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Outside the Whale: Reading the American Political Novel in the Age of Reagan

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Outside the Whale: Reading the American Political Novel in the Age of Reagan

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Content Outside the Whale:
Reading the American Political Novel
in the Age of Reagan
by
John Whalen-Bridge
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1992
Copyright 1992 John Whalen-Bridge
UMI Number: DP71342
All rights reserved
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-4015
This dissertation, written by
JOHN WHALEN* BRIDGE
under the direction of .. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements fo r the degree of
D O C T O ^ O F P H ILO S O P H Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date Septem ber 2 1 , 1992
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
11
DEDICATION
To my mother Marion Doyle Bridge (1934-1989) and to my
grandfather John Bridge (1900-1984)
Ill
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Jay Martin and Ronald Gottesman
for their interest and encouragement. Their suggestions
have improved this venture tremendously, and I am
genuinely grateful for their support. I would also like
to thank my wife Helena and my son Thomas for the hours of
R&R they provided, without which I certainly could not
have finished. Long ago and far away I began to study
literature with Milton Stern and John Abbott, to whom I am
also grateful. Will Jacobs kindly read my chapters and
gave practical advice. Finally, I am grateful to the
students I someday expect to teach, without whom all this
training and writing and fretting and thinking really do
not make much sense. Many genuine thanks to all and
sundry.
IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements............ iii
Introduction The Whale and the Book................... 1
Chapter 1 Inside the Whale: Political Fictions
in the Age of Reagan.....................18
Chapter 2 The Political Novel Submerged: Moby-
Dick and the "Two-Book" Theory........... 64
Chapter 3 The Problem of the Pure
Political Novel: The Iron
Heel..................... ............116
Chapter 4 The Handmaid's Tale and the
(Impure) Art of the
Political N o v e l ................ 168
Chapter 5 An American Political
Novelist in the Age of
Reagan: Norman Mailer ............ 194
Afterword Art with an Attitude.................... 236
Bibliography......................... 243
V
EPIGRAPH
"I have left the body of the whale, but the mouth of
the night is still wide"
Theodore Roethke, "The Longing"
INTRODUCTION
The Whale and the Book
Readers in the United States come to an inauspicious
fork in the road when approaching the "political novel"
via the route of academic criticism. Hindering discussion
of political fiction in the United States is the falling
assumption on one hand that politics and literature do not
mix well and the rising assumption on the other that
"everything is political." Either no literature worthy of
extended discussion is political, or no literature of note
is particularly political. The middle possibility is
excluded on the one hand by the idea that literature must
be pure of politics, and the idea on the other that there
is no difference between literature and politics (since
literature, when properly unmasked, is ideology by other
means). Outside the Whale carries the discussion of
American political fiction beyond the present impasse by
substituting a historically and politically specific
definition of the political novel for the transcendent-
universal definitions attempted in previous studies. For
this reason the present study names the political novel
with the current political context in mind. Outside the
Whale refuses on the one hand to acquiesce to the belief
that literature and politics are unmixable substances, and
its partisan stance should serve as a frequent reminder of
2
this. Outside the Whale also refuses to politically
correct strategy of pretending that naming the world in an
intrinsically political language (the critical language
that reflexively foregrounds race, gender, and class, for
example) manifests genuine involvement in that world.
There is a narcissistic element in the way we
casually engage in political debate with essentially like-
minded people. Though it is preferable to avoid this kind
of mirror-gazing when at all possible, it will at least be
necessary to say what I mean by "Age of Reagan." Or
rather, to confess my rhetorical tactics bluntly enough so
that I at least do not fool myself, "the Age of Reagan,"
meaning the apotheosis of the Lethe-drinking President
into an anti-Liberal cosmology, is the dragon-term against
which my story is organized.
What I am calling "The Age of Reagan" begins with the
Reagan Revolution of 1980 and extends at least until
election day 1992. Non-Marxist radical views of this
period have been provided by Edward Said, and by Noam
Chomskey's various essays on the "New Cold War." Reagan's
own speeches on the "evil empire" in the early 1980s
manifest the sort of neo-Gold War thinking Chomskey has
described. Left or Communist governments in Latin America
were a prime source of political, ideological, and
military entitlement for the New Cold Warriors until the
"Irangate" scandal became public. The Age of Reagan is
3
best characterized as a return to Cold War ideologies in
which enemy-production substitutes for any kind of
positive vision. If not the Soviet communists, then the
Contras. If not the Contras, then the Columbian drug
dealers. If not them, then Noriega or Hussein. This new
and improved "enemy" is flexible. In the refusal to
recognize the possibility of a "loyal opposition," Age-of-
Reagan lieutenants combine their hatred of Democrats with
their contempt for democracy.
Reagan and Bush are sometimes credited with "winning
the Cold War," at least when they speak in praise of their
own virtues. This event is usually construed as a victory
for democratic values, but if we contrast Bush's self-
praise regarding the Cold War victory with his silence and
inaction regarding the Tiannamen Square massacre, the
contempt for genuinely democratic struggles can be seen
for what it is.
At any rate, with the fall of the Berlin Wall
American politicians were in sudden need of a new
demonology, which would never have the neat simplicity of
the old demonology. It is always easier to play on
xenophobia and emphasize a foreign threat that will
organize one's constituency, but the New Cold Warrior's
must now be nostalgic for the days when they could link
communism and any left-wing sentiment at home with such
ease. The Willie Horton advertising campaign and the "war
4
on drugs" and gave focus to George Bush's 1988 campaign
and presidency, but these ultimately successful strategies
were only good in the short run. The racially divisive
Willie Horton commercials in no way offered a vision for
the future, and the American military leaders had
adamantly refused the job of border security in the "war"
on drugs— until the Wall came down, when military
spokesmen turned on a dime. Supreme Court appointments in
the Age of Reagan have been blatantly ideological, but the
partisan struggle over these appointments have generally
been counter-productive to the Bush administration's
attempt to construct an internal Dragon for St. George to
slay.
The capture of Manuel Noriega and the war with Iraq
under Saddam Hussein provided more credible demon-figures.
Both dictators our ally until we found ourselves once more
in search of enemies, and some have argued that the need
to conjure demonic enemies is the determining factor
behind American foreign policy. When our army stopped
short of Baghdad, it was hard to avoid the embarrassing
appearance that Saddam Hussein was still our ally in an
Orwellian sense.
"Orwellian" in the derogatory sense often signifies
the kind of political deception in which a government
pretends to fight a foreign power (Eurasia, say) in the
interests of its people when the government is in fact
5
using the pretext of a foreign enemy to make war on its
own people. Donald Pease means much the same thing when
he writes, in an article on American writers during the
cold war, that "The cold war can be said to have
supervised the postwar recovery by securing the nation's
willingness in peacetime to submit to wartime discipline"
(Pease, 1992, 74). A cold war, then, is the mechanism by
which governments continue to maintain an increased sense
of control over their own populations, but without the
risks or costs of an actual war. It is a government's of
stealing power from the governed, rather than from those
whose interests are not ostensibly defended by the
government.
"Orwellian" can also be used in an honorific sense.
An Orwellian writer unmasks political rhetoric and other
doublethink as "defense of the indefensible." Some
American writers who do this sort of unmasking are Gore
Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Stone, Marge
Piercy, and Don DeLillo. Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller,
William Melvin Kelley, E. L. Doctorow, and, Thomas Pynchon
have also written one or more novels that are "Orwellian"
in this honorific sense of the word. In some sort of
fictive, metaphorical, and sometimes totemic way, these
writers have attempted to slay dragons that threaten
democratic liberty. (Each of these writers is hereby
6
nominated for an honored position in the Order of St.
George, Writer's Branch,)
Orwell's Inside the Whale is my titular launching
point because it defines the political element in
literature without scanting the individual element and
without repressing his own sense of which way the world
should move politically. Since he did not pretend to hold
a non-partisan view of literature, he was more able than
most who write about politics and art to approach
political literature as literature. Orwell enjoyed the
work of apolitical and even reactionary writers who chose
to live "inside the whale," but he refused to disguise his
belief that their kind of literature was a security
blanket between us (writers and readers) and political
reality: "The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough
for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space
that exactly fits you with yards of blubber between
yourself and reality,..." Orwell may strike us as old-
fashioned in his use of the word "reality," He would have
said "non-verbal trace of the Real" if he were alive
today. Or maybe some other doubleplusungood duckspeak.
In order to imagine the resistance to political
fiction in a non-nebulous way, I have used Orwell's own
whale imagery freely. Melville has also contributed more
than a few phrases, In order to capture the totemic sense
of the political novel in a single, concrete image, we
7
turn to Winston Smith's thoughts on the matter in Nineteen
Eightv-Four. Smith believes that "The Book" does not tell
us anything new as much as it tells us what we already
know but in an organized fashion. The political novel
organizes readers, just as the political activist
organizes "workers," "African-Americans," "voters," etc.
At the same time, there is a danger that The Book will
become a source of absolute rather than contingent values,
and that followers of The Book will have fundamentalist or
totalitarian conversion experiences. Orwell's novel is
especially insightful about the dangers of too much
political organization, and Orwell's satire subtly
translates this lesson into literary terms. Just as
totalitarian state occurs when organization is so complete
as to exclude the possibility of competing organizations,
a totalitarian book is one which excludes the possibility
of any other view. Goldstein's Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism is such a book. Winston Smith,
in reading The Book as an infallible Bible of resistance,
is not sensitive to the danger of over-organization (or
"totalization," as we in English departments now put it).
Orwell satirically undercuts his character when O'Brien,
Winston Smith's torturer, reveals to Winston that he wrote
The Book, not Goldstein. Orwell grimly warns us that "he
who fights to long against dragons becomes a dragon
himself." The great danger to liberal thinking in the
8
Cold War and the New Cold War has been that opposition to
totalitarian regimes abroad produces totalitarian thinking
at home.
Instead of catastrophic certainties of Orwell's day—
the Blackshirts and the bombers— we have very often the
uncertain sense that political liberties are being eroded
in the Age of Reagan. It is an age when nothing said by
the Teflon President or his successor seems to matter very
much; in academic circles, authorial agency is given a
short welcome since "the author is dead." Many writers
refuse political engagement and prefer to remain "inside
the whale," but there also have been writers who use
fictional form to rebut the common assumption that
political levers are beyond our grasp. Outside the Whale
concerns the latter company of writer and approaches their
work with an eye toward the political actualities of
today.
My first chapter describes the politics-or-literature
dilemma faced by American novelists. "Inside the Whale :
Political Fictions in the Age of Reagan" reviews
Americanist scholarship to show how American pastoral
ideology has inhibited both the writing and the critical
appreciation of political novels. After demonstrating
that the main tradition of American writing (the Adamic or
pastoral) has inhibited the critical celebration of
9
politically activist fiction, my remaining chapters
develop the ways in which authors respond to literary
ideologies that would demarcate absolutely political and
aesthetic concerns.
"The Political Novel Submerged; Mobv-Dick and the
"Two-Book" Theory" employs psychoanalytic and structural
interpretations of Mobv-Dick to show how the American
critical bias against political novels influences both the
writing and the reception of the political novel. While
Mobv-Dick, in my view, is not a political novel, it tells
the story of how a potentially political novel— and
Melville's novel is full of political symbolism and
political attitudes that can never quite converge into
political commitment— of how a novel may be turned away
from its political "destiny." Mobv-Dick, more than any
other novel, expresses the plight of the frustrated
political novel.
As my third chapter shows, one response is to "just
say No" to the demand that politics and literature be kept
separate but equal. This was Jack London strategy in the
writing of The Iron Heel. The damn-the-torpedoes attitude
is hardly without aesthetic risks, and "The Problem of the
Pure Political Novel: The Iron Heel" evaluates London's
literary and political strategies with these risks in
mind.
10
London called The Iron Heel "a labor of love," but he
certainly did not regard the novel a commercial success.
As Melville wrote in a letter to Hawthorne, ["tell the
Truth and go to the Soup Societies."] Novelists in the
United States have not been able to "just say no" to the
demand that literature be disinfected of political
commitment in the way authors in other English-speaking
cultures have, and to develop this contrast I have chosen
to discuss Margaret Atwood's novel about the United States
in "The Handmaid's Tale and the (Impure) Art of the
Political Novel." Though Atwood's novel expresses more a
Canadian than an American point of view, it is especially
noteworthy for the purposes of this study because it has
been well received by various American audiences even
though it was written about and largely against American
tendencies. When E. L. Doctorow complained that there was
no critical fraternity (Atwood would have said "sorority")
to welcome the American political novelist, he was
demanding for political novelists the sort of acclaim
Atwood has received.
If authors such as Jack London directly challenge the
literary tradition in ways that put political authors at
odds with our culture's habitual ways of determining
literary value, authors such as Orwell, Atwood, and (in
his mature phase) Mailer have been more sophisticated in
adapting their political interests to popular literary
11
genres. "An American Political Novelist in the Age of
Reagan: Norman Mailer" describes some of the ways in
which Mailer modifies conventional narrative forms and
literary mythos in order to contain and express political
commitments. Like hermit crabs appropriating a larger
shell, American political novelists move into apolitical
mythologies and use them for their own ends.
My afterword, "The American Political Novel: Art
with an Attitude" generalizes on the findings of the
previous chapters and briefly considers some of the
prominent political novels written in the Age of Reagan."
Since the logic of my chapters has been to look closely at
the category of "the American political novel" rather than
to develop a comprehensive list of such books, I hope in
closing only to suggest that my handful of authors are by
no means the only writers worthy of consideration.
This book is also, in its most general sense, a
critique of American values. We discuss politics and
literature for many reasons, and one aim among many is the
desire to discern who we are as Americans. In a legal
sense Americans are those eligible for a U.S.A. passport;
this is, at any rate, what most Americans north of the
Mexican-American border think the word means.
Geographically the word refers to anyone born and residing
in North America. Ideologically the term signifies
12
certain beliefs and identifications, by which I mean the
more and less systematic groups of ideas and values
through which we (in the United States) understand
ourselves as Americans. The difference between politics
and ideology for me is that the former is overt, the
latter subliminal. When we attend ideology closely, we
desublimate it into politics.
The "American ideology" I have posited does not exist
metaphysically, although no one sensible would want to
collect all of its material constituents together.
Although I often agree with them politically, I have to
part ways intellectually with those who insist that
ideology is a matter of "radical alterity," some
unknowable episteme that floats around like a Greek fate
or one of Macbeth's weird sisters. Ideology exists
historically, but, because it only becomes significant as
a "habit of culture," it is in some sense "unconscious."
It is not, in my view, unconscious in the Freudian sense
but is rather like a habitual action performed most
smoothly when we do not think about it. Ideology is
frequently mobilized by political interests, and much of
our cynicism about the political process ensues from
having to watch and hear politicians pretend to have
certain spontaneous emotions. To watch a national leader
intentionally pause during the sound-bite portion of a
supposedly candid remark is to endure a poor player who
13
struts and frets our hours upon a stooge. Ideology is
most annoying when most overt, but unless we divest
ourselves of the idea that ideology (or American identity)
is always employed in the service of politics, we are
liable to suffer with the paranoiacs--but with even less
hope of effecting social change. Just because we have
become aware of some habits does not mean we are suddenly
without habits. Habits can be unfortunate, but we need
them if we are to make any judgments whatsoever. William
James has written on habit as the foundation of human
culture in The Meaning of Truth; "At life's origin, any
present perception may have been 'true'— if such a word
could then be applicable. Later, when reactions became
organized, the reactions became 'true' whenever
expectation was fulfilled by them....Here is a perfectly
plausible germ for all our higher consistencies" (58).
To return to more strictly literary matters, our
dependence upon ideology means, in part, that we must
distinguish political from non-political novels : What is
the habitual frame appropriate to each kind of book? I am
of course aware that the distinction between "propaganda"
and "literature" has been used politically by some New
Critics to exclude literature with Left or otherwise
socialist subject matter from the "Canon." When
literature conforms to dogma— or when literary exclusions
14
of this sort harden into a dogma— literature becomes
ideology by other means.
Though this distinction between political and
literary discourse has been politically beneficial for
certain interests, there are also historical factors that
are clearly non-partisan. At least since the Civil War,
we in American have not experienced catastrophe on a
European scale. While France and Germany have suffered
plagues, the United States has had an occasional bout with
the flu. We have political struggles in this country, but
the American citizen has consistently been able to afford
the belief that political problems are essentially foreign
affairs, whether the "over there" chorus refers to
Washington or the shores of Tripoli.
This "affordable" notion has been our critical habit,
and in this sense it has been the "truth." It certainly
is not what serious writers have generally recommended,
and it has been the definitive obstacle for many American
writers. At the same time, the belief in American
transcendence has been a source of imaginative entitlement
for many writers as well. Ralph Waldo Emerson enthuses
thus over the possibilities of Man apart from the
(politically complicated) crowd: "Here's for the plain
old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole
world." It has not been a secret to thinking people that
this Adamic personage does not exist in history. It is
15
the thought that counts, as R.W.B. Lewis has acknowledged
in The American Adam; "however vulnerable or illusory,
this image had about it always an air of adventurousness,
a sense of promise and possibility— of a sort no longer
very evident in our national expression." Writing in the
I-Like-Ike mid-1950s, Lewis laments the contraction of the
national voice. Can we afford, Lewis wanted to know, not
to believe in this illusion?
Post-war writers such as Ralph Ellison, Norman
Mailer, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Coover
have written novels that teach us, in comic or tragic
ways, that near-oligarchical political interests have
consistently manipulated the national self-image to
further their own interests. Again, these political
powers are neither monolithic nor immutable, though Cold
War actualities appear to have organized these political
forces into a somewhat stable coalition. Mailer catches
the usefulness of American ideologies to Cold War
political interests in his latest novel, Harlot's Ghost
when he satirically presents American Exceptionalism side-
by-side with American Paranoia ;
"There is no emotion on earth more powerful than
anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America
is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest
emotion of them all."
"Yessir."
However much writers such as Thoreau have attempted to
harness the rhetorical power contained within such
16
imaginary structures, the imaginative writer who pushes
against social structures will be pushed back. Writers
who rock the boat receive rotten reviews, yet contemporary
academic critics castigate American writers for continuing
the "American ideology." Much of today's academy is
saddled with the unfortunate belief that "the master's
tools will never bring down the master's house." It is
absurd to think that a tool, be it a hammer or a book,
keeps a permanent allegiance to its original owner. At
any rate, it is pragmatic not to think this way.
The belief that we can see things from perspectives
other than our habitual view is probably the only social
justification worth attempting for the time and effort we
put into literature and the other arts. In several
chapters I have attempted to look back at American
literature from the habitual views prompted by non-
American novelists. Orwell is the most important of
these, and I think his skepticism about the venture of
political fiction is a healthy antidote to the grandiosity
that has ruined many a political novel and which makes so
much contemporary literary criticism a bore to read.
Orwell had this to say about writers "outside the whale":
As a rule, writers who do not wish to identify
themselves with the historical process of the moment
either ignore it or fight against it. If they can
ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can
understand it well enough to want to fight against
it, they probably have enough vision to realize that
they cannot win.
17
We began at a critical impasse, an Either/Or in the road
that makes the political novel very much the road less
taken. As Orwell's cynical wisdom would have us know, the
best political novelists have always known this and have
written their books anyway.
Outside the Whale, Chapter 1
Inside the Whale: Political Fiction in the Age of Reagan
"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah."
Jonah.^
Outside the Whale : _____Interpreting the American
Political Novel in the Age of Reagan is, in a strict sense,
about the conditions underwriting political fiction written
in and about the United States of America. It attempts to
answer the question. What does the writer who wants his or
her books to make a political difference need to consider?
In this respect the book is about the composition of
political novels, but insofar as the answer to this
question is something like— The potentially political
novelist in this country really ought to consider a belief
prevalent among his or her readers, namely that politics
and literature mix about as well as oil and water.— to that
degree. Outside the Whale concerns itself with the
reception of political fiction. Whenever possible I avoid
meta- and meta-meta-critical mirror games, but it is
impossible to speak about self-conscious readers and their
literary consequences without spending some time in the
hall of mirrors. One can only lay down a
^The epigraphs for chapters 1-5 and the afterword are
from_ "Extracts," Mobv-Dick.
19
golden thread of irony to insinuate that there is a way
out of the labyrinth.
In a looser sense. Outside the Whale offers testimony
to my belief that some books are "political" in the strong
sense implied when we say "Her latest book is an arresting
political novel" or "His first film, the one about
Jakarta, is a great political movie." This everyday
recognition vanishes when we bring up the same novel,
film, poem, or play within the walls of the graduate
seminar or the conference presentation. In part this is
because it is always difficult or impossible to define
terms within a living language, but the difficulty is also
symptomatic of our deeply ingrained suspicion about mixing
the substances Politics and Literature.
A provisional definition, then: the political novel
is something that can exist in two places at one time: we
can imagine it enjoying equal celebrity at a political
rally, where it will function as a kind of totem; and we
can, at the same time, imagine it as organizing a group of
readers who form around it to discuss its literary merits.
There is no reason why there should not be persons common
to both groups, even though these groups will have very
different ideals and goals. The most important
characteristic of the political novel is that it leads a
double-life. Unlike spy novels or other kinds of books
that string political details on the narrative line for
20
the sake of suspense, the political novel both foregrounds
political ideas, characters, and situations, and the novel
also functions politically. In that it serves a political
interest as well as a literary or aesthetic interest, the
political novelist is a spy in the house of fiction.
The definition of the political novel tends to become
more controversial when we shift from abstraction to
particular lines of tradition. This is because the
definition will have all the consequences that any other
formal definition will have, but it will also have a
number of political consequences. These two sets of
consequences do not always mesh neatly. Those in the
political group will sometimes accuse those in the
literary group of excluding certain books for political
reasons, and those in the literary group may accuse those
in the political rally of not really caring about the book
sufficiently. At best, the one who defines the political
novel is a diplomat aspiring to increase the good will
between these groups. At worst, he or she is a demagogue
berating one side or the other. As this situation often
tends to the worse in current academic debates, it a
dubious supposition that there exists a community of real
readers who will appreciate the political novel. Outside
the Whale begins with this apprehension in the hope of
enlarging the possibilities that such critical coterie may
form.
21
i. In Search of Imagined Communities
Just as we imagine communities into existence despite
obstacles and conflicts, we imagine communities of
literary texts, which we call "traditions," even though
there are various discontinuities and exclusions marking
any given tradition as differing from all that has been
written. That an idea of literary tradition is political
and ideological rather than natural has been put forward
as subversive of any tradition whatsoever, but there is no
reason that this should be the case. In response to
Hayden White's attack on the idea that history ever exists
in a positive sense, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have
recently responded by defending "history" on political
grounds.^ Whether or not the theorist can find it, the
activist needs it. Without a belief in external,
apprehendible history, the feminist literary historian is
deprived of the grounds for analysis and thus ultimately
for change.
^Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar assume, first, "that
there is a knowable history and, second, that texts are
authored by people whose lives and minds are affected by the
material conditions of that history. Both these assumptions
have lately been challenged, of course: on the one hand by
thinkers who claim that all accounts of history are
arbitrary fictions, and on the other hand by theorists who
deny the reality of the author while assigning ultimate
authority to the text and its reader. In our view, both
these challenges to history and authorship, radically
antipatriarchal as they may seem, ultimately erase the
reality of gendered human experience" (Gilbert & Gubar,
xiii-xiv) . ____________________________________________________
22
My primary assumption in writing this study is that
it is useful and necessary to conceive of American writing
in terms of a tradition, though this tradition is anything
but monolithic. Nor can any description of the tradition
be expected to reflect perfectly all the best strands of
American writing at any given time: it is an imaginary
structure, a model. It is subject to change. It is not a
"canon" of saintly figures selected by an infallible
authority, though it might be compared to an icon or a
meditational aid. Like meditational art, it is not the
thing itself, though it in practice it is best to proceed
as though the object of contemplation were
"consubstantial" with the whole. This is to say that an
imagined literary structure may receive the attention and
respect reserved for religious ideals (since literature
potentially contains communal ideals), but literary
structures differ from religious ideological structures in
that they are more openly subject to change. In this
respect they more closely resemble genuinely democratic
political structures of ideas. For the sake of preserving
general principles, the personal representatives are
mobile.
As an imaginary structure, it is something we can
always "see through." Some critics argue that the idea of
tradition should be scuttled because it is thoroughly
ideological, but that is about as sensible as withdrawing
23
from politics upon discovering that it is a thoroughly
political businessIf the American literary tradition
were not produced by competing political and aesthetic
ideologies, then there would be very little point in
discussing political literature or the politics of
literary study. That literary tradition is ideological,
and that the organization of American ideals is of some
consequence to American life beyond ivory towers, coffee-
shops, and the other hiding places of American
intellectual life, is the strongest political
justification for the teaching and study of literature
(Lentricchia, 1983, 1-20)^.
The serious political novel--that which is both
aesthetically adventurous and rhetorically geared to
political organizations or movements, does not have a
place of respect in the United States as most historians
conceive it. Possibly this is because "Americans love to
hate politics," as the best-sellers tell us, but more
likely it has to do with literary traditions that are the
Gregory S. Jay among others has called for an end to
"American" literature in his article "The End of
'American' Literature: Toward a Multicultural Practice"
(Jay, 1991).
^"We have let our beliefs and our discourse be
invaded by the eviscerating notion that politics is
something that goes on somewhere else, in the 'outside'
world, as the saying goes, and that the work of culture
goes on 'inside' the university is somehow apolitical— and
that this is a good thing....That inside/outside
distinction is killing us" (Lentricchia, 7),
24
creation of critics, popular reviewers, and the writers
themselves. Margaret Atwood has suggested that American
authors feel "sullied" when identified with a political
cause. Atwood identifies herself with Amnesty
International, she speaks out against free trade with the
United States, and her work supports feminist causes, but
she does not identify herself with any mainstream
political party. The rightness of her remark has,
however, nothing to do with joining a party or signing a
petition. That American authors feel sullied by too close
an association with politics becomes evident, Atwood
thinks, when we compare the achievement of American
political novelists with those in other countries (Atwood,
1990).
She is largely but not wholly correct. It certainly
was not true of the writers of the thirties the politics
and literature to be kept apart, and political criticism
also enjoyed a vogue in that decade (Raab). There were
many writers between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies
who attacked the reactionary phenomenon of Cold War
hysteria (Doctorow, Coover); who sided against the Johnson
and Nixon administrations to oppose U.S. involvement in
the Vietnam War (Mailer, Ely, Ginsberg); who wrote highly
political feminist literature (Rich, Piercy, Kingston);
and who mobilized readers for civil rights through
literary art (Kelley, Reed, Walker). Atwood's comment
25
certainly rings true for writers in the Age of Reagan,
however. The writers who are willing to take on political
themes from book to book (Stone, Vidal, Mailer) are few
and far between. There is as much political commentary
scattered through American literature as ever, but a
i literature that creates political communities is, as ever,
a world elsewhere.
Atwood is not alone in her perception, though
American writers tend to have a slightly different view of
the matter. Perhaps "American literary history" is to
blame. When Bill Moyers asked E. L. Doctorow in 1988 why
I
' the prominent contemporary political fictions are written
in South Africa and Latin American but not in the United
States, Doctorow left the blame at the doorstep of
American literary criticism:
There's no critical fraternity today that has that
much regard for the political novel in America. But
when political novelists come along from other
countries, the value of their work is recognized.
It's almost as if we're too good to need political
novels in this country. It's like President Reagan's
feeling about trade unions. He likes them as long as
they're in Poland. (Moyers, 1988, 84).
Doctorow, author of the highly regarded political novel
: The Book of Daniel (1971), does not say that political
novels do not get written in America but rather that they
are, once written, pushed aside by critics who prefer the
Czech or South African political novel to those that
strike nearer to home. Doctorow is half right. We do
have the.problem of literary critics embracing political
26
activism in literature— just so long as the books in
question are without consequence to American life.
Authors who are against oppression in East Bloc or Latin
American countries were praised for courage and
intellectual honesty, while Americans who probe the abuse
of power in this country are dismissed as neurotics or
propagandists for some extremist point of view.
American political novelists have encountered some
obstacles that are not entirely the creation of literary
critics, and a discussion of literary activism must take
into account both the opportunities and the obstacles.
The tradition of American writing, however conceived, is
not only an aggregate of the individual writers's
achievements, it is also composed of the teacher/scholar's
selections and the inertia of anthologies and popular
editions. None of these elements exist in isolation; it
takes not only great talent on the part of the individual
writer to change the anthologies that introduce American
literature to many readers; there must also be a movement
of sorts among the professors in order to overcome the
inertia of habitual structures, royalty agreements, and so
on. Whether the writer attempts to enter or subvert the
perceived tradition, the writer's identity is inextricably
related to that tradition. While we "kill the messenger"
when we see critics as the sole creators of "the American
tradition," the novelists are right to complain that
27
critical ideologies have hampered the reception of the
political novel in America. The main part of my study
describes the essential choices made by political
novelists who confront these obstacles; this chapter
deepens our understanding of the novelists' choices by
describing the ways in which American literary critics
have helped or hindered the reading of American political
novels.
ii. American Criticism of the Political Novel
I will discuss the relevant criticism in four groups:
that which seeks to define and comprehensively discuss
American political fiction; that which discusses examples
of American political fiction within an international
context; that which defines American political literature
in relation to particularly American political and
literary traditions ; and, finally, that in which the
politics of criticism displaces a concern for political
literature. Several comprehensive studies of the
political novel in America have been written: (Speare,
Blotner, Milne). A few critics, in discussions of the
political novel from various countries, have commented on
the American situation (Howe, Boyers). The first group is
often charged with applying the sort of mechanical
definition of the political novel that excludes aesthetic
value. There is something to this idea, but we must not
28
bring up our own charges injudiciously. Not only are we
privileged with hindsight, but more serious is the danger
that we approach the criticism of yesterday with the
political reflexes of today. The second group
demonstrates how a more formally sophisticated definition
often excludes or depreciates writers of American
political fiction. The third critical response attempts
to discuss American political novels by taking into
account the special problems of the genre in this country
(Rideout, Karl). While current academic trends have much
to offer the study of the political novel, the most recent
politically engaged critics of American literature (Pease,
Schaub) do not constitute the "critical fraternity" that
Doctorow suggested was necessary to legitimate the
political novel, and the reasons why are most complicated.
Whether or not such a community of readers will be
imagined into existence any time soon, my own study
attempts to take the best from each of these groups.
The academic study of the political novel begins with
Morris Edmund Speare, who wrote about both English and
American political novels but was concerned to show the
differences between these traditions as well as the
similarities. In his 1924 study The Political Novel, he
argued that a specific genre, the political novel, had
been introduced by Disraeli and developed by subsequent
authors such as Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Mrs.
29
Humphrey Ward, H.G. Wells, as well as Americans such as
Henry Adams, Winston Churchill, and Paul Leicester Ford.
Speare points to the connections between this form
and such English didactic literature as Defoe's novel Moll
Flanders and Johnson's novelistic parable The History of
Rasselas. To understand what Speare meant when he claimed
that the political novel develops from didactic
literature, we must recall that, in the decades before
Joyce's Ulysses (1922), it would have been a defense than
a criticism to describe a book as didactic or moralistic.
We have become used to thinking of didactic literature as
a crude evolutionary stage, as the morality play that must
be performed before Shakespeare's morally variegated art
became possible. But, according to Speare, Defoe does not
; divide moral intelligence from psychological insight, as
though one were the primitive and the other the mature
form. In reading Moll Flanders through Speare's eyes, "we
watch the infinite misery of a sinner who, after arriving
at Newgate, gets no satisfaction from repentance when she
knows that it has come after the power of sinning further
has already been removed from her" (Speare, 360). It is
just this didactic aspect than many contemporary readers
will not welcome in the political novel, and there have
been a number of strong movements in literary studies
which have not been quick to give the discussions of
30
subject matter or ethical consequence in literature a bad
name. ^
In emphasizing the didactic function of literature as
he did, Speare unknowingly left himself vulnerable to
later critics, who could blame him for defining the
political novel in an anti-literary or anti-aesthetical
way. Speare has been criticized for offering a definition
of the political novel that is elitist and tending away
from literary value, such as when he writes that the
political novel is
a work of prose fiction which leans rather to 'ideas'
than to 'emotions'; which deals rather with the
machineiry of law-making or with a theory about public
conduct than with the merits of any given piece of
legislation; and where the main purpose of the writer
is party propaganda, public reform, or exposition of
the lives of the personages who maintain government,
or of the forces which constitute government. In
this exposition the drawing-room is frequently used
as a medium for presenting the inside life of
politics, (ix, original emphasis)
As we can see from this quotation, Speare's definition is
flexible yet specific; he discusses the political novel in
terms of its tendencies rather than any rigidly defined
Modernists and New Critics ban ethics and subject-
matter selectively, though it is not at all difficult to
find discussions of T.S. Eliot's personality which
nonetheless quote "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
Fredric Jameson has looked awry at feminist "ethical
criticism." John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (about which
Carolyn Porter writes "Unhappily, even 'genteel moralism'
has made a fitful return') has been laughed out of the
room (Porter, 7). Wayne Booth's more sound attempt at
moral criticism The Company We Keep does better.
31
characteristics, It is a civil and useful definition with
which many subsequent readers have found fault.
It is the practice of political critics, even more so
than other kinds of scholars, to begin by faulting those
of an earlier generation, and Speare takes the fall in
many studies subsequent to his own work. In criticizing
Speare's definition in his introduction to Political
Fictions (1980), Michael Wilding arraigns Speare for the
narrowness of his definition, which. Wilding claimed,
"corresponded with the narrow social elite that peopled
the drawing-rooms of those novels" discussed in Speare's
study (Wilding, 1). In complaining about the "elitist
social assumptions" underlying Speare's definitions.
Wilding is in effect blaming the messenger. While it is
true that social and literary historians have in recent
years successfully challenged the "Great Man" approach to
the telling of history, this was certainly not the case in
1 9 2 4 Wilding, in thus disposing of Speare, reads the
definition but does not consider the practical
consequences of Speare's definition as demonstrated in his
introduction or interpretations. Wilding's account would
lead one to think that Speare was, flat and simple,
advocating a literary form that justified the privileges
of the upper classes, but this is not the case. While
^See Howard Zinn's People's History of the United
States for an alternative to the Great Man approach.
32
Wilding appears to criticize Speare on political grounds,
the difference between them is political only in a trivial
sense : Wilding is "more radical than thou," and he makes
of Speare's definition a foil for his own.^
While Speare can be faulted both for his
inclusiveness and his exclusiveness, his definition
requires the political novelist to do much more than
merely represent the various movements and sub-movements
of political history. At times he writes about the genre
as though it could be determined solely on topical
grounds :
In this sort of pageant men take sides on great
national and international issues. Whigs, Tories,
Conservatives, Liberals, Unionists, Chartists, Anti-
Corn Law Leagers, Utilitarians, Utopians of every
type and color— they crowd upon your canvas and
demand a hearing. (26)
This inclusiveness may not by itself be a satisfactory
defense if we are going to charge Speare with representing
a narrow social elite, as Wilding does. If we are going
to proceed with suspicion we should also ask. Did Speare
merely demand that the political novelist include token
characters from various rag-tag political parties? (Or,
Wilding's stance throughout Political Fictions is
not "more radical than thou," and his readings of
political fictions are intelligent and lively. It is
perhaps more a professional than a political reflex to
begin a study by challenging the legitimacy of
predecessors. I examine the political side-effects of
this professional reflex in the section to follow entitled
"Some New American Adams : the Political Novel into the
Nineties."
33
if he were writing today, would he say that the political
novelist must include representations of all genders,
races, and classes?) But Speare does not rest his case
for the political novel on superficial inclusiveness.
Actually, Speare argued, the political novelist faces a
tougher standard. Speare's demands of the novelist in
j some ways parallel Bakhtin's prerequisite, the "dialogic"
aspect of fiction. For both Speare and Bakhtin, the
political novelist must be more of an artist than the non
political writer, not less. Speare writes :
To portray these diversified beings dispassionately,
to let each man have his say and none the entire
platform, to treat all fairly and truthfully and
succeed in steering between the Scylla of
partisanship and the Charybdis of tractarianism,
requires the most delicate craftsmanship on the
writer's part, and a scholar's knowledge of the
arguments, but withal an artist's delicate fancy and
power of creation, if the result is not to be a creed
disguised in the garments of a novel, a political
platform hidden by a mountain of decoration. (26)
Though the idea that any writer is dispassionate or
objective is currently heretical, all the instruments
agree seem to agree that monologism is just as deadly for
the political novel as it is for any other kind of
literature.
For Speare the political novel was a unique genre,
and the American political novel had its own individual
character within the class of political novels. He was
the first to insist that we not use the English or
European political novel as a yardstick to measure the
34
American political novel, since they were each working
within different traditions, appealing to different
readerly expectations. The American version, claimed
Speare, has a more activist-pragmatic or rhetorical aim
than the English:
A comparison...of the American with the English
political novelist brings out one striking fact :
that whereas in England the writers have often enough
been interested in presenting the political panorama
for the sake of panorama,— shall we say, for art's
sake?— American novelists have been mainly concerned
with Reform. (334)
For a definition of what makes a political novel different
' from other kinds of novel, Speare has not really been
superseded, though he has been frequently misread.
Speare's recognition of the political novel's rhetorically
partisan stance is exactly what subsequent critics often
need to circumvent.
Part of the problem seems to be that we have a
pragmatic strain within our culture (recognized in the
American contribution to philosophy) which is at odds with
our predominantly aesthetic thinking about Literature.®
®American writers such as Emerson approached poetry
with both idealistic and pragmatic expectations ("man-
making words"), but this century's criticism has had
little difficulty in reducing Emerson to an icon of
disengagement. The transparent eyeball floats through
most classroom discussions of Emerson. In Carolyn
Porter's formulation, Emerson initiates a mode of detached
pragmatism or, perhaps, clinical transcendentalism : "when
Emerson becomes a 'transparent eyeball,' joyfully
announcing 'I am nothing; I see all,' he articulates the
position of both the transcendent visionary poet (to whose
role he himself aspires) and the neutral scientific
observer (whose role he wishes to counteract). That is.
35
We are heavy on delectare and embarrassed by orodesse. To
: this day, a metaphysical divide or an abstruse or
"undecidable" image wins out over the well-worn tool on
the workbench or the cupboard. While important writers
; such as William Carlos Williams have challenged this
' approach to art and literature, ("no ideas but in things",
they have not been as influential as T.S. Eliot (John
Donne could smell an idea). Hasty as it is to claim that
pure aestheticism has been the rule in this country, a
I general conception of the "aesthetic" that rules out
I everyday use in our criticism has certainly been a
! stumbling block for the political novel.^
One could interpret the divide between the politics
and the aesthetics politically rather than aesthetically.
As we have a constitutional separation of church and state
in the United States, we have an informal but hardly
uncommon separation of politics and aesthetics. The
separation of politics and aesthetics at first may seem to
be no more than a figure in the carpet, but this informal
division is a thread running through most reviews and much
the detached observer, like the visionary seer, appears to
himself to occupy a position outside the world he
confronts" (Porter, xii).
^Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton and Michael
McKeon have theorized the division of knowledge between
politics and literature. See Alice Walker's short story
"Everyday Use" for a more everyday, and perhaps a more
useful, treatment.
36
of the criticism of political novels. Occasionally we
happen upon it whole cloth, as it were, such as when the
ideological bias receives codified form. In the section
of its booklet entitled "What the Endowment Does Not
Support," the National Endowment of the Humanities makes
it clear that it will support no projects that
Are directed at persuading an audience to a
particular political, philosophical, religious, or
ideological point of view, or that advocate a
particular program of social change or action....(6)
Such policies provide a negative definition of political
art that corresponds nicely with Speare's judgment that
the American political novel is engaged in the business of
Reform. The political novel exposes itself to certain
economic and critical perils that other novels need not
fear, and these risks shape the form of the political
novel.
It would not make much sense for a critic who
basically felt that aesthetic and political value were
unmixable to attack Speare's definition on political
grounds, since this move mixes politics and literature
from the outset. Subsequent readers of this sort have,
instead, attacked his definition on aesthetic grounds, for
example by criticizing his emphasis on idea over emotion.
Gordon Milne acknowledged the rudeness of the genre which
^°I discuss in detail the political dimension of
literary criticism in my next chapter, "The Political
Novel Submerged: Mobv-Dick and the Two-Book Theories."
37
has been, since Stendhal's bon mot, something of a
commonplace, but he also sought to redeem the political
novel from the limitation implied by Speare's emphasis on
ideas alone:
... I quickly came to agree with the astute
Stendhalian comment that 'politics in a work of
literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a
concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing
to which it is not possible to refuse one's
attention.' Quite willing to grant my attention,
becoming intrigued by the diverse political points of
view of writers of this type of fiction, [I became]
astonished by their emotion-laden tones.... [page]
It should not be necessary to add that Speare hardly
decreed boredom as the necessary reader-response to the
political novel. Perhaps to exonerate the genre from the
charge that it is inherently dull, later critics such as
Milne question the difference between the political novel
and the non-political novel. Speare and his followers
spoke to different audiences and had different objectives:
Speare to single out the characteristics of a special sub
group of novels; Milne and others to deny that the
political novel differed from other novels as a pistol-
shot differs from a symphony, however much the political
novel does resemble the pistol-shot.
More of a problem than Milne's review of Speare is
his way of presenting the political novel with, it seems
to me , impossibly contradictory goals :
Questions begin to arise in my mind. Did the
novelists achieve their almost universally shared
objective of reform? Did they avoid the exaggeration
38
and distortion that so often mar the purpose novel?
(vii)
The first doubt anticipates that we will judge the
political novel according to its extraliterary effects,
whereas the second question demands that the novelist not
violate the borders of literature: since any literary
effect that is "directed at persuading an audience to a
particular political, philosophical, religious, or
ideological point of view," may be regarded as
"exaggeration" or "distortion," any novel that passes one
standard will likely fail the other.
And yet books have been written that are of literary
value but which have also been commonly recognized as
having a political purpose. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle,
the book which appealed to America's heart and reached its
stomach, achieved an entirely different set of reforms
than the author intended. Should the gastronomical
extremities of his novel be seen as "exaggeration"?
Robert Coover and E.L. Doctorow's fictional handling of
the Rosenberg executions were both characterized by
stylistic exaggeration and distortion: should The Book of
Daniel and The Public Burning be dismissed as puerility or
hysteria? If so, the novelist is trapped, for he or she
may wish to reform American political hysteria without
39
being allowed to artistically represent it. Milne's
enthusiasm for the form appears to be absolutely genuine,
and so we can be sure that these contradictions are not
part of a conscious attempt to depreciate the genre.
Rather, Milne's approach to the political novel is the
legacy of a critical tradition that has not often
recognized the divided nature of the political novel: it
is a centaur-like creature, combining the animal
aggression of the Reformer and the civilian ambivalences
of the Novelist. It must combine Hamlet's ambivalence
with Hotspur's commitment to action, and still survive in
the world.
Milne's doubts have been voiced by many subsequent
critics. In 1966 Joseph Blotner also published a
comprehensive study of the American political novel in the
twentieth century. While Milne pretty much echoes Speare,
Blotner's definition in The Modern American Political
Novel is more sensitive to the post-Cold War
Michael Paul Rogin circumvents this critical
dilemma in Subversive Genealoav by challenging the
assumption that the American romance tradition is
I apolitical: "The relationship between American politics
and American art is very nearly the reverse of that
normally proposed. Politics did not root itself in
concrete social interests, driving literature into
fairyland. Rather, American political conflict was both
more fragmented and more rhetorically inflated than that
in Europe. If by realism is meant sensitivity to class
and to social constraint, then antebellum American
politics was not realist. American literature took on
critical, political functions in the absence of a realist
politics, but that absence decisively influenced the form
of the critical literature itself" (19].___________________
40
uncertainties, though it attempts to recuperate the non
relativist sense of the genre that we find in Speare:
In order to keep the study from extending to all
outdoors, "political" is here defined in a very
literal and functional sense. The subject of these
works, apart from a few on the fringe noted as such
but illustrating particular themes, is also primarily
political. (8)
By this standard the political novel has a disadvantage as
art. Blotner's "functional" definition actually excludes
a number of interesting novels that are about politics and
which function politically in my sense— those that
challenge the reader's political identifications.
Blotner's definition frequently excludes books considered
to be of greater literary value for reasons that may seem
to us to be arbitrary. Blotner explains these exclusions,
but his explanation compounds our difficulties :
Sociological novels such as Sinclair's The Jungle
(1906) and proletarian novels such as Steinbeck's The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), for example, are excluded.
This definition excludes novels which do not deal
primarily with political processes and actions, but
concentrate instead on the conditions out of which
political action may eventually arise. It also omits
novels portraying actions and attitudes which can be
regarded as political only after being extracted from
a matrix of allegory and symbol^— a highly subjective
process.
To dismiss The Jungle as a "sociological" novel is
perplexing. No one with any sense would claim that the
novel is devoid of sociological interest, but to phrase
the matter in such a way as to imply that "sociological"
and "political" could be mutually exclusive categories is
baffling. Intolerable to Blotner is a definition without
41
exact borders, and his solution, that we approach art with
"objective" criteria, paves the way for his procrustean
definition of the political novel.
Blotner, like many students of the political novel
who attempt an exact and exclusive definition, asks "Why
are there so few modern American political novels of any
excellence? Why are there so many bad ones?" As with
Milne, it almost seems that to call a novel a "political
novel" is to give a dog a bad name. Blotner and Milne
obviously set out to praise the political novel, and in
many cases they are able to do just that. And yet there
seems to be a bedrock assumption in their approach to
literature foreordains a woeful outcome for the form (pace
Blotner's ubi sunt on the matter). Or rather, on what
grounds did it become commonly assumed that the political
novel was a house built on sand? This question forces us
to divide those historians of the political novel who
attempt a permanent definition of the genre from those who
believed that ideological currents have a strong effect on
scholarship.
Critics in other countries, or American critics
abroad, may be better prepared to appreciate the American
political novel. The Indian critic Harish Trivedi has
assembled a volume of essays on the American political
novel which begins with essays by Trivedi and Townsend
Ludington on the problem of definition. The American
42
Political Novel! Critical Essays (1984) discusses a wide
variety of American political novels by authors such as
Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nathanael West,
Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, Trivedi
reviews previous theories of the political novel with
attention to the ways in which the American political
novel is slighted. While Trivedi's collection of essays
cannot explain the absence of similar volumes in this
country, it is by virtue of its very existence a challenge
to Americanists at home.
iii. Cold War Containment and the Critical Garden
It seems likely to some historians of American
literature after the Second World War that the period
known as the "Cold War" had a traumatic effect on American
culture as a whole (Whitfield, 1-26). Writing through the
Kennedy administration and into the first years of the
Johnson administration as Blotner and Milne were doing,
they would not have had to weather the same kind of
scrutiny as those who thought about political controversy
a few years earlier might have.
Blotner and Milne make no observations on the
political climate in which they wrote, but critics of
political fiction from the previous decade made statements
that offer clues. Writers in the mid and late Fifties
were uncomfortably close to the McCarthyism that demonized
43
actors and professors who had been in the Communist Party
during the depression. The Cold War tempers the writing
of Walter Rideout's 1956 study The Radical Novel in the
United States, 1900-1954 and also Daniel Aaron's Writers
on the Left. Literary historians of politically engaged
fiction such as Rideout become more than a little
defensive about the supposed incompatibility of politics
and art. Rideout prefaces his study with an ominous note :
"Doubtless some readers will find this book
unsatisfactory. The general reader may be put off by the
subject matter, for nowadays in the United States the
mention of anything having to do with radical politics is
likely to be met by suspicion or anger" (vii). Rideout
also suspects disapproval from various professional
fields !
The strict literary historian may object to finding
some literary analysis and evaluation here, while the
formalist critic will surely be unhappy over the very
large amount of what he would call "extrinsic"
material. Likewise, if the literary critic may
object that the book contains too much talk of
politics, the political scientist may feel that it
contains too little. (vii)
Just as the phobia of political impurity abroad (the Red
scourge) justified a foreign policy of containment, so too
Rideout's sense of his audience's "suspicion or anger" at
the impurity of his writing (is it political science?
literary history?) brought Rideout to worry about leaks in
44
his own container, The radical element in the fictions
discussed by Rideout is "extrinsic" to the pure matter of
literature and perhaps ought to be "contained" elsewhere.
Since "strict" literary history effectually gerrymanders
the political novel out of existence, the study of
political fiction itself is a kind of imipurity. After
making defensive statements of this sort. Rideout and
others moved away from general studies of the political
novel and, instead, discussed more narrowly defined sub
genres such as the "radical novel" or the "strike novel."
Irving Howe apparently was haunted by no specters of
readerly suspicion or anger, perhaps because he expressed
regret that the American ground has been unable to produce
a novel of first-rate political intelligence. In his 1957
study Politics and the Novel, Howe does not voice
discomfort at any Cold War harpies tormenting his text.
He suggests, rather, that post-war literature in general
has suffered from a lack of the "wrenching conflicts"
(Howe, 254) that buttress all great political novels :
"one thing, I believe, can profitably be said about
[contemporary political novels]: they constitute a
literature of blockage, a literature of impasse" (Howe,
^^There were those who wrote "without fear or
apology" during the Cold War period, Auden and Trilling
for example. These writers were, however, were no longer
expressing radical views in Rideout's sense of the term.
45
252). This sense of political frustration informs Howe's
definition of the political novel.
Although it must be said that he in no way intended
Politics and the Novel to be a comprehensive study in the
manner of Speare, Milne, or Blotner,Howe does not
satisfactorily explain the impasse that kept him from
discussing American authors. When Howe attempts to define
the genre, he waves away the problem of precise definition
as something for academics to quibble over. Howe defined
the political novel in this way:
By a political novel I mean a novel in which
political ideas play a dominant role or in which a
political milieu is the dominant setting....Perhaps
it would be better to say: a novel in which we take
to be dominant political ideas or the political
milieu.... (Howe, 17)
Howe has incorporated his own uncertainty principle into
this definition, though he provides no particular insight
about why the political novel should be harder to define
than other genres. Howe may have avoided precise
definition in order to circumvent the pressures that
Rideout clearly experienced: by refusing the "academic"
^Trivedi applauds Howe for salvaging the political
novel but criticizes his inattention to the American
political novel: "It would seem...that Howe had, once and
for all, redeemed the political novel from the impure
fringes of literature to instal it right at the centre,
dragged it out of its circumstantial quagmire to stand it
shining and whole on the prominence of significant art.
And yet, as if turned out, his superb example held few
lessons for a more enlightened study of the American
political novel— for the reason that very few American
^novels_were_a.dmitted_to_his_seleci:_canon.._l_(-Trivedi.,_7_)---
46
problem of definition, Howe freed himself to select novels
of undeniable literary quality. However, he found very
little worth mentioning from the United States, and his
commentary on this deficit is disappointing.
Why do American critics slight or leave out political
fiction written by Americans? Frederick Karl's American
Fictions: 1940-1980 (1983),a comprehensive study with a
chapter on American political fiction, offers a
suggestion. Although he points the finger at writers more
than critics, Karl agrees with Doctorow about the hazards
of creating political fiction in the United States and
traces the lineage of this problem back to the pastoral
strains in our literature. Literary Adamicism, Karl
contends, arrests the public attention to politics
required for "the large-scale political novel such as we
associate with Mann, Musil, Malraux, Kafka, or even with
Koestler and Orwell" (Karl, 254). While Karl also argues
that the Great Novel itself may be a thing of the past,
his attention to the Adamic tradition within American
writing brings up an interesting chicken-and-egg question:
if we lack great political novels because our culture
favors Amnesia over Memory, who is more to blame, critics
or writersThe chicken/egg dilemma is of course not
resolvable--so we are well advised to change the question :
^^See Michael Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory on
amnesia and American, historiography,.___________________
47
how do politically engaged writers respond to American
literary criticism? This is the question my following
chapters attempt to answer, but before answering it we
will have to take a closer look at literary Adamicism.
Beyond Karl, the argument extends in this direction: by
focussing on the American Adam rather than on class
conflicts between Cain and Abel, American novelists and
critics promote the idea of "American Exceptionalism. "
The most recent authorities on American literature attempt
to smash through the pasteboard mask of American ideology,
and, as we shall see, this is a very American thing to do.
My discussion of recent writing by Donald Pease and Thomas
Schaub suggests that the Adamic repressed returns once
more, this time to haunt the New Americanists.
iv. Politics and the Novel into the Nineties : Pease and
Schaub
I am reminded of a musician who became well known if
not an out and out celebrity in the late 1960s, a musician
^^See Jameson's Signatures of the Visible, p. 23, for
commentary on the politics of "American Studies." For an
ideological analysis of Americanist criticism, see
Porter's chapter on American ahistoricism in Seeing and
Being. Porter defines American ahistoricism as "a set of
assumptions about the American romantic tradition which
are related, on the one hand, to the theory of American
exceptionalism, and on the other, to an emphasis on Adamic
innocence, and which, taken together, yield a reading of
that tradition in which an 'end to the memory of history,'
along with a faith in the transcendent sovereignty of the
individual, are seen as definitive" fxiii)._________________
48
who was both an innovator in the world of Rock and Roll
music and at the Same time its greatest satirist : Frank
Zappa, who has more recently won attention as a cultural
liaison between the developed Western countries and the
newly independent countries that were the East Block of
the Soviet Union. In the late 1960s and early 1970s
he wrote songs that were to the typical Rock and Roll
Lyric as "The Rape of the Lock" is to "Paradise Lost": in
that they celebrated common values, they were similar, but
in making light use of the original, the songs were a form
of criticism.
Zappa's songs made fun of the excessive claims that
Rock and Roll musicians and aficionados made regarding the
purity of youth versus the corruption of age, but, in
mock-epic fashion, Zappa succeeded in having it both ways.
He celebrated American innocence as he made fun of it.
Straight-faced, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
sang songs with lyrics that both epitomized and taunted
the driving ideas of the age:
All your children are poor unfortunate
Victims of systems beyond their control.
A plague upon your ignorance
^^Frank Zappa visited Czechoslovakia after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and appointed himself
"Cultural Emissary" from the West. He is reported to have
gotten along well with Vaclav Havel, who told Zappa that
the genuinely free spirit of Zappa's satirical music was
important to Czech people such as himself during the years
of the Soviet o c c u p a t i o n . ____________________________
49
And the gray despair of your ugly life.
My rendition suffers without the music, which provides the
oceanic thrust driving the silly surfboard. In discussing
the work of the most recent stage of Americanist literary
criticism, that of the New Americanists, I sometimes taunt
too much, but, like Frank Zappa, I wish to have it both
ways. The New Americanist direction is a spirited
political approach to literature, but it sometimes takes
itself too seriously. Or rather, it often gives the
critic's self-consciousness a centrality that is neither
critically persuasive nor politically useful.
New Historicism, it is sometimes claimed, differs
from other branches of critical theory by turning context
into text, and it appears that New Historicism has begot
New Americanism, a New Historicism approach to American
Studies. New Americanists are at their best when
appreciating the influence of political climate upon
various stages in the life of the text; the criticism is
most surprising when it shifts nimbly from the way text
and (political) context are interdependent at composition,
reception, canonization, and after.
The great strength of the New Americanist platform is
in the astute consciousness of the politics of literary
study. This consciousness is often casually referred to
as critical "self-consciousness," which is something of a
misnomer since the New Americanist generally "etherizes"
50
an Old Americanist to authorize his or her own position.
Donald Pease provides the clearest statement to date on
the New Americanists when he packages them for mass
marketing in his introduction to a special issue of
boundary 2 entitled. New Americanist: Revisionist
Interventions into the Canon.
Pease begins his introduction to this collection of
essays by various New Americanists by summarizing
Frederick Crews's critical review of recent revisionist
literary histories, "Whose American Renaissance?" (New
York Review of Books, 27 October 1988), a review essay in
which Crews first coined the term "New Americanist."
Pease and Crews agree that there is something different
about the New Americanists. In a strategy that uses the
attack of another critic to create a sense of (New
Americanist) identity. Pease quotes Crews at length to
reproduce Crews's essential complaint, which Pease then
wraps up with the following summary in his own words.
Supposedly reporting on Crews, Pease writes, "the New
Americanists have returned ideology to a field previously
organized by an end of ideology consensus" (2). The
sentence is not an exact reproduction of Crews's meaning,
since Crews (according to Pease) presents the conflation
of ideology and literature as a very bad thing, whereas
New Americanists regard the "New Historicist return of the
repressed context" (35) to be a very good thing indeed.
51
Pease rewrites Crews's critique in order to reverse its
polarity, such as when he quotes a few phrases from Crews
to define the New Americanists:
the New Americanists' critique of 'slavery, "Indian
removal," aggressive expansion, imperialism, and so
forth' reasonably seems to Crews indistinguishable
from the demands of academic special interests
groups. (3)
We are of course to conclude that the critiques of slavery
or imperialism are hardly the demands of a special
interest group— but not yet. We must first pause to ask
who "we" are, for we are not necessarily of the same
group. In political criticism, as in the political novel,
the concept "we" is never as casual as it sounds.
That is to say, we must mind our Pease and Crews.
Crews criticizes the younger generation of critics for not
respecting the disciplinary boundaries that give the study
of American literature a meaning. According to Pease,
Crews has not merely criticized the New Americanists, he
has rejected them as followers in the path of American
Studies. Pease embraces the claim that New Americanism is
a bastard discipline (and he exaggerates Crews's
"rejection" to do this) because the illegitimacy of the
newer discipline is, paradoxically, the ground of its
legitimacy— as a counter-hegemonic formation. Since New
Americanism is not as familiar as traditional brands of
American literary criticism, I will have to quote Pease at
some length to show how this works :
52
Crews's remarks...are valuable for the urgent
need he displays at once to displace and dismiss. In
attending more fully to the threat he experiences in
the New Americanists, we can discover what Crews
believes to be at stake in this change within
American Studies and can develop the terms of
discovery necessary to introduces a volume of New
Americanists. Crews, as the author of Sins of the
Fathers, his bench mark study of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(a canonical figure in the field of American
Studies), had previously internalized the norms,
working assumptions, and self-understanding of the
field. While tacitly held, these assumptions work
the way other self-evident principles do, that is,
they remain exempt from critical scrutiny. As the
unquestioned basis for practices within the field of
American Studies, these assumptions constitute what
might be called the disciplinary unconscious : an
Americanist cannot at once act upon these assumptions
and be conscious of them....the New Americanists, in
consciously delineating the literary standards
presupposed in Crews's book on Hawthorne as the
results of an ideological state apparatus complicit
with aggressive expansionism, patronage politics, and
slavery, break faith with the constitutive principles
of Crews's field. For by associating literary
artifacts with the "historic national shames" of
American politics, the New Americanists do not write
from within the field but from a someplace else, a
someplace Crews, depending on his argumentative mood,
locates as the field of academic politics, the
sixties' counterculture, or the affirmative action
office. (3-4)
Pease is not shy about demonstrating his facility for what
Frederic Jameson has called "metacommentary."
Metacommentary is a mode of writing that implicitly claims
an ideological overview, and Jameson has made a case for
Marxism as a look-out tower in The Political Unconscious.
High places, however, have their hazards, and the
metacommentator takes a fall when he or she— while
hollering "Always Historicize!"— convinces him or herself
that he or she really is looking down on History.
53
What makes the New Americanist Adamic in the
pejorative sense is the need to "displace and dismiss":
just as Pease charges Crews with a quasi-Freudian
repression of the critical-theoretical Other, the New
Americanist's insistence that he or she differs in kind
from the "Old Americanist," can be traced to the newer
critic's anxiety of influence. By seeing himself or
herself as more ready to admit "historic national shames"
than the previous generation of critics, the New
Americanist undergoes rhetorical self-purification and is
reborn as the simple, genuine self against the whole
academy. Unable to bear the sins of traditional
criticism, the New Americanist reinvents him or herself,
and in this respect the New Americanist is a most familiar
specimen.
The passage I quoted in which Pease criticizes Crews
is marked in several places by Jameson's
Lacanian/Althusserian appropriation of Freud. In
"displace and dismiss" we hear echoes of Freud's
displacement and condensation but always with the Lacanian
sympathy toward the unconscious or repressed elements.
Freud insisted in The Interpretation of Dreams that
the unconscious must be brought under the domination of
the conscious and preconscious. Jameson and Althusser,
following Lacan, radicalize Freud by emphasizing Freud's
comments on the alterity of the unconscious. The split
between aspects of the self— between the subject who says
"I" and the unconscious repository of dissenting voices—
can be reworked in terms of social classes. For a
_discussion_of_the_differences_between_Freud_and_Lacan,_see.
54
Readers of The Political Unconscious will of course
recognize Fredric Jameson as the father of this passage,
especially when Pease posits a "disciplinary unconscious."
This passage has more than one father. Jameson is
the good father, the father with whom the son will
affiliate himself. Crews is the Laius figure that Pease
must slay. There are of course elements of inverted
filial piety in the writing, such as when Pease furnishes
a complaint with the diction of a complement: "Crews's
remarks...are valuable for the urgent need he displays at
once to displace and dismiss." Crews is valuable : Pease
directs our attention to Crews's critical blind spots (De
Man is also a good father), but he never de-values Crews
as a reader; to slay an insignificant father is to win a
paltry patrimony. In slaying his father, Oedipus does not
destroy the institution of patriarchy, and in the Freudian
meta-psychological retelling of the myth the murder of the
father in fact reproduces the institution of patriarchy.
Pease of course deploys the Oedipal motif self
consciously (he will not let us forget that Crews wrote
The Sins of the Fathers), but in his struggle to
distinguish his generation of critics from the older
section iv of the Melville chapter.
^^This passage has several fathers and no mother.
Although the New Americanists volume has one essay on "the
maternal," maternity and womanhood in general are often
.repressed_elements_in_Adamic__discourse______________________
55
generation, he refuses to see the ways in which his ways
of reading are continuous with the Old Ways. This refusal
forges Pease's disciplinary unconscious and demarcates the
New Americanist border between politics and literature in
an unsettling way.
The metacommentator may not claim to have
"transcended" the grist of his or her own critical mill,
but such a critic usually signals through rhetorical
deployments subtle and unsubtle that he or she is merely
the last, best commentator on the subject. Such an
interpreter is savvy enough to sav things like "We all
know there is no meta-language," and yet we note that this
statement hardly describes the practice of such a critic.
New Americanism, as practiced by Pease, is a rhetorical
mode of self-purification; it is a way to see oneself in
pure opposition not only to the national sins (slavery,
imperialism), but also to earlier modes of criticism.
Pease, then, arranges the mirrors so as to present himself
as an anti-academic academic. However, to allude to
Althusser on "an ideological state apparatus complicit
with aggressive expansionism, patronage politics, and
slavery" as Pease does in his discussion of Crews does not
really distinguish Pease from Crews. Pease's claim that
the New Americanists are in a Somewhere Else
unintentionally (or ironically?) echoes Poirier's claim
that American writers seek "a world elsewhere," an Eden or
56
virgin land beyond history. The American Adam must ever
be born again in flight from history, and the Adamic
critic must ever "make it new."
Insofar as Pease's volume is a call for more
ideologically dissident scholarship, and as his proposals
to academics are genuinely against the grain, the New
Americanist is also Adamic in the clearest sense of the
word. There is an adventurousness to Pease's call for a
political criticism, but we need not agree with him that
New Americanism exists in pure opposition to American
Studies as it is practiced by those who have not yet had a
critical-theoretical conversion experience.
While Pease stands in my analysis for the main
directions of American literary criticism at this time, he
writes primarily about American Renaissance texts and
postwar American critics. Pease directs our attention to
the way criticism mediates our experience of literature
and shapes the canon, but he is less concerned with what
living writers actually do. For an approach to the
contemporary situation for writers, we must go to a
different sort of book. Thomas Schaub's American Fiction
in the Cold War (1991) finds the political in themes and
forms that had previously been regarded as apolitical, and
it traces the ways in which "opposition" in the arts
becomes complicated and contained by Cold War "reality."
57
Even though it is nominally about novels written
since 1945, American Fiction in the Cold War is a good
example of the way in which a focus on the politics of
criticism displaces the reading of political literature.
Schaub's preface offers a partial genesis of his study,
and we can see the ways in which his end is in his
beginning :
This book is about the discourse of revisionist
liberalism— what was then called "the new
liberalism"— as it appears within the discussion and
practice of fiction in the United States during the
forties and fifties. The origins of my study,
however, were another time and place, in which I set
out to defend the experimental writing of the sixties
and seventies against the criticisms of it in such
books as Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself.
(vii)
Though the book is thorough in many ways, it is also
incomplete. A brief concluding chapter aside, we never
get to the experimental modes that Schaub originally
sought to defend, so we are left with the a Foucauldian
sense that the Revisionist Liberal discourse was somehow
inescapable. Like Ellison's Invisible Man, the reader
waits for politics to resurface.
It would seem that politics must always hide
underground in literature of the United States— -must
always threaten to arrive and await "a world elsewhere"
for an open hearing. A momentary pulse from this depth is
felt in the conclusion of American Fiction and the Cold
War, where Schaub mentions the later work of Mailer and
quotes Pynchon from The Crying of Lot 49;
this Berkeley was no somnolent Siwash out of her own
past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or
Latin American uniyersities you read about...the sort
_____ that_bring_governments_down____________________________
58
The body of Schaub's argument, which concerns the
ways in which Cold War ideology divided writers from a
sense of political agency, falls into two parts. The
first part weighs the pressure of politics on three
strands of critical discourse and explains the resultant
shift on postwar prose. The New York intellectuals, the
Southern conservatives, and a sampling of writers are
assessed in the first three chapters entitled "The Liberal
Narrative," "The Politics of Realism: Novelistic
Discourse in the Postwar Period," and "Form and Authority:
The Writer's Point of View." These chapters discuss the
ways in which embarrassments such as the Nazi-Soviet Non-
Aggression Pact shocked the Left (Trilling, Rahv, Howe)
and underwrote the emphasis on New Critical formalism on
the Right. The fourth chapter, "The Unhappy
Consciousness," analyses the shift to first-person-
singular narration in postwar fiction. This shift is seen
in part as "an effect of the shift from economy to mind so
visible throughout the intellectual community of that
time" (68-69), but this psychological explanation is in no
way an alternative to politics :
...the first person appeared to be a form of
resistance to general pressures, both popular and
critical, for political conformity and controlled,
crafted form. The discourse of resistance and reform
Berkeley becomes our City on the Hill, our vision of a
complete his agency, "world elsewhere"— but it is a world
elsewhere come home. This brief image of resistance
_appears_f leetingly_bef.ore_diving_deeply- ---------------
59
was no longer dominated by the language of social and
economic forces, giving way, instead, to explanatory
models based in psychology— to renewed focus upon the
mind. (69)
This passage is representative of the spirit of Part I,
since it implies that some form of resistance is indeed
possible: the discursive vocabulary may shift from
politics to psychology, but the political import of that
shift is found in the writer's potential to escape
Procrustean political languages— the Party Line.
The second part surveys the ways in which Revisionist
Liberalism guided the hands of novelists as different as
Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, and John
Barth. "Guided the hands" in this sense: writers in the
postwar period found much to be against, but the
embarrassments of the Left these writers without ways to
organize visions of collective resistance. The
adversarial stance, driven from the street, thrives in the
underground of Art. Ellison, for example, moves "From
Ranter to Writer" by shedding the Old Left sources of
traction (the rhetoric of engagement, the statement of
radical purpose) for the slipperiness of New Critical
ambivalence, irony, complexity, and tragedy. Ellison in
quoted in the epigraph to this chapter: "The essence of
the word is its ambivalence." Like the critics analyzed
by New Americanists such as Pease, Ellison succumbs to an
"end of ideology ideology":
60
"Ellison's experience was not unlike that of Rahv,
Trilling, and Chase; like them he understood
political literature to be a form of propaganda,
while "art"— being faithful to the ironic
complexities of experience— was inherently anti-
ideological " (95).
Each of Schaub's chapters develops the political
consequences of novelistic innovations supposedly
following the end of ideology, but his critique of the
post-war "anti-ideology" does not really operate from
outside of that ideology. We can see this in a general
way in the preferential treatment he gives to supposedly
apolitical or anti-liberal writers such as John Barth and
Flannery O'Connor, and his way of reading becomes
especially cramped when he discusses an unrepentently
political novelist such as Norman Mailer.
Every Adamic narrative must have a Fall, and Mailer
takes a tumble in the chapter, "Rebel Without a Cause:
Mailer's White Negro and Consensus Liberalism." In Part I
Schaub uses Mailer's writings to exemplify the position of
"The Unhappy Consciousness," and Mailer is thus in Part I
one of the good guys. But in his Mailer chapter Schaub
dismisses Mailer's fiction of the fifties to discuss "The
White Negro" instead. Schaub is free to conclude that
Mailer's novels are of little interest if he so chooses,
but to quote from Barbarv Shore to support his notion of
the writer's situation in the first part of a book and to
then ignore the novel in a chapter that should address
Mailer's novels written under those difficult conditions__
61
is unusual— at least when Cold War fiction is the critic's
ostensible subject.
It appears that Schaub chooses "The White Negro" for
its excesses, for its latent and manifest racism, and for
its sexism in particular. Mailer is discussed as one
supposedly hostile to liberalism, who is then shown to
work within the discourse of Revisionist Liberalism. Or,
to divide the doctor from the disease. Mailer is a good
doctor in Part I, but Schaub needs to purify him in Part
II. While writers in Part I are at times considered to be
perfectly conscious of the political discourses around
them, in part the writers of Part II are understood at
other times to express ideology unknowingly. Whether or
not "the Author is dead," the critic may mine the writer's
text for veins of discourse
which we may read as evidence of culture speaking
through Mailer, just as a geologist may read the
sedimentary striations of canyon walls to learn the
earth's history, the canyon being merely a convenient
point of access. To do this to see "The White Negro"
transformed into an expression of culture inhabiting
Mailer, who has, in varying degrees, thus lost the
reins to his own thought.... (138)
Mailer certainly merits reading against the grain, and
Schaub's argument that we must question the pure
opposition Mailer offers between himself and "the shits
[who] are killing us" (Advertisements for Myself ^ is well
taken; but it remains a problem that Schaub discusses the
novels of three writers that are diagnostically
.interesJ:ing_but_then_sele-C-ts_from^Mailerl.s_work_a----------
62
symptomatic essay. While Schaub appears to affirm a
politically oppositional form of criticism, he is at the
same time concerned to separate himself from what I have
claimed is the necessary messiness of politics. If the
essence of the Adamic is that it separates one from the
sources of guilt, Schaub's telling of American fiction in
the Cold War is an Adamic narrative.
We are likely to get the most out of the political
novel when we admit the special problems of the genre at
the outset. Henry Adams told us why politics tends to
upset the spirit of literature when he wrote, early in The
Education of Henrv Adams, that "politics, as a practice,
whatever its professions, had always been the systematic
organization of hatreds" (Adams, 7). However much we may
want to politicize the study of literature, it is usually
felt to be the case that it differs from political
discourse because of literature's liberal (broad-minded,
unbiased, cosmopolitan) aspirations. Literature, most
would agree, makes or should make room for as many voices
as possible. Literature casually accommodates the kind of
coalitions that are a great strain in political movements.
It follows from Adams's insight that the political
novel risks its status as literary art. Since it is by
definition an activist form, necessarily rooted in present
rather than extinct political controversies, it loses the
. _ _ g3
aura of "universality" that distinguishes much of what we
call literature. Not only does it risk the accusation
that it is "topical," it consequently cannot pretend to
transcend ideological divisiveness as do those Great Books
that hail the "Gentle Reader." The political novelist,
whatever his or her professions, organizes our hatreds,
thus calling our attention to interests that are not
purely aesthetic, and so its political activism is, to a
greater or less degree, at odds with its "literariness."
While it may wheedle and cajole in an effort to unify an
audience, the political novel— lest it preach to the
converted— -must be more aware than most novels of the
conflicts of interest that divide its potential
readership. The political novelist takes on a double
risk and for this reason must be measured in terms
slightly different than those reserved for non-political
fiction.
^^Note Kenneth Burke's definitional comment in The
Rhetoric of Motives on rhetoric as the area of "wheedle
and cajole." This partisan element is often held to be an
impurity within real Literature. See Robert Alter's
Partial Magic for a discussion of the novel as an
especially "self-conscious" genre.
64
Outside the Whale, Chapter 2
The Political Novel Submerged: Moby-Dick and its "Two-
Book" Theories
"Very like a whale."
Hamlet.
Can our readings of Melville's novel be geared to our
own contemporary political struggles? The novel is (among
other things) a profound meditation on the way political
ideology and narrative conventions conspire to shape our
stories. In the "Age of Reagan" more and more people have
become alarmed at the way public figures have become
decreasingly accountable: the Vice-President assured the
American public that he was "not in the loop" about the
Iran-Contra scandal, while the President, when subpoenaed
to testify, pleaded amnesia (Kammen).
In the age of the sound-bite, the social novelist who
would attempt a deep sounding dive seems more and more the
creature of a previous age. In fact, one of the best and
most recent interpretations of the novel's generic
plurality argues convincingly that "The heterogeneity of
Mobv-Dick...actually reflects the narrative license of the
times" (Post-Lauria). Mobv-Dick is about many things, but
if we look specifically to those themes that are of
consequence to the novel's overall form it becomes clear
65
that the novel has a great deal to say about the politics
of story-telling. As we see in "The Town-Ho's Story," the
chapter in which Ishmael and the Spanish Dons whisper in
the dark, Ishmael participates in a conspiracy, albeit
reluctantly. It may be better to say that his way of
addressing the reader bespeaks a "complicitous
resistance." For postmodern readers who take stock in
"complicitous resistance" (Hutcheon), Ishmael's resistance
may appear to be as good as it gets, but Melville signals
through "The Town-Ho's Story" that there is another tale
to tell.
Many critics studying the form of Melville's novel
have concluded that the author started one kind of book
(an autobiographical narrative reminiscent of White
Jacket 1 but finished another. Ishmael is with us on the
first page and the last, but we lose sight of him for long
stretches. He is of less consequence when we consider him
in comparison to Ahab— especially if we read with an eye
towards political symbolism. Such readings frequently
concede Melville's formal failure so that we may get on
with the enjoyment of the novel, but it is a premature
conclusion that Melville merely lost control of his
narrative. It is not enough to notice that Mobv-Dick is a
divided narrative; we should ask whv Melville veered from
one sort of story to another. To approach the novel with
66
this question is to see that "The Town Ho's Story"
contains the aborted remnants of the political novel that
Mobv-Dick might have been.
Mobv-Dick is not often (and should not be) regarded
as a political novel, although there has been much
scholarship on the novel's political symbolism.We
could draft Melville's novel into one of several causes
(anti-totalitarianism? radical democracy?), and it would
be easy to select passages to show how Melville expresses
insights into whichever cause we prefer. Unfortunately,
this approach ignores the formal struggles that produce
the oddly divided narrative.
Though not a political novel, Mobv-Dick contains
traces of its own repressed political content. "The Town-
Hq's Story" gives expression to this repressed content in
the way that the Freudian dream gives voice to a taboo
desire. Specifically, "The Town-Ho's Story" preserves the
ideal possibility of the meaningful political resistance
necessary to authentic radical democracy (in the secret
story of Steelkilt's heroism), but it preserves it in a
narrative limbo akin to the unconscious as described by
Jacques Lacan. The political unconscious in Mobv-Dick
"speaks" through "The Town-Ho's Story," just as the
personal unconscious smuggles its messages through
^^See Foster 1961, Heimert 1963, Karcher 1980, Rogin
L l . 9_ 8 3.,_and_pubin_l 9.8 2_and^ 1 9 . 8 . 3 , . _____________________________
67
distortion and displacement. This is not at all to say
that Melville wrote a political novel in spite of himself,
or that he did not know the real meaning of chapter fifty-
four: the political message is unconscious because
Melville had to leave it out of his main narrative. It is
unconscious from Ahab's point of view, but not from
Ishmael's. When we step into the point of view of
American greatness, as we do when we read the novel as
"The Tragedy of Ahab," then "The Town-Ho's Story" slips
out of sight. Mobv-Dick is often read as an exemplar of
American greatness. More than that, it is a great
American novel haunted by the dream of a political novel.
i. Repression in Literature
"Repression" differs from "suppression" in that the
former means to exclude from consciousness, whereas the
latter means to exclude consciouslv. Melville consciously
excluded certain themes, but in the field of the novel
those themes are sublimated. The repressed I wish to
describe is the discourse of "fighting back" as it
(dis)appears in Mobv-Dick. Melville's artistic
^^In The Political Unconscious : Narrative as a
Sociallv Symbolic Act. Fredric Jameson posits a political
unconscious to writers who, in their conscious minds, were
"reactionary." I am discussing a political unconscious of
which Melville was more or less conscious but could only
express indirectly due to his perception of readerly
resistance. I discuss the consequences of Jameson's ideas
_on_some_Americanist_critics_in_chapter_one-----------------
68
suppressions achieve this pattern of repression, but our
concern is with the novel, not Melville's psyche.
It could be argued that Melville's fictional craft
and beleaguered psyche come together in that both are
half-created from Melville's audience. In a famous letter
to Hawthorne, Melville describes the forces that require
him to suppress material. Common sense and Truth conspire
to silence the would-be writer:
It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly
declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a
personage as Gen. George Washington. This is
ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the
sun. Try to get a living by the Truth— and go to the
Soup Societies. Heavens I Let any clergyman try to
preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the
pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on
his own pulpit bannister (557).
How odd that "nature" and "Truth" should be mutually
exclusive. "Truth"— even the democratic truth that George
Washington and a jailbird are created equal— is thus
inadmissible evidence in the court of public opinion, much
to the disadvantage of public reformers. Or rather, it
cannot appear in an undisguised form. It may appear
"under the sun" only if it is "the silliest thing."
A problem: if something is repressed, relegated to
the unconscious, how do we know it exists at all? After
all, Melville never specifies what his "Truth" is in his
letter to Hawthorne. Might it not be more sensible to
proceed as though the Repressed never existed? The
repressed returns in distorted form. That which cannot be
69
said is displaced into a form in which it can be said.
Radical democracy^ the sort which allows us to see
Queequeg as a cannibalistic incarnation of George
Washingtony is intolerable ^ and yet it is certainly a
Truth uttered several times in Mobv-Dick.
Melville's solution is to use humor to "smuggle" his
intolerable message past the censorious public. If one is
going to make such a representation ^ one had better make
the idea tolerable by making it "ludicrous"; Melville's
audience is more likely to accept this representation when
they can consider its source, Ishmael. He is a ludicrous
and at times a self-mocking candidate for the Soup
Societies whose playful pantheism is not a satisfying
substitute for a personification of radical democracy in
the form of Steelkilt or Bulkington.
If the "missing" theme of radical democracy were absent
from all pages of the novel except those of "The Town-Ho's
Story," it would be best to understand the chapter as an
oddity, but the repressed possibilities which are
available through "The Town-Ho's Story" are given a voice
briefly in other parts of Mobv-Dick. The missing theme
shows up at key moments, in fact. The desire for radical
democracy appears, significantly, just before the chapter
introducing Ahab, the key agent of political repression
within the world of the novel. The democracy prayer in
"Knights and Squires" (the passage ending with the appeal
70
to "thou great democratic God!") is a trace left behind,
an unrepressed fragment of the radical democracy repressed
in the narrative organized around Ahab's monomania. The
content of the prayer bespeaks the real possibility of the
democratic sentiment, and yet the prayer-form implies that
such things are not to be had in this world. The prayer
thus appropriately takes the shape of a paradox by
foreshadowing the unsayable; "were the coming narrative
to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor
Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to
write it..." (104). Of course, Mobv-Dick does narrate
Starbuck's failure, and so the conditional "were" is the
repression (of the truth of Starbuck's lack of fortitude)
necessary for Ishmael to write his novel. This repression
bespeaks, in inverted form, the novel as a whole, in which
the repression of radical democracy (personified by
Steelkilt and Bulkington) is necessary to the narration of
Ahab's monomaniacal quest.
According to Jacques Lacan, repressed elements are
forced into the realm Freud identified as the unconscious,
and they speak to the conscious subject from that place:
"The unconscious is that discourse of the Other by which
the subject receives, in an inverted form, his own
forgotten message" (1977, 4 3 9 ) . While a novel cannot
^^Jameson points out the difficulty of identifying
"subject" in "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan" (1977).
This problem applies to readings_of_*LThe_Town-Ho is_Storv_l
71
have an unconscious in the way a person can, the
rhetorically overt and covert expressions in a novel may
be structured in ways that approximate the divisions in
human consciousness. "The Town-Ho's Story," as we shall
see, is by this logic the "forgotten message" of Mobv-
Dick . As the democratic equivalence of George Washington
and a cannibal can be expressed through humor, so can the
hope in a democratic resistance to Ahab's usurpation of
power be expressed in a "prayer" form— if and only if we
understand this prayer to be rhetorically excessive.
Ishmael makes it clear that even he does not believe his
prayer will be answered.
We can look to Melville's rhetorical arrangements and
style, or we can see the same principle at work in terms
of dramatic character substitution. The hopeful
possibilities of Bulkington (a man of the same build and a
similar name to Steelkilt, who also disappears
mysteriously) are displaced by the ominous appearance of
Ahab With the loss of Steelkilt/Bulkington, there is a
power-vacuum on board the Pequod. Ishmael will certainly
not fill it. George Washington-like Queequeg in no way
as the political unconscious of Mobv-Dick. "The Town-Ho's
Story" is a retelling of a dialogue between Ishmael and
the Dons, neither of whom seems especially conscious of
the radical implications I will draw from the tale. I
would argue that the insights ultimately become available
to readers of the novel, and therefore that the political
unconscious "belongs" to American culture, as embodied by
jthe_totality_of_iis_readers.,_rather_than_to_Ishmael..-------
72
imagines himself to be a player. The theme of radical
democracy is momentarily embodied by Starbuck, but Ishmael
develops his democracy prayer away from Starbuck, an
insufficient object of his utopian desire.
Ishmael's desire meets with several obstacles of the
sort described, and there are lengthy passages where it is
simply not on his mind. As Ishmael is often caught up
with the business of whaling, often in his own
metaphysical speculations, he is not always thinking about
this frustration. It is not a psychotic notion burned
into his psyche. And while Ishmael freely admits that he
was mesmerized by Ahab, in narrating his tale it is
certain that he does not betray his desire for radical
democracy, even when the idea appears doomed to
frustration.
No particular audience or other agency of repression
appears to silence the democracy theme, and yet the
Melville's rhetorical arrangements and dramatic
juxtapositions squeeze radical hope out of the realm of
the possible. If we back up from Melville and look at the
criticism, we see that the so-called realism of the shift
from the utopian urge of the democracy prayer has been
almost universally accepted as "realistic." Realpolitik;
whereas the Ahabs of this world (those persons in
authority with contempt for democracy) are real and
therefore worthy of attention, utopian urges and democracy
73
prayers are merely distractions from these real dangers.
The distinction between "realistic" and "unrealistic"
kinds of political desire has a numbing effect on the sort
of philosophical and social engagements that make radical
democracy possible. This "numbness" has, in fact, become
the object of scrutiny in recent decades. Fredric
Jameson, following Luckacs, criticizes the way formalist
readers stop their interpretation at what Marxists call
"reification" (a kind of ideologically produced reality-
effect) as though it were a brick wall. Jameson objects
to "their failure to account for the initial numbness of
our perception in the first place, their inability to
furnish a sufficiently historical explanation for that
ontological deficiency which they can only understand in
ethical or aesthetic terms" (1971, 374). Jameson sees a
return to the repressed political content of a text
through Lacanian formulations of the unconscious to be a
useful path beyond the "initial numbness," and my
suggestion is that we see "The Town-Ho's Story," Ishmael's
"secret part of the tragedy," as expressive of the
political unconscious of Mobv-Dick. If "The unconscious
is that discourse of the Other by which the subject
receives, in an inverted form, his own forgotten message,"
the Other-ized in Mobv-Dick is that which asserts the
reality of radical democracy against the discourse which
assumes its impossibility.
74
Melville's novel dramatizes the scenario described
above in a poetic rather than in a schematic way. We may
reduce these problems to abstractions, but when we read
the novel the shifts and changes are hardly formulaic. On
the contrary, they are sudden and shocking. The shift
from Ishmael's democracy prayer to the introduction of
Ahab fleshes out the abstract notion of reification which,
Jameson argues, fences in political critique in a
capitalist society.
Abstraction has its uses. When Melville is abstract,
it is to put us in a certain frame of mind. Though the
democracy prayer does not name Steelkilt of "The Town-Ho"
or his mesomorphic counterpart Bulkington by name, these
two mariners best approach the idealized forms of the
prayer:
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and
castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities,
though dark; weave round them tragic graces ; if even
the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted
mounts ; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some
etherial light.... Bear me out in it, thou great
democratic God! (104-105).
The abstraction of this passage marks Ishmael's flight
from actuality (where his desire will be frustrated) into
sublimity (where it can be true that some common man would
become the Savior of Democracy).
The flight from the unhappy reality of Ahab's
approach is analogous to Ishmael's telling of Steelkilt's
storv in "The Town-Ho's Story" in two ways. On__the_one___
75
hand, the full-blown rhetoric is, in its exaggerated
appeal to highest Authority, like Ishmael's request to the
Dons at the end of "The Town-Ho's Story" for the largest
Evangelists available. (224) He would swear the truth of
his tale (of rebellion against corrupt authority) on a
Bible, and yet the tall-tale demand for the "largest
Evangelists available" ironizes his sincerity if not his
veracity.
On the other hand, Ishmael swears that Steelkilt is
real, that he has seen him since the sinking of the Town-
Ho # and Ishmael's vow parallels the remnant of sincerity
in democracy prayer. Ishmael's odd oath (so disturbing to
the Spanish Dons) and his equally odd democracy prayer are
part of the discourse of the Other in Mobv-Dick; the
appeal to God, both in Ishmael's oath and in the democracy
prayer, signals a displacement from human to divine
authority which dramatizes the frustration of earthly
possibilities. Though Ahab is not yet on stage, there is
a doomed sense to the prayer as Ishmael utters it; the
apologetic manner in which Ishmael idealizes the mariners
foreshadows the repression of those mariners as political
players on Ahab's ship. This "doomed sense" is of course
not expressed directly. We infer it, as a psychoanalyst
infers the existence of an unconscious desire. In
contrast to such tentative expressions, the early
portrayals of Ahab never tread so lightly; "Know this, 0
76
young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease." Of
democratic mariners we may hope; of disease we can be
certain.
Art thou real, my ideal? Ishmael's God does not bear
him out, for in the next chapter "Reality outran
apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon the quarter-deck"
(109). Ahab's introductory chapter is the reality against
which Ishmael's democratic faith comes to appear
insubstantial. "Faith is a fine invention," in Emily
Dickinson's words, but Melville must turn his microscope
on the emergencies that threaten democratic health :
"There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,
nor of the recoveiry from any" (109, emphasis added).
Ishmael's impassioned plea is submerged into Ahab's
reality, but Ahab's reality consists of a strange
signlessness.
This absence of democratic health is presented in the
main narrative of Mobv-Dick as an unquestionable reality.
Ahab Bulkington's disappearance is never explained.
How does Ahab's reality-effect, apparently consisting of
the silence between two absences, dislodge Ishmael's
democratic longings from a place in the forefront of the
narrative? The space between the two absent signs, that
of Ahab's health and that of his recovery, are elliptical
and suggestive, but they hardly indicate what gives this
reality its unquestionability. On the other hand, equally
77
odd moments in "The Town-Ho's Story," concluding as it
does with Ishmael's oath and satirizing as it does the
Dons's selective vision, subverts reification by
dramatizing the ways in which Ishmael's audience resists
or misrecognizes various elements in his story. "Reality"
is not a given, since it is always mediated by its
"audience," and if the idea that reality is socially
constructed is open to question, it is nonetheless
striking that "The Town-Ho's Story," alone among
Melville's chapters, includes a built-in audience (Kosok).
More than any other chapter, "The Town-Ho's Story"
foregrounds the political pressures manifest in a
narrative's reception.
The Dons are blind to the class of men asked for in
the democracy prayer, the Lakemen and Canal1ers of the
world— the sort of men who overthrow aristocratic elites.
Does "The Town-Ho's Story" give Mobv-Dick its forgotten
message (in inverted form) by highlighting Steelkilt as
one of democracy's Invisible Men, lost on an aristocratic
audience? Their social blindness signals their
politically repressed vocabulary and their inability to
hear anything other than wholesale "good news" [Fr. LL
evangelium, fr. Gk eu-angelos1. What would these
aristocrats, so nervous at a friar, make of Melville's
wicked book, baptized so strangely— "'Ego non baptiso te
in nomine— but make out the rest yourself'" (562).
78
Melville's elliptical letter to Hawthorne (June 29, 1851)
illustrates not only his uncertain relationship to his
larger readership, but his discomfort at expressing
himself even to Hawthorne: "when you see or hear of my
ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a
touch of a shrink, or something of that sort" (556-557).
Melville shows in this letter his awareness of the degree
to which the political Other speaks through certain
passages which leak into his novel, especially the
democracy prayer and "The Town-Ho's Story." The
apprehension expressed in the letter to his fellow
intellectual-aristocrat applies to his audience in
general: "I dont know but a book in a man's brain is
better off than a book bound in calf— at any rate it is
safer from criticism" (553).
If, as Heinz Kosok has argued, the Dons in "The Town-
Ho 's Story" satirize Melville's own readership, the
chapter is a parable about how much Melville has to
repress in order to deliver his novel to his initial
readers. The object of Melville's satire in "The Town-
Ho 's Story" appears on the surface to target an obsolete
class in a far-away country, but Melville's letters to
Hawthorne indicate that Melville's anxieties about
audience may have extended to his most sympathetic reader.
Perhaps Melville's "ruthless democracy" was taboo even to
his best readers; knowing this, Melville was forced to
79
deliver his radically (democratic) message in inverted
form. "The Town-Ho's Story" approaches the tragic loss
prefigured in the democracy prayer, but, preserving his
original style, the story must express those elements in
the comic tall-tale style which delights the Spanish Dons.
2. Audience as Taboo
As Melville put it to Hawthorne in his June 1 letter,
though without specific reference to political symbolism
in his work, "What I feel most moved to write, that is
banned,— it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the
other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and
all my books are botches" (557). Clearly Melville felt he
had to write around certain topics.
One meaning of taboo, used as an adjective, is
"forbidden to profane use or contact because of supposedly
dangerous supernatural powers" (WNCD, 1176). "The Town-
Ho 's Story" suggests two taboo areas: in the first place,
Radney violates Steelkilt's dignity and so brings on
himself the so-called divine visitation of Moby Dick; in
the second, Ishmael swears an oath on the Holy Evangelists
with no apparent supernatural punishment— though he nearly
faints when asked to narrate the story of the white whale.
When Ishmael asks Don Sebastian to go for a priest, a
member of the company cautions Ishmael, saying "'Though
there are no Auto-da-Fés in Lima now. ..I fear our friend
80
runs the risk of an archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more
out of the moonlight. I see no need of this'" (224). A
taboo is something better off avoided, something sealed
off from the realm of acceptable experience by social
convention. Introduced into the social context, it cries
out for repression, but then the unvanquished desire for
the taboo object may subsequently produce a displacement
or condensation that will allow for the taboo desire to be
satisfied through a disguised form. Whether in dream or
literary text, this practice of psychic smuggling with its
attendant deceptions problematizes (to say the least) our
ability to define the exact nature of the taboo.
For example, the question remains whether the taboo
challenged by Ishmael's tall tale is religious
irreverency, as indicated by the surface of Melville's
narrative, or if religious irreverency displaces something
Melville thought better off avoided. Do the Dons'
warnings about sacrilege point to the taboo, or do their
interruptions, ostensibly about trivial matters of
identification, signal a different taboo object entirely?
When Ishmael observes that sinners "most abound in holiest
vicinities," Don Pedro responds by asking "Is that a friar
passing?" (214). Is "vicinity" in Ishmael's reported
speech-act the Church with which the friar is most often
associated, or is the Golden Inn, the place of ishmael's
Story, among the "holiest places"? Note especially that
81
the Don does not warn Ishmael against uttering sacrilege,
only against offending a friar. Kosok is worth quoting at
length on this point:
it does not matter whether Ishmael has uttered an
irreverency but whether a friar had heard it: the
audience is not concerned about the truth or falsity
of such a statement but about propriety....Melville,
of course, was aware of the probability that Mobv-
Dick , even more so than his earlier novels, would be
criticized for its apparent irreverence (it is hardly
necessary to quote his famous statement "I have
written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb" in
support of this). He knew that many of his readers
would rather reject the "truth" he felt he had
written, than allow him to violate the teachings of
their churches, however little they might believe in
them (Kosok, 56).
Kosok's essay is probably the most useful contribution to
criticism of "The Town-Ho's Story," but I must differ from
him in not taking at face value that the prohibitions
violated by Ishmael's narrative are really of a religious
nature. The Dons verbally acknowledge discomfort at
Ishmael the religious Freethinker, but their interruptions
suggest a lower layer.
The Dons interrupt Ishmael several times during his
tale, but two key developments appear to stimulate the
interruptions. The interruption concerning the meaning of
"Canallers" follows shortly after Steelkilt hits Radney,
causing him to spout "blood like a whale" (214), and this
interruption leads to several other exchanges between
Ishmael and his audience. The second major break occurs
after the sighting of Moby Dick. The breaks in Ishmael's
narrative correspond _directly_to_ruptures_in_the_political_
82
order on the Town-Ho, first Steelkilt's striking of
Radney, then the appearance of the whale that will kill
the first mate. Melville has the Dons interrupt Ishmael
when they do to dramatize their need to avoid the most
distressing corollaries of radical democracy: the
bloodshed of tyrants who do not respect democratic law.
There is no explicit reference to the Spanish Dons as
tyrannical; as in "A Paradise of Bachelors, A Tartarus of
Maids" we only have the juxtaposition of contexts to go
on— and history. According to The Columbia Encyclopedia,
"Many of Peru's problems have been inherited from the
Spanish Conquest, which might be said never to have
finished." That the government who gave little or no
voice to creoles and oppressed the Indians was so
efficient in its exploitive practices "explains why Peru
was the last of the South American colonies to gain
independence from Spain" (Columbia, 1523-24). This
context perhaps provides a way of seeing Ishmael's
narrative difficulties: a product of the first colonial
revolution tries to tell a revolutionary story to those
who have been most recently deposed— -but they do not yet
recognize their obsolescence. Ishmael, a good-mannered
friend to all auditors, must avoid creating too great a
disturbance, just as the dream gradually leaks awareness
from the unconscious into the conscious state. A flank
83
attack is necessary, or else the censorship mechanism will
repress the matter entirely.
The representation of violence of the oppressed
against the oppressor is taboo.James Scully writes in
Line Break, his argument for class-conscious and
politically engaged poetry, "only the violence against the
oppressed may be acknowledged. The artist is stuck:
confirming and reinforcing victimization, unable to admit
to, never mind celebrate, the concrete struggle to destroy
the system that produces such stultifying misery" (Scully,
90) .
Scully's suspicion that our sense of literature is
warped by a critical bias against radicalism is supported
when we look at the critical receptions of more activist
19th century writings. Representations that directly
confront social institutions and representations of direct
confrontations with consensual social values occur
regularly throughout nineteenth century American
literature. When such representations do occur, they are,
like disturbing elements in the Freudian dream, contained
within their narrative frameworks in such a way as to
neutralize the representation. Criticism corrects
stubborn authors who fail to conform, and so we may add
critical distortion to narrative containment. Either the
^^For an excellent discussion of the way ideology
mediates violence in developing American literature, see
Fi sher_2 2 - 8 . 7 _ . ______________________ _________________________
84
author disguises taboo material, or the work may be
distorted in its subsequent reception. After we take such
distortions into account, the representations of violence
in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Douglass's Narrative of the
Life of an American Slave, and Mobv-Dick all confirm
Scully's observation.
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass both
represent slaves who take arms against slave-masters,
though in slightly different ways. In Uncle Tom's Cabin
the runaway slave George speaks for the use of violence as
a path to freedom;
"I d^ run a risk, but"— he threw open his overcoat,
and showed two pistols and a bowie-knife. "There !"
he said; "I'm ready for 'em! Down the south I never
will go. No! if it comes to that, I can earn myself
at least six feet of free soil." (125)
Even within this highly melodramatic novel, George's will
to violent self-defense is presented as an excessive
passion. Though George shoots a man to defend his own
freedom, the wounded slave-hunter recuperates as a better
person in fairy-tale fashion, and George's violence is
ultimately displaced by Uncle Tom's martyrdom. George's
spirited self-defense has been a comic interlude.
In his Narrative of the Life of an American Slave,
Frederick Douglass presents a stronger challenge to
Scully's arguments. He does not represent violent self-
defense as humorously excessive, nor is the necessity of
85
violence in any way pushed into the margins of his
account :
from whence came the spirit I don't know— I resolved
to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I
seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I
rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance
was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken
all aback. He trembled like a leaf. (1913)
That the violence is completely unexpected— both by the
oppressor and the oppressed— suggests Douglass's awareness
of the sort of ideological mediation described by Scully.
For Douglass the initial violence and its subsequent
representation without apology are essential in undoing
the work of this ideology.
Douglass does not frustrate the proposed model in
which the liberal taboo on violence functions as an
ideological censor, he complicates it. According to the
model, Douglass's representation of violence should be
regarded as non-literature. Douglass's narrative is
currently included in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature and is frequently read as "literature" rather
than, say, social history. In The Unusable Past Russell
Reising acknowledges the rise in Douglass's literary
stock, but also points out that we must look at the
specific ways in which previously excluded materials are
belatedly received: "Douglass's place in the American
canon has, over the past decade, grown increasingly more
secure. Less certain, however, is just how Douglass's
Narrative is to be situated in American literary history.A
86
(Reising, 256) One condition of Douglass's inclusion
seems to be a de-emphasis of his assertion that violence
is physical struggle is necessary to freedom. Reising
criticizes a well-known reader of Douglass:
Houston Baker, Jr's assertion that 'by adapting
language as his instrument for extracting meaning
from nothingness, being from existence, Douglass
becomes a public figure' needs some qualification
(Baker, 1980, 39). It is, of course, true that the
publication of the Narrative launched Douglass's
career as a 'public' figure. But, while Baker
stresses language as Douglass's prime vehicle in
becoming public (though he does not adhere to a
simple or privatistic notion of language as such),
Douglass himself renders language as an abstract
medium subordinate to the externalization of that
self (partially a linguistic construct) in physical
battle. (264)
H. Bruce Franklin has also criticized the academic
reception of the Narrative in Prison Literature in
America. noting especially the liberal taboo against
libertarian violence. One critic quoted by Franklin finds
"irony in the situation in which Douglass must reduce his
conflict with slaveholders to a question of brute strength
and physical violence in order to assert his 'manhood.'"
(Scully, 90). This reading cannot, of course, stand for
all criticism, but it does suggest the lengths to which
the academic response may go to avoid a taboo.
One of the pleasures of political activism is that it
organizes the activist's world by dividing it into "us"
and "them." Consequently, oppositional criticism is
liable to a range of charges : it may be dismissed as
partisan , _or, in Emily_Dickinsonis_words., Hhandled_with„a_
87
chain" for having a paranoid view of itself in relation to
all other views. John Fraser, a non-radical critic,
reaches similar conclusions in his study Violence in the
Arts. Against the liberal ideology that all violence is
unwarranted, Fraser points out that those who hold such
views depend on social institutions to obscure the violent
defense of their own privileges : "far from being
mindless, violence is usually the cutting edge of ideas
and ideologies," (Fraser, 162)
politically respectable violence is not considered to
be violence at all and the term is reserved for
actions that are denied political significance or are
felt to possess the wrong kind....the military and
the police, for example, are not violent
organizations (Fraser, 157).
Representations of physical violence are rare on board the
Pequod since Ahab knows how to balance words ("The
Quarter-Deck") and cash ("Surmises"). Still, Ahab is
aware that words and cash may not be enough, since, "of
all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt
to get out of order" (183). After "The Quarter-Deck," in
which Ahab "impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private
purpose of the Pequod's voyage" (184), Ahab knows that he
has "laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
usurpation." Ahab's "impulsive" speech is, then, a kind
of leak that he must plug, since there is no legal
question or uncertainty-of-Hamlet about the situation :
"his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent,_could_
88
refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently
wrest from him the command." But Starbuck i^ uncertain,
and his uncertainty reflects the ideologically oriented
taboo on violence against authority. The crew can only
"violently wrest from him the command" if they can first
apply to their own actions the word "violently." Starbuck
shrinks from the word.
He is more or less ferocious against whales ("The
First Lowering," "The Hyena"), but, as Fraser notes,
legally sanctioned violence is given a less pejorative
name. The label "violent" never hinders Starbuck in his
whale hunting because whale hunting is not called violence
by whale hunters. Legality, then, protects Starbuck's
vocation as whale hunter, but the same ideological system
castrates him politically when it comes to challenging
authority. Starbuck is well within his legal rights in
forcefully taking command of the Pequod, but he is
inhibited in just this attempt by the thought that he
should be "violent" as his cry to heaven reveals :
"Is heaven a murderer when its lighting strikes a
would-be murderer in his bed, hindering sheets and
skin together?— And would I be a murderer, then, if—
— " and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways
looking, he placed the loaded musket's end against
the door (422).
Starbuck cannot stand the strain of this legally
justifiable violence, and so he puts the musket back in
its rack. He is blocked not by a door or a law, but by a
j:^pncep:b_in_his_pmi_mind— perhaps_the_Oedipal_Law.. As______
89
Scully argues, "only the violence against the oppressed
may be acknowledged," and this truth is well represented
by an earlier scene in the novel:
Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming
part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and
pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is
one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain
that is lord over the Pequod.— On deck I" (394).
Clearly, Ahab suffers no inhibition which divides him from
his own violence. And, since there is no member of the
crew with Ahab's ambition to embody the Law, there is no
political rupture on board the Pequod.No sailor is
flogged, though all but one die as a result of Ahab's
monomania. The struggle between Starbuck and Ahab, and
especially the manner in which the label "violent"
mediates that struggle, illustrates the ways in which
ideological tendencies in a language exert pressure on
social struggles which supposedly exist in a "reality"
^In Lacanian terms, everyone is denied the phallus,
the signifier of the Law. To fit into the symbolic order,
which is organized around the phallus and fully determined
by it, men are permitted various satisfaction (car, house,
wife), provided that the do not surrender to the absolute
hunger for joissance. Ahab, however, will not settle for
this form of ideological castration. Steelkilt does not
suffer Ahab's ambition to absolutely embody the phallus,
to conquer Moby Dick. This becomes clear in the scene in
which he carefully retreats from Radney, mirroring his
movements, but drawing a line from which he will not
retreat further. Steelkilt does not accept the castrating
terms offered by Radney's command (that he shovel pig
manure), and he also insists on his own social value in
his bold manner of address to both Radney and the captain,
but it cannot be said that Steelkilt's hunger for power is
absolute since he makes it clear that he will do his work
.if_he_is_not_flogged.-----------------------------------------
90
beyond language. "Violence" in Mobv-Dick is itself the
site of an ideological struggle.
If such a taboo against radically democratic struggle
exists, how is it that Melville presents taboo violence in
"The Town-Ho's Story"? When Melville does represent the
violence of the oppressed against the oppressor in "The
Town-Ho's Story," that violence is presented in ways that
avoid the ideological censorship that often meets taboo
discourse. First of all, Steelkilt's violence is admitted
into the narrative up to a point, but just before his
candidly expressed will to commit physical violence
crosses the line of murder, Moby Dick intercedes, as
though a divine intervention, and kills the offensive
Radney. The manner in which Steelkilt becomes a murderer
in every way except actual guilt, which is displaced onto
the great white whale, Melville indicates his own
perception of the furthest limit of ideological deviance.
Secondly, the story is contained within several narrative
frames. It is a version of a version of a version of a
story, secretly told to Ishmael, and then retold by
Ishmael in its original (tall-tale) style. The violence
at the core of the tale is well-insulated by its
retellings, as it may be explained away as unreal, as a
popular genre in the tall-tale tradition as opposed to the
Truth. Even Ishmael's sacred oath is a tall-tale affair—
hence Ishmael's reminder that his fifty-fourth chapter is
91
preserved "For my humor's sake...[in] the style in which I
once narrated it at Lima..." (208).
iii. Displacement in Consciousness and Story
Most readers take for granted that the story we read
really is identical with the one told at the Golden Inn,
but what is true of dreams for Freud is also true of
events in Ishmael's story: "we have no guarantee that we
know them as they actually occurred" (Freud, 550).
According to the Freudian understanding of the dream, the
subject becomes aware of the taboo content repressed into
the unconscious when the taboo sneaks by the censor in
distorted form. Distortion can be the slip of the tongue
or the joke in waking life; in the dream distortion is
produced by condensation or displacement. "Dream-
displacement," writes Freud, is one of the chief methods
by which that distortion is achieved" (Freud, 343).
Writers who wish to challenge sexual, political, or other
taboos often consciously use displacement of the sort
Freud describes to smuggle their messages past society's
censors. Orwell, our aforementioned one political writer,
seems to have understood this process as an entirely
conscious strategy by which political writers beat the
ideological censor through cleverness:
"Imaginative" writing is as it were a flank attack
upon positions that are impregnable from the front.
A writer attempting anything that is not coldly
______lintellectual2L_can_do_very_little_with_words_in__their_
92
primary meanings. He gets his effect, if at all, by
using words in a tricky roundabout way. (Rorty, 174)
Imaginative writing, like the dream, must use condensation
and displacement to successfully communicate its ideas.
One corollary of Freud's notion of displacement is that
the dream picks up apparently insignificant details
beneath which to hide its repressed content, and so we may
draw comparisons between Orwell's own love of the
ordinary, the socially déclasse, and Melville's democracy
prayer for meanest mariners, for mere workers. The Dons
do not even have "Lakemen" in their vocabulary.
A more troublesome corollary to such an application
of Freudian dream theory to literature is that distortion
and displacement are, according to Freud's model, ways to
communicate what without them could not be even partially
communicated. Freud's way around this problem, in the
psychoanalytic context, that is, was to authorize the
"meaning" of the dream certitude through the certitude of
conviction of the subject, once the pattern of meanings in
question became available through the psychoanalytic
dialogue. In applying psychoanalytic methods to
literature the main problem has been the difficulty of
identifying the "subject" (Jameson, 1989, 75). Is Ishmael
the subject who dreams up Mobv-Dick? (Zoellner, Egan) The
individual reader? The culture in which the text is
supposedly embedded? The gap between the ambiguity of
93
psychoanalytic dream interpretation and that of literary
texts apparently narrows in the face of such questions.
Literature differs from the dream in that dreams
leave no copy text. Freud points out that in the dream
"we have no guarantee that we know them as they actually
occurred" (Freud, 550), whereas we are certain that we
have something when we look at Ishmael's narrative. That
something, however, is no better than the written form of
an uncertain dream memory, since the story after all comes
to Ishmael via Tashtego's dream and his subsequent
retelling upon waking up.^^ The story
was the private property of three confederate white
seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems,
communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions
of secresy, but the following night Tashtego rambled
in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way,
that when he was wakened he could not well withhold
the rest (208).
That is, the private property leaks, just as the Town-Ho
itself (private property of Radney, among others) leaks.
That Ishmael swears the truth of his account on the
largest Bible available does not really persuade us that
there are no leaks in his telling, especially given the
irony of a religious oath that satisfies unbelievers.
That we cannot know what "really happened" aboard the
^^Ronald Gottesman pointed out the parallels between
Freud's topographic division of the mind and the
particular locations of leaks on board the Town-Ho in his
lectures on_ American Renaissance_writers.,_Spring_19.89..___
94
Town-Ho forces us to interpret, to become interpretive
subjects.
Some readers argue that it is not displacement but
misplacement that accounts for the strange matter of "The
Town-Ho's Story." Revision theories generally see "The
Town-Ho^ s Story" as an early version of Mobv-Dick which
Melville chose to incorporate rather than discard after
his overall conception changed (Stewart, Barbour,
Hayford). The revision theorists, those who see "The
Town-Ho's Story" as material from the Ur-Mobv-Dick that
Melville just did not want to scrap, see the kinds of
parallelism between Steelkilt and Bulkington that I have
been describing, but their explanations for Bulkington/s
bizarre "apotheosis" (98) either beg the question of why
Melville revised, or stop short of the kind of inquiry I
am recommending. That Bulkington disappears so
^^Harrison Hayford is one of the most recent revision
theorists; "I think Bulkington, in Melville's mind,
outgrew his station, 'becoming', in his heroic role, Ahab.
For if Bulkington was a heroic harpooner, at what was his
harpoon, in more than a routine whaleman's way, to be
pointed? At the White Whale some call Moby Dick?" (156).
There is nothing in Mobv-Dick to suggest this last
possibility, but if Hayford had considered the most
striking duplication in the novel, the reappearance of
Bulkington in the person of Steelkilt, he might have
considered a different antagonist.
^®Barbour is the most astute of the two-book readers.
His discussion of the completion of Moby-Dick's
discontinuous elements in "The Town-Ho's Story" is
excellent, but it does not go on to ask the question. Why
did Melville not go on to write a "Town-Ho Novel"? My
essay describes the ways in which "The Town-Ho's Story,"
by incorporating the audience of a tale into the tale.
95
suddenly and so strangely is an important part of the
story, and readers who see this aspect as mere
misplacement or revisionary replacement miss the artful
pattern of displacement.
The common element of displacement, misplacement, and
replacement is Place. "The Town-Ho's Story" appears to be
situated more securely than other chapters in Mobv-Dick.
since we know exactly when and to whom it was told (Kosok,
54). In fact, the story is in several ways the place of
displacement. First of all there is the doubleness of
place--the story is set around the Cape of Good Hope,
whereas the narrative is presumably told at the Golden
Inn. These two places yield additional displacements.
The Cape of Good Hope, we learn in an earlier chapter,
once had a less inviting name:
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape
Tormentoso, as called of yore; for long allured by
the perfidious silences that before had attended us,
we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea,
where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and
these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly
without any haven in store....
The unpleasant name for a hellish place is displaced by a
more inviting name, indicating a good place, a better
place for commerce.This sort of displacement makes us
makes available to us a politically engaged revision
theory along the lines of the Freudian dream.
^^Ronald Gottesman has suggested that the Cape is
akin to Dante's Limbo, where political fence-sitters are
doomed to suffer in between worlds. _______________________
96
wonder about the "Golden Inn." Did it have a previous
name? The Peruvian context and the use of various names
illustrate the sort of displacement we find in Freud's
dreams, and in ways which relate directly to the conflicts
on board the Town-Ho and the Pequod.
Spilling his drink, one of the Dons concludes that
"The World's one Lima" (215), and readers such as Kosok
have taken this statement at face value. We are told in
"The Whiteness of the Whale" that
Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher
horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits
not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads
over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an
apoplexy that fixes its own distortions (167).
The veil which obscures, the references to Pizarro, the
concern about earthquakes and apoplexy, are highly charged
politically; if "All the World's one Lima," it is a world
of conquest, oppression, and perhaps revolution. Melville
makes the connection between universal whiteness and the
world-wide system of racial oppression in the same
chapter: "this preeminence in it [white elephant] applies
to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal
mastership over every dusky tribe..." (163). The world is
one Lima because every place on it, to generalize along
Ishmaelian lines, supports one colonial gentlemen or
another, usually white, at the expense and suffering of
its dusky tribes. As Ishmael asks before setting sail,
JUWhp__ainlj:_a_slave.?J!__________________________________________
97
The difference or similarity between Lima and other
worldly places becomes an issue in the foreground once
more when Ishmael "gets caught" speaking of one place in
terms of another. The Limeese gentleman displays a
Freudian certitude of conviction in his announcement of
this discovery:
"A moment! Pardon!" cried another of the company.
"In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to
express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means
overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present
Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison.
Oh! do not bow and look surprised; you know the
proverb all along the coast— 'Corrupt as Lima.' It
but bears out your saying, too; churches more
plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open—
and 'Corrupt as Lima.' So, too, Venice; I have been
there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
Mark!— St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks :
here I refill; now, you pour out again."
The displacement of Lima by Venice, when noted by the man
from Lima as such, shocks and silences Ishmael. The Dons
are usually described as stupid, but here one is alert and
good humored— although Melville never says the man is a
Don. The intersection of saint's names (which I will
develop further in the next section) and "purge it"
develop a number of rich correspondences between the story
in and the telling "The Town-Ho's Story." Steelkilt
wants a cup of the leaky material; Ishmael's cup runneth
over; also, there is the strange correspondence between
the Limeese acknowledgement of "delicacy" and the "strange
delicacy" of sailor's on the Pequod, who keep "The Town-
Ho' s Story" a secret. As etiquette provides a manner in
98
which to pass through potentially embarrassing encounters
with others, the "strange delicacy" on board the Town-Ho
and within the walls of the Golden Inn provides a manner
in which to confront the Other, the political unconscious
perhaps, without really creating a disturbance (Freud's
"distressing affect" in the dream, a rupture of social
relations in waking life).
Ishmael's momentary silence seems to settle the
matter (substitute Lima for Venice), but a comment which
follows shortly after complicates the possibilities of the
displacement even more: "No need to travelI The world's
one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate
North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.—
But the story" (215). Is this disparagement of the fool's
paradise a swipe at Emerson? Probably, but it is also a
reference to the moral geography of the United States as
it was understood from the Northeast (this geography is
the map on which Uncle Tom's Cabin is written). The Don
wonders at Ishmael's description of so hot-headed a
Northerner as Steelkilt, but learns through Ishmael's
narrative of the volcano beneath the snow. This double
displacement indicates that, like the vigilant interpreter
of dreams, we cannot always stop at the first solution.
We may trace the displacements from Venice to Lima
and then back to the American cultural text as it survives
in other novels from the period, and there are also
99
threads from Ishmael's Town-Ho narrative which find their
way into the main story of Mobv-Dick. In evoking the
Peruvian context, Ishmael several times mentions Pizarro,
the original Spanish Conquistador. The Dons themselves
are not said to be cruel or in anyway oppressive, but we
nonetheless know them to be Owners, and we should at least
wonder if they exist as cultural opposites of the "meanest
mariners" of the democracy prayer. Ishmael "craves
courtesy" and otherwise speaks the courtly language when
addressing the Dons directly, but "owners" receive a very
different sort of discourse within the story Ishmael tells
them:
Now, this Radney, I suppose, was a little of a
coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous
apprehensiveness touching his own person as any
fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that
you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore
when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of
the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was
only on account of his being a part owner in her
(211).
Ishmael's direct addresses to the Dons, i.e. "gentlemen,"
always point out a difference between themselves and a
villain such as Radney, but the pattern of displacement in
"The Town-Ho's Story" invites us to speculate. Or is
Radney a dream representation of the Dons? Is Radney the
unmasked tyrant beneath the gentlemen? One might object
that the way Ishmael and the Dons address each other
signals a clear and substantial difference between the
Dons and such a brutal authority figure as Radney, but the
100
description of Ahab in "The Quarter-Deck" chapter makes
the link between authoritarian captains and gentlemen of
leisure; "Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin
gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk
at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal,
take a few turns in the garden" (140). Later in the novel
Ahab makes the link between possession and tyrannical
authority explicit; "But look ye, the only real owner of
anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is
in this ship's keel.— On deck!" (393). We can interpret
such passing comments as the missing links between the
seemingly benevolent world of gentlemanly leisure in "The
Paradise of Bachelors" and the Marxian vision of the
workers world in "The Tartarus of Maids." But this
uncomfortable link is never a matter of direct exposition:
as the dream may circumvent the censor through
displacement to reveal uncomfortable messages, "The Town-
Ho' s Story" presents an uncomfortable image of Owners to
the Dons, as does Mobv-Dick to its readers.
iv. America and its Political Unconscious
Mobv-Dick is brimming with ominous silences, but no
place is more marked by the Unsaid than "The Town-Ho's
Story." When Ishmael calls the story "the secret part of
the tragedy, I assume that "the tragedy" is the sinking of
the Pequod within the larger narrative of Mobv-Dick. but
101
the phrasing is most ambiguous, secretive even within its
revelations. In a brief summary of the story he is
about the recount, Ishmael states that it "seemed
obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous,
inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of
God which at times are said to overtake some men" (208).
"Seemed," "obscurely," and "so called" take away at lest
as much as this statement gives, and then we are left to
31
work out the sense of "inverted visitation."
Steelkilt's warning to Radney takes a verbal form to a
point, then, as though by a physical state change, it
sublimates into "an awful and unspeakable intimation with
his twisted hand" (213, emphasis added). When Steelkilt
is locked below the Captain "whispered something down the
crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them" (217).
Then there is the series of hisses Steelkilt issues in an
attempt to ward off the Captain and Radney's rope. One
might complain about the ease of Freudian or post-
^°William K. Spofford argues that, because the story
is ambiguous, critics should not be misled into deciding
which character represents good or evil. We might ask.
Ambiguous in comparison to what? While the chapter
promiscuously produces unanswerable questions, many
readers have acknowledged that it is melodramatic in
comparison to other chapters such as "The Whiteness of the
Whale" and "The Doubloon."
^^Early interpretations call this visitation the
Calvinist God (Sherman Paul) or parody thereof (Don
Geiger). Melville's ambiguous presentation of religious
themes destabilizes the boundaries between Religion,
.Politics.,_and_Ps.ychology_.------------------------------ -------
102
structuralist homologies— finding a "central" meaning in
every gap or absence— if it were not for the obsessive
pattern of unsayabilities in "The Town-Ho's Story".
Jameson in The Political Unconscious offers a theory
for reading such silences, and he argues better than most
gap-mongerers for the necessity of such an inquiry:
the literary structure, far from being completely
realized on any one of its levels tilts powerfully
into the underside of impensé or non-dit, in short,
into the very political unconscious, of the text,
such that the latter's semes— when reconstructed
according to this model of ideological closure—
themselves then insistently direct us to the
informing power of forces or contradictions which the
text seeks in vain wholly to control (Jameson, 1981,
49) .
The repressions in a text are very much a part of that
text and as worthy of our attention as plot, character,
setting, and genre. Even if Jameson's own critical method
depends for its glamour on certain very odd
repressions,^^ we should not hesitate to apply his
method, his attempt to "radically historiciz[e]" texts.
For example, Ishmael's six-inch "stoneless grave of
Bulkington" does not at all appear to be of ideological
import, but when we note the ideological pattern of
unsayability, the full sentence takes on a different ring;
"Wonderfullest things are ever unmentionable; deep
Jonathan Arac notes that the term "political
unconscious" "leads a strangely subdued existence
throughout the book" (263) and that Jameson's method of
historicizing texts represses more history than that of
Irving Howe. ______________________________ ________________
103
memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the
stoneless grave of Bulkington" (97). It is not enough to
conclude uncritically that Bulkington just drowns (Seelye,
62) .
Jameson draws heavily on Benjamin and Bloch's utopian
formulations in an effort to rescue the ideologically
repressed utopian content of literature in the modern era.
(As Irving Howe put it, God died in the nineteenth
century, utopia in the twentieth.) For Jameson,
The Utopian moment is indeed in one sense quite
impossible for us to imagine, except as the
unimaginable; thus a kind of allegorical structure is
built into the very forward movement of the Utopian
impulse itself, which always points to something
other, which can never reveal itself directly but
must always speak in figures, which always calls out
structurally for completion and exegesis (142).
I have been describing the democracy prayer and the
disguised presentation of the violence of self-liberation
in "The Town-Ho's Story" as pulsitive examples of such a
"Utopian impulse," and it could be said that Bulkington's
apotheosis and stoneless grave also stem from such an
urge. Most significant, and most overlooked, is that
Bulkington's sudden absence demands structural completion
of the sort Jameson recommends.
Jameson also draws heavily on Franco-Freudians
Althusser and Lacan, which complicates his model of the
text considerably. Why Lacan, rather than Freud?
Although Lacan always claimed his own method to be a
104
"return to Freud,a most important difference exist in
there attitudes toward the unconscious. Crudely put,
Freud emphasized the need to put the unconscious at rest,
to silence it or reclaim it, whereas Lacan sought ways for
the subject to identify with the work done by the
unconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud wrote
that the purpose of the analysis "is to make it possible
for the unconscious processes to be dealt with finally and
be forgotten." According to Freud, "psychotherapy can
pursue no other course than to bring the Ucs. under the
domination of the Pcs" (Freud, 617, original emphasis).
The Freudian approach, then, would justify the repressions
in Mobv-Dick as, let us say, necessary to a civilized art.
The discontented ones, the Steelkilts and Bulkingtons of
this world, might better be described in terms of
thanatos, the death urge. Steelkilt's suicidal attempt to
take over the Town-Ho could be described in such terms.
^^How can Lacan's disagreement with Freud be a return
to Freud? Lacan argues that we return to the early Freud,
and that the later Freud repressed the true nature of the
unconscious as revealed by Freud's earlier topographic
model of the mind. According to Lacan, his differences
from Freud should be understood with two factors in mind.
First, that Freud's repression of his earlier model of the
unconscious is consistent with Freud's understanding of
the pulsitive nature of the unconscious, of its inherent
need to disappear. Second, and more important, Lacan
argues that Freud would have described the subject, the
unconscious, and so one, in a vocabulary more like Lacan's
if Freud had had access to modern linguistic thought as
_pre sen ted_by_Saus sure.----------------------------------------
105
Lacan's descriptions of the unconscious do not
attempt to bring it under the "domination" of the
preconscious, and for that reason his formulations may be
more useful in approaching "The Town-Ho's Story". Lacan
writes that "The unconscious is that chapter of my history
that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it
is the censored chapter" (1977, 50). Or, to put it in
Ishmael's words, the unconscious is the secret part of our
tragedy. This unconscious certainly does "speak," but it
does so in figurative ways, and after its utterance, it
must return to its secret realm:
I have constantly stressed in my preceding statements
the pulsative function, as it were, of the
unconscious, the need to disappear that seems to be
in some sense inherent in it--everything that, for a
moment, appears in its slit seems to be destined, by
a sort of pre-emption, to close up again upon itself,
as Freud himself used this metaphor, to vanish, to
disappear (1978, 43).
Just as the utopian desires inherent in the democracy
prayer disappear beneath the "reality" of Ahab, "The Town-
Ho 's Story" silently slips away, perhaps beneath. The
"strange delicacy" of the Pequod's crew accounts for why
the story has no effect on the political developments on
the ship, but we must posit something like a political
unconscious to account for that strange delicacy.
It is not so simple to account for that which, by
definition, is not there. The man-on-the-street response
to the notion of an unconscious is "if it's not there, why
fix it?" Lacan's distinctions_steer_the_unconscious_out--
106
Of this problem: "what still becomes apparent to anyone
in analysis who spends some time observing what truly
belongs to the order of the unconscious, is that it is
neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized" (1978,
30). The theme of radical democracy, as it occasionally
stumbles into the text in spite of interruptions (the
Dons) or larger obstacles (Ahab), is "unrealized" in Mobv-
Dick, and it has the problematic ontological status which
Lacan assigned to the unconscious. The political
unconscious of a text, then, is that area which contains
its "unborn" themes : "That repression should discharge
something into this area is not surprising. it is the
abortionist's relation to limbo" (1978, 23). To say that
the repressed themes are not part of the text is like
saying that the abortion has no part of the life of the
woman or doctor.
Lacan's analogy, drawing on the Catholic Church's
descriptions of limbo, establishes the ethical status of
the unconscious (1978, 33). Whereas Freud justifies the
repression of the unconscious, Lacan describes this
repression in a manner more akin to a Marxist reading,
insofar as the repression is not reified. If we accept
limbo, at least as a metaphor, then the repressive
activities of the abortionist at least become suspicious.
In describing the unconscious as "the censored chapter of
my life," Lacan appeals to our general liberal desire (he
107
always had literary people in his seminars) to resist
censorship.
Resistance is possible since the repression mechanism
is rarely if ever absolutely efficient. The repression
agency and the unconscious it causes have often been
described in hydraulic terms, as in Françoise Meltzer's
essay "Unconscious": "Occasionally (like water exerting
pressure against a weak wall) some of this unconscious
energy will leak through the "repression barrier" and
thrust its way into consciousness" (Meltzer, 151).
Melville's novel is full of similar leaks; the Town-Ho and
Pequod, of course, both are leaky ships, but of more
concern is the concept of the leaky conscience: "I
greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and
will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery
pit. Captain Peleg" (73). When Starbuck calls the leak in
the hold of the Pequod to Ahab's attention, Ahab himself
leaks his real concerns, saying in a burst,
"I was not speaking or thinking of that [the leak in
the hold] at all. Begone I Let it leak I I'm all
aleak myself. Aye I leaks in leaks I not only full of
leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky
ship; and that's a far worse plight than the Pequod's
man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can
find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug
it, even if found, in this life's howling gale?"
(393).
As in "The Quarter-Deck," Ahab impulsively leaks his
intention to usurp the mission of the Pequod in order to
pursue his obsession with Moby Dick. His response to
108
Starbuck, a thorough displacement from the literal to the
metaphoric, opens up the metaphysical problems of the
unconscious as discussed above, but described in terms of
leaks, hulls, and casks. Ahab is obsessed with the
failure of boundaries, of containers.
Moby Dick is offensive to Ahab because the whale
crosses the boundary separating willful agency from the
impersonal realms of the inanimate and the instinctual.
In turning on its hunter, the whale profoundly disturbs
Ahab's sense of categories, and so Ahab totalizes his
world, turning all his own energies, the resources on
board the Pequod, and even the desires of the seamen
against the great, white whale. Though it would be a
simple-minded application to say that Ahab wants to
possess the phallus, to become the Great White Male, the
issue arises in a slightly less obvious way in "The Town-
Ho 's Story".
When Ishmael first mentions the name Moby Dick, he is
again interrupted by his audience : "'Moby Dick I' cried
Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic % Sir Sailor, but do whales
have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'" (221).
Like the captain of the Samuel Enderbv, Don Sebastian is
struck that a whale should cross the threshold into the
symbolic order in anthropomorphic terms. But the Don's
apparently trivial question "do whales have christenings"
is of some consequence. In his surprise the Don cries
109
"St. Dominic," from L. Dominus, or "master." St. Dominic
is the patron of the cathedral in Lima, which is
appropriate to the Spanish Dons, masters in that place.
It is as though Don Sebastian cries out to his saint of
domination at the mention of Moby Dick. There is no
'Saint Moby" or "Saint Dick" listed in my Saint's
Dictionary, but Dick is the colloquial of Richard, and St.
Richard of Chichester was noted for being
Merciless towards simony and nepotism, of simple
personal habits, generous in his charities, strict
with his clergy, and happy among the humbler people
of his flock; even before his troubles with the king
were resolved he had succeeded in holding synods to
legislate against abuses (Attwater, 297).
What better saint to represent radical democracy? "Moby,"
if you track it in the dictionary, resembles no particular
word more than "mobile" or "mob." Moby Dick stands out
from the mob of whales as Steelkilt or Bulkington do from
sailors, but Moby Dick is still a whale and Steelkilt a
sailor. The individual is the strongest member of the
group in each case.
These relations between Steelkilt and Moby Dick
manifest themselves in Ishmael's consciousness in a most
uncertain way. True enough, he does not appear to have
been radicalized by his experiences, and he confesses the
limits of his own understanding in pre-Freudian but
recognizably psychoanalytic terms :
What the White Whale was to them, or how to their
unconscious understandings, also, in some dim,
_____ unsuspected_way,_he_might_have_seemed_the_gliding----
110
great demon of the seas of life,— all this to
explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go.
The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can
one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever
shifting, muffled sound of his pick ? Who does not
feel the irresistible arm drag? For one, I gave
myself up to the abandonment of the time and the
place, but while yet all arush to encounter the
whale, could see naught in that brute but the
deadliest ill (162).
Ishmael's habitual ambiguous and suggestive phrasing
rather than explicit statement suggests that he has been
changed in some way by his experience, in that he saw the
whale as malevolent at "that time and the place." The
observations occur, however, in "The Whiteness of the
Whale," which is among Melville's most overtly and
explicitly ambiguous chapters. Mobv-Dick is not a
political Pilgrim's Progress, and it is wishful thinking
to read it as Ishmael's conversion narrative.
V. The Transference of Political Desire
Clearly Ishmael has not been turned into a Steelkilt,
so why bother to read Mobv-Dick with such close attention
to radical murmerings and almost-said political slogans?
What does such a manner of interpretation change?
In brief, such a way of reading, a manner in which we
resist the codes within a narrative that tell us when to
stop reading, makes available a repressed political
dimension in both the literary text and in "extra-literary
Ill
texts" such as political discourse.Sacvan Bercovitch
has characterized American romanticism as "The conflation
of the private with the national dream," (Bercovitch,
173), and this definition suggests that romanticism is a
coopted and compromised form of political discourse.
American romanticism as received by the general public may
well figure in such a way, but the way of reading
advocated by critics such as Jameson seeks a way around
such ideologically inscribed closure. American
romanticism, taken whole, has meant very much what
Bercovitch tells us it has meant, but in political terms
it could mean something very different.
It would be inane to "resist narrative codes" without
a compelling reason. If we resist the grammatical
ordering of a story in order to demonstrate the
ideological and political significance of supposedly
"common sense rules" or "natural laws," there is merely a
danger that we will drive badly. To drive on the right in
England or on the left in the United States will
successfully demonstrate that conventions are human
inventions, but only a lunatic will do this to make a
political statement. Running stop signs and driving
^^For a discussion of the interrelations of political
and literary rhetorical devices, see Folena: "Philology
separates literature from politics. It is certainly
important to overcome the separation by asserting that
literature is political; but it is also necessary to
stress that political discourse is literary, inasmuch as
,it_i s_a_form_of_cultural_representation2: L2 2 9J____________
112
carelessly are not defensible "political acts" if they are
done without any connection to genuinely political
consequences : ends that are ultimately in line with
communally defined justice are a minimal requirement for
extra-legal means. That is to say, we can distinguish
critical disobedience of the infantile sort from critical
civil disobedience.
In resisting the conventional ways of reading
American literature, one should at the very least be ready
to plead the necessity defense. Donald Pease has argued
persuasively that Melville's novel, as it has been
reflected by the mirror of Americanist criticism, is a
"Cold War" Mobv-Dick, and his writings on this subject
help us to see the ways in which sophisticated and
internally consistent literary criticism can have
ideological and political consequences that may even be
directly counter to the quotidian political beliefs of the
critic. The critical approach which accepts the tragic
higher purpose of Ahab and the approach in which the
totalitarian Ahab is seen as the effect of a cowardly mob
are, according to Pease, useful to the ultimately
conservative (anti-socialist, pro-military/industrial
complex) interests, and these interests are the chief
beneficiaries of the Cold War.
What are the consequences of not reading the book
against the grain? Milton R. Stern in "Melville, Society,
113
and Language" reads Mobv-Dick politically for what it has
to tell us about totalitarianism. Stern's Melville
teaches distrust of the masses in a way that may be
confluent with Cold War rhetoric from media of various
sorts : "as in all the books preceding Mobv-Dick, there
are indications that the masses are divided by cowardice
and selfishness and that the commonality is endlessly
manipulable" (Stern, 455). Stern's point is well taken as
far as it goes; this view of the crew could come from
Starbuck or from Ahab, but never Steelkilt or Bulkington.
Stern has not considered the ways in which these repressed
voices are still very much a part of the text, determining
(if we attempt to understand those eloquent silences) how
we are to understand Ahab.
Stern writes that "Most frightening in Melville's
political insight is that the totalitarian leader
expresses the subconscious will of the mass" (Stern, 465),
but this view of the mass, or, to use the more pejorative
term, the Mob, is ideologically inscribed, and reveals the
ways in which our critical language has been shaped by the
needs of the Spanish Dons, rather than the meanest
mariners. Stern is certainly aware that Bulkington's
story presupposes an entirely different point of view:
Mobv-Dick is Melville's hymn of praise to the
underprivileged masses who perform the labors on
which society depends....Bulkington, the pioneer hero
who cannot stand to be on land, braves the unknown
depths to provide life for the community. He is the
_____ darling of the crew. He is the ultimate_hero_of_the__
114
world of work, ever in the vanguard of the human
race'* (454).
Stern is fully aware that other points of view than those
of Ahab or the Spanish Dons are possible, but his reading
does not take into account the ways in which Mobv-Dick's
aesthetic oddities are charged with political significance
(Stern, 1969). Instead of seeing Steelkilt and Bulkington
as class-specific side show pieces, we should recognize
the degree to which their conspicuous absence shapes the
novel as a whole.
Like Ishmael, the book as a whole follows the path of
a "subterranean miner." The political unconscious, the
language and desires of the political Other that returns
in inverted form, resists the confines of our critical
language because it is, in the Lacanian sense. Real and
therefore more than a mirror-effect of our language. Moby
Dick "unspeakably" returns to Ahab, who sinks the ship
rather than accept his inability to dominate the Other
beyond his grasp.
The novel resonates for many readers as somehow
"political" less because it expresses wishes
characterizing the political novel and more because it
narrates the frustration of such active and overt wishes.
Like Ellison's Invisible Man. it is more a statement of
political impotence than a political action in support of
a cause. In this respect, we might want to call it a
_!lpr^p^li^ical_npyel,Ji_one_which_deals_imaginativ.ely_with_
115
the conditions of political action but which abstains from
taking those actions.
To illustrate this difference in political terms, I
would like to return to a quotation from Frank
Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change; "The 'active'
critical soul in America, from Emerson to Burke, joins
parties of one, because it is there, in America, that
critical power flourishes." This sentence is very
attractive to those people who would like to be involved
in politics but cannot stomach the unfortunate side of
political organization: the "party line," an
intensification of cajolery and deal-making, and, to echo
Henry Adams once more, the systematic organization of
hatreds. The problem with Lentricchia's "party of one"
solution is that he collapses "critical power" and
"political power" together as though they were the same.
This is not adequate. If politically concerned Americans
are going to settle for parties of one, for isolato
disgruntlement, they might as well say "Call me Ishmael."
116
Outside the Whale. Chapter 3
The Iron Heel and the Problem of the Pure Political Novel
"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales."
Goldsmith to Johnson,
The Macmillan Company published a pamphlet in 1905,
revised in 1910 and republished again as recently as 1972,
entitled "Jack London: His Life and Literary Work." This
pamphlet, which was certainly intended to increase
London's readership and to promote the sale of books
published by the Macmillan Company, presents London as the
man-of-action. Just after the title page there is a
picture of Jack London and his skipper in front of the
not-yet-completed Snark, the ship that Jack and Charmian
London planned to sail around the world. The first page
of text reinforces the image of Jack London as a kind of
superman, telling us that "The backing of sturdy ancestral
stock enabled young Jack early to prove his mastery over
environment," and that "He seems endowed with the force
that enables a man not only to prevent being pushed out of
his true self by untoward circumstances, but even to shape
them to his own ends" (Macmillan, 1910, 5). While the
sentence about London's "ancestral stock" also works to
legitimize London, the pamphlet as a whole was presumably
117
designed to bring in those would-be readers who feared
that bookishness marked one as effeminate.
Macmillan wanted London's readers to see him as the
sort of Real Man who could live out every dream, and
London is characterized throughout as a successful
competitive individualist. The pamphlet quotes London on
the joys of masculinity:
"To be a man was to write man in large capitals on my
heart. To adventure like a man, and do a man's work
(even for a boy's pay)— these were things that
reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other
thing could. And I looked ahead into long vistas of
a hazy and interminable future, in which, playing
what I conceived to be a man's game, I should
continue to travel with unfailing health, without
accidents, and with muscles ever vigorous. As I say,
this future was interminable. I could only see
myself raging through life without end like one of
Nietzsche's blond beasts, lustfully roving and
conquering by sheer superiority and strength...."
London's dream of Transcendent Masculinity also echoes the
Victorian dream of manhood expressed in lines penned by
William Ernest Henley in the year before London's birth:
It matters not how strait the gate.
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul. (125)
London's persona made good copy. Just as he was the
captain of his own soul, he was also captain of the Snark,
the boat he and his wife attempted to sail around the
world. He was celebrated in newspapers across the United
States for living the active life in a most public
118
fashion. London as a person and as a writer continues to
interest readers as a spectacle of pure masculinity.
The iibermensch persona strikes many of today's
readers as unreal or cartoonish. Perhaps it confuses
matters to read London's writing and his reputation side-
by-side as though they were both texts for our
interpretation. Assuming for the moment that we can
neatly divide the author's reputation from the reader's
literary experience, the approach to life exemplified by
London has been discredited for many readers because it
has been so strongly associated with "fallen" ideologies.
"Stalinism" is now short-hand for political brutality in
the name of a political ideal. Josef Stalin was the name
taken by a young editor of the newly formed publication
Pravda in 1913, and it means "man of steel": his
political identity was a fiction constructed from the sort
of super-man myths celebrated by Nietzsche and London
(Martin, 1989). Man-of-steel is not very far from
"Everhard," the name of London's quasi-Nietzschean hero in
The Iron Heel. The notion of strong blood coursing
through the body of the vigorous man was not unique to
London (these were the days of Teddy Roosevelt and the
Rough Riders), but these images and attitudes are tainted
in the latter twentieth century. We are more likely to
associate "conquering by sheer superiority of strength"
119
with Nazis than with those who would resist the Iron Heel.
London's novel will be regarded with particular
suspicion in the American academy because it is a direct
challenge to the disengagement of literary Modernism.
Modernists will dismiss The Iron Heel for its lack of
subtle nuance, or for expressing the idea that literature
should do something. Virginia Woolf had contempt for the
kind of book that made the reader feel obliged to write a
check for a political cause. About Finniaans Wake Samuel
Beckett is supposed to have exhorted, "It is not about
something; it is that thing itself." Political novels are
always about something, and so they will seem aggressive
and intrusive to those who insist on the mythical methods
o f Moderni sm.
The overtly political works of American Modernism
(Pound on Douglas, Dos Passos) are either ignored or are
discussed as embarrassments to the tradition.In part
this is because of the Modernist predisposition against
literature that is "pushy," that makes you want to do
something. Orwell, in "Why I Write," defines "political
purpose" as a "Desire to push the world in a certain
^^Recent writing on Ezra Pound discusses his anti
semitism and economic obsessions in relation to his belief
that the poet "purifies" the diction of the tribe, but for
the most part readers of The Cantos have emptied Pound's
literature of its politics. Dos Passos critical receives
lip service, but no publisher currently publishes U.S.A.
.a s__a _s ing 1 e_vo lume,._____ _____________________________________
120
direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of
society that they should strive after. Forster's
character Aziz asks why poetry has lost the power to make
men brave in Passage to India, and in part literary
history is to blame. We scholars tend to give the royal
jelly to Auden for writing "poetry does nothing" rather
than to Orwell for writing "The opinion that art should
have nothing to do with politics is itself a political
attitude." "Pushiness" of the sort characterizing
political literature is, in our culture, considered an
aspect of the masculine "genderlect," and this masculine
language remains an embarrassment in polite society
(Tannen, 1991). In the academic context, though certainly
not for the American readership as a whole, literary
machismo has been frowned out of the room.
To what degree do impediments to masculine
identification operate in the Age of Reagan? The
inhibition of masculinity I have been positing is
characteristic of literary contexts but not of political
contexts. The iibermensch mentality cannot be so
thoroughly out of fashion in a political era in which the
President of the United States, patterning himself on a
vigilante character from a B-movie, says "Read my lips,"
even if he later voiced hopes for a "kinder, gentler
nation." Literary people with great disdain for the
sound-bites of politicians tend to define their language
121
in opposition to that of such figures, but to settle for
disdain in this way is to respect the division of labor
between politics and culture. There a difference
between politics and literature, which is not to say that
we should always respect that difference.
A novel such as The Iron Heel disrespects the
boundary between politics and literature. Unlike the most
respected literature, it speaks in a simplified way to
inspire its political audience, but if it is also
literature it must be double-voiced in a way that allows
it to bridge the gap between politics and literature.
"The Political Novel as Übermensch" discusses the
aesthetic risks the novelist assumes when he or she
commits to writing a political novel.
In using masculine entitlement against the
totalitarian formation the Iron Heel, London inadvertently
created problems for contemporary readers, who are often
distrustful of any authority based on masculine
ideologies. The tendency today among those who study
unrepentedly masculine authors is to focus on androgyny or
to develop a macho author's feminine qualities (Spilka;
for an exception, see Schwenger). Literary scholars
interested in gender frequently distinguish between
masculinity and patriarchy (Boone and Cadden). I take up
these matters in the second section of this essay: "Humor
and Dual Perspective in The Iron Heel." London's
122
reputation as a purely masculine writer is somewhat belied
by the novel's text, which is both more rhetorically
complicated and more expressive of feminine viewpoints
than has often been considered. Instead of reading lips,
we must read between the lines.
We must look at individual strengths and weakness
when evaluating a political writer, but our sense of the
writer cannot rest alone on individual achievement. Since
political fiction differs from other fiction in that it
does something, something social rather than individual;
and since it is too much to ask of a novel that it succeed
in the world to be considered a successful piece of
literature; it is a matter of principal significance to
recognize the influence of the political novelist on his
or her particular literary traditions. "Jack London and
the Tradition of Political Fiction" discusses the ways in
which The Iron Heel influenced subsequent political
fictions. It is also telling to consider how later
writers change our reading of Jack London. In retrospect
we can see that The Iron Heel anticipates aesthetic
achievements in later novels such as Orwell's Nineteen
Eightv-Four and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and this
retrospective "improvement" of our enjoyment of London
marks the degree to which he has put a dent in the
interpretive conventions that hinder the futures of
political fiction.
123
i. The Political Novel as Übeimensch
Aryan purity and masculine bluntness are not the
whole truth of Jack London, but there is no denying that
The Iron Heel is notable for its "vigorous" and "forceful"
expression of the socialist point of view. Even London's
most hostile reviewers granted him his "virile" style
while condemning his ideas as sociological nonsense. As
London was reputed to be a "straight from the shoulder"
writer and an ultimately masculine man, his most famous
piece of political writing is also remembered for the
directness of its attack on capitalist society and its
belief that, ultimately, our political salvation rests in
the hands of those super-men (and super-women) who will be
able to go underground, survive the Iron Heel's
oppression, and ultimately prevail. London's 1908
dystopian novel The Iron Heel tells the story of a
proletarian group that struggles against an oppressive
oligarchy but fails because the rebellion is premature.
There are several ways to interpret the novel's concern
with prematurity, and The Iron Heel is most interesting as
a political novel if we read it as a book about the
"timing" of resistance.
The novel has two temporal settings : the narrative
of Avis Everhard covers the first decades of the twentieth
century and is dated 1932, whereas Anthony Meredith's
introduction and historical notes are set in the fourth
124
century after the "Brotherhood of Man" has been achieved,
some seven centuries after the events described by Avis
Everhard have occurred. In part London used chronology to
distinguish his political vision from that of rival
political novelists. Other writers might have been
regarded as similar either because they shared political
beliefs with London (such as radical socialism) or because
they were also known as naturalistic or realistic authors.
By pushing the imaginary achievement of socialist utopia
forward several centuries, London offers a vision of
political change that is hard-edged and "realistic" in
comparison to that of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking
Backward envisages utopia within the decades of the next
century. London's vision is realistic in comparison to
that of gleam-in-the-eye socialists who believed progress
would march without interruption toward its utopian goal—
but it is phantasmagoric compared to Hamlin Garland's
merciless view in "Under the Lion's Paw" (1889) of the
farmer's plight. Garland, Bellamy and London each wrote
to express socialist ideas that many readers would have
described as radical, and yet each responded with
radically different visions of social change. London's
manipulation of chronology in The Iron Heel thus gives his
collectivist vision its individuality, and this
individuality is distinctly masculine (meaning, in Western
cultural terms, active instead of passive). Bellamy's
125
utopian dream-vision offers a providential view of the
future; Garland's story documents a stoic acceptance of
oppression; but London's novel counsels direct action
against the oppressor. Call him Bulkington.
In addition to giving The Iron Heel its own identity
among competing fictions, London's attention to
prematurity also expresses a sophisticated understanding
of his own political significance. In dramatizing the
premature revolt of the Chicago Commune, London wryly
supports the political activity of his own day (muckraking
writers, unionizing workers), but acknowledges at the same
time that the political struggle for human equality was
something that could be achieved in centuries, not in
decades. While the novel seems to be absolutely for the
revolution (Jack London signed many of his letters "Yours
for the Revolution), a careful look at the novel's form
reveals its double-mindedness. London was torn between
his enthusiasm for the Revolution and his sense that
things were going to get a lot worse before they got any
better.
The book is often discussed as if it were a placard
at an anarchist rally or a bumper sticker ("I'D RATHER
BE...SMASHING THE STATE !"), but London was actually
offering a complex message. Between the title page and
the table of contents, London enclosed this epigraph,
taken from Tennyson, to disclose before all else his
126
belief that we must hold out for the widest perspective
possible:
"At first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe
You almost sicken at the shifting of the scenes.
And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show
In some fifth act what this Wild Drama means.
London's imaginary historian Anthony Meredith writes, in a
foreword to Avis Everhard's account, that "events, and the
bearings of events, that were confused and veiled to her,
are clear to us. She lacked perspective" (1908, ix).^^
Along with the title and author's name, the cover of
the first edition pictures a half-dozen hands reaching for
a bright, shining sun. A similar image adorns the spine.
It is impossible to say whether the hands express yearning
for an ending or a beginning, but the brightness of the
sun and the first pages of the novel direct us more toward
"origins." In contrast with Anthony Meredith, who
introduces the novel with the question of the Everhards's
fate. Avis Everhard begins her part of the narrative with
This epigraph is included in the first edition and
in the Library of America edition, but it has been left
out of many editions (Arcadia, Sonoma, Lawrence Hill).
Better poetry has been written since these four lines, but
their essential message, that we do well to hold out for a
comic perspective despite the pain of immediate events, is
worth attending. Tennyson's quatrain, presented to us
before the title page or the first instance of the dual
perspective in The Iron Heel, instructs readers in the
essentially comic perspective that we should take in
regards not only to The Iron Heel, but also towards "the
Revolution."
Unless there is other indication, all references
are to the first edition, copyright 1907 and published in
1908.__________________________________________________________
127
attention to the present and immediate future. In
dividing our interpretation of social change into separate
streams of Memory and Desire, The Iron Heel is more
complex than it is often thought to be.
This is not a surprising fate for a political novel.
It is commonly considered that political novels are simple
grub, whereas artistic novels are complex, rich, subtle,
and full-bodied as the finest wines available to humanity.
By such lights the political novel should, like a bumper
sticker or a sound-bite, express commitment without
complexity. Or it should express propositions that may be
verified, or predictions that may turn out to be true or
untrue. This conception of the political novel is not
unsatisfactory merely because it would tend to flatten the
book in artistic terms, it is equally unsatisfactory as a
description of political discourse. Sheldon Wolin in
Politics and Vision berates the notion that political
philosophy is propositional rather than fanciful:
"fanciful statements are not of the same status as
propositions that seek to prove or disprove. Fancy
neither proves nor disproves; it seeks, instead, to
illuminate, to help us become wiser about political
things" (19). Like Wolin's idea of political discourse,
the political novel must be "fanciful." It must be
interesting. Despite the occasional moments of cynical
humor in the footnotes, London was aware of the danger of
128
dramatic failure and cautioned himself accordingly in his
preparatory notes:
What scenes are given, let them be striking, to
make up for absence of regular novel features— make
striking:
The bishops break
Congress
Chicago Commune
etc. etc.
London placed the fall of the Chicago Commune near the end
of The Iron Heel to give the novel a sense of dramatic
closure. His primary concern was to express his message
strongly, which need not and did not rule out artistic
complexity.
The Iron Heel is certainly fanciful, given London's
elaborations on the "found manuscript" trope and the
phantasmagoric style of the latter chapters. Reviewers
friendly to the book's socialist message found the book to
be imaginative in a positive sense, whereas political
opponents of the novel suggested that its absurd political
extrapolations yielded much unintentional comedy for the
snickering reader. In that very few newspaper
^®This comment from the Advertiser, Boston MA, Mar 5
1908, is typical: "This latest effort of Jack London is
bally nonsense. Why a talented writer of fiction persists
in writing silly misinterpretations of socialism is one of
the things ... no man can understand."
London hired a newspaper clipping service to collect
all reviews of his books, which were then pasted into
London's scrapbooks. These scrapbooks are in the
Huntington Library in San Marino, California. My
quotations and summaries of reviews and advertisements are
drawn from a microfilm copy of these scrapbooks (JL 917)
in the Huntington Library. The names of the newspapers
_and_the_dates_are_sometimes_legible,_sometimes_not ,_but---
129
reviewers assumed London's novel could be ignored, his
fanciful approach to American politics provided "interest"
for readers of various stripe.
Many of the dialogues in the novel directly criticize
the dominant political powers of London's own age, and
this topical attack is the way in which most readers
recognize the novel as being in some sense political. In
the months after the novel's publication, there were
constant rumors that the socialists would run Jack London
for President of the United States, as evidenced by the
speculations on the matter that kept showing up in the
newspapers alongside reviews of the novel. Teddy
Roosevelt, perhaps made anxious by London's celebrity,
even attacked his reputation as a nature writer, calling
him a "nature faker." The Iron Heel was thus not only
political in a thematic sense; it was useful as political
propaganda, and it was regarded as a threat by established
politicians. Quite a few reviews expressed alarm at the
books incendiary potential, since London depicts terrorist
resistance to the oligarchy in a positive manner.
The Iron Heel is also called a political novel
because it has continued to speak to successive
generations of politically engaged readers as "prophecy."
That is, the novel is re-interpreted from time to time as
all 150 or so reviews were published between early
Februarv and early May of 1908._____________________
130
responding to moments in American political history that
occurred after the novel's composition, rather than as a
fanciful representation of America in the first decade of
this century. Because it speaks equally well to the
moment of its composition and the moment(s) of its
reception, there is little controversy about The Iron Heel
as a political novel. Unlike political novels that become
dated when their political topics lose currency, London's
novel creates a consensus of sorts among readers from
different periods of literary and political history: it
organizes readers. If we wanted an example of a pure
political novel, we could hardly do better than The Iron
Heel.
The novel's "purity" is its blessing and its curse.
The virtue of this purity is that it gives us a standard
against which to measure other would-be political novels.
Somewhat rudely, the novel kicks the fence and shakes up
those books that might be a political novel, depending on
our literary and political values. Dr. Johnson (the
kicker of stones) insisted that all thought is
comparative, and very few American novels are political
novels in the variety of ways in which London's novel is a
political novel. A number of sufficient conditions
convene between the covers of London's book, and so the
book offers a certain hope : it is tempting to call the
book a touchstone, or to think that, in kicking the fence.
131
London makes clear and permanent distinctions between the
political and the non-political novel. The novel
certainly does kick the fence and shake up the fence-
sitters, but it does not follow that the novels then fall
neatly into categories. It is recognizable as a political
novel only because of its aggressive stance viz à viz the
political status quo, but the line between those novels
that are politically active and those that are politically
passive is necessarily vague.
Though authors who challenge the status quo can
always cry "dollars damn me," as Melville did in a letter
to Hawthorne, authors in some eras are more damned than
others. However valid Melville's complaints were in 1850,
the fact remains that other authors have written overtly
39
This is true of all terms in a living language, and
so attempts to distinguish clearly the set of political
novels from the set of non-political novels can only
result in a procrustean definition (Alston, 84-106). It
is interesting to note that, in providing a concrete
example of the utility and necessity of vagueness in
certain social contexts, Alston delineates a political
scenario: "There are contexts in which we are much better
off using a term that is vague in a certain respect than
using terms that lack this kind of vagueness. One such
context is diplomacy. Suppose the American ambassador to
the U.S.S.R. is instructed to say 'My government will
strongly oppose any interference in the internal affairs
of Hungary.' This is vague because of the vagueness of
the adverb "strongly." Just what constitutes strong
opposition? Simply expressing disapproval in a press
conference would clearly not be strong opposition, and
declaring war clearly would be. But where is between is
the line to be drawn? Is pressing for a UN resolution
strong opposition? How about an economic embargo?....The
interesting fact is that there would be grave
disadvantages in removing this vagueness....We need vague
terms for situations like_this_._ü _(Alsjton,_85j=L86_._)_________
132
political novels in the United States, and some of these
novels have succeeded in various ways despite the absence
of a critical fraternity to welcome them into existence.
Whereas Moby-Dick is a book whose political activism has
I '
j been repressed into the dream-world of the novel. The Iron
I
I Heel is the political novel in the heroic mode. However
j much London has been censured by belle lettristic critics
for being an unabashedly commercial writer, he did not let
dollars damn him. The Iron Heel has more of a "damn the
torpedoes" approach to the problem of marketplace
censorship.
Joan R. Sherman writes in her pages on London's
critical reputation that "A majority of Beacon and Main
Street critics found The Iron Heel unimaginative
literature and unconvincing Socialism. It was called a
pessimistic bore that would put an anarchist to sleep, or
a dangerous tract to be condemned for fomenting social
dissension" (xi). Sherman accedes to London's own
exaggerated view of the novel's reception. While the
belle lettristic reviewers tended to read as Sherman
suggests, the Main Street reviewers (middle brow journals
and newspapers rather than purely literary journals) were
comparatively more receptive. Even London's ideological
antagonist often complimented his craftsmanship. The Wall
Street Journal (19 March 1908) contains some of the most
sophisticated criticisms of London's novel, and this
133
review is paradigmatic of the most sophisticated attacks
against political fiction written in our own day.
Clearly, The Wall Street Journal is going to be opposed to
London on ideological grounds, but they do not rest their
case on "bad writing." As one of the best reviews of the
novel, it is worth quoting in full:
There can be no doubt that some time a great
novel will be written, founded upon the economic
struggle which is now in progress in the United
States. The times in which we live have a dramatic
quality; they are even tragic in some of their
aspects. Not since the Civil War has there been a
period in American history so full of thrilling
interest as these days in which we now live. The
novelist of the future, therefore, cannot fail to
turn to these days as to a mine of dramatic scenes.
Jack London, however, has not written the great
novel of this social revolution through which we are
passing. He is an exceedingly clever and interesting
writer, and perhaps it is not his fault that he fails
in this book to write in a convincing way of the
economic significance of the times. He is too close
to the events to have the perspective necessary for
adequate treatment' Moreover, 'the Iron Heel' is, in
reality, much less a novel than a presentation of the
radical socialist view. It is an argument, rather
than a story, although it possesses dramatic
interest.
Jack London, like other socialistic writers,
seems to think that an indictment of the present
social system is a sufficient reason for
revolutionizing that system. He is mistaken. The
advocates of socialism must not only show the abuses
of individualism, but they must also present
convincing proof that the substitution of socialism
would be an adequate remedy. This Mr. London has not
been able to do. (London, notebooks)
The writer who chooses to represent political themes is
"too close" to events to have the detachment needed for
great art. The idea that art should be detached, and thus
apolitical, is the assumed interpretive convention that
134
will bring down even the radical fiction of a great
• ^ 40
writer.
Writing during the Progressive Era of American
politics, London also recognized that he had more
opportunity to express politically dissident themes than
' had previous authors. His novel was composed at a time
I when socialism was growing in the United States, and
socialist newspapers such as Wilshire's MonthIv and Appeal
to Reason gave his book considerable support. By virtue
of the novel's wide reception (it was reviewed in over one
hundred and fifty newspapers across the United States),
and its continuous position in American critical memory,
we can say that it has been possible to write political
novels of the most direct sort. Unlike those who told all
the Truth but told it slant, London fashioned a novel of
pure opposition to capitalist culture as he understood it.
! Steven Mailloux argues that "literary texts and
! their meanings are never prior to the employment of
interpretive conventions; they are always its results.
' Texts do not cause interpretations, interpretations
I constitute texts" (197). Relying as I am on Mailloux's
; lucid exposition of the importance of interpretive
j conventions, it may seem ungracious to quibble— but I
I believe that the reader must read as if the text were an
' ideal or otherwise immutable substance in order to come to
I his or her convention-dependent interpretation
(Vaihinger). Mailloux's brilliant discussion of various
responses to The Red Badge of Courage does not acknowledge
that most of the literary critics consider a text of the
novel. It would be hard to imagine anyone finishing an
article or book on the meaning of Crane's novel without at
least the illusion of an established copy-text (though
textual chaos is more productive for meta-critical
discussion^),._______ __________________________________________
135
While it is necessary for the political novelist to foster
"opposition" amongst readers, the dream of "pure
opposition" is the greatest political obstacle of the
American intellectual tradition (Lentricchia, 4)
Far less sensitive to audience resistance than
Melville's novel. The Iron Heel exemplifies the direct and
active approach to political dissentIf we conceive
of the novel as an expression of the desire for radical
democracy Melville found to be taboo, then we read a tale
told by Bulkington or Steelkilt rather than by Ishmael.
As a work of art The Iron Heel is direct and propositional
compared to Mobv-Dick, a novel characterized by narrative
indirection and sublimity; it is the opposite of Ishmael's
"boggy, soggy, squitchy picture."
, ^^Frank Lentricchia weighs the strengths and
! weaknesses of American individualism for American
' (Pragmatist) social theory in Criticism and Social Change.
' About the notion that education can Stand in pure
; opposition to society, Lentricchia writes, "Pragmatism's
I mostly uncritical celebration of the uncontextualized
individual is another expression of a deeply ingrained
tradition of antinomian American individualism, which
returns here to haunt pragmatism's nascent social theory"
(4). Lentricchia's discussion of American social
philosophy delineates the social and intellectual
consequences of American Adamicism. The intellectual
dream of pure opposition is the direct analogue of the
mythic dream of "the simple genuine self against the whole
world."
^^Though I have been treating Melville and London as
opposites in regards to the political novel, this is
certainly not the best way to compare them as writers.
For a discussion that emphasizes the continuities between
their lives and writing careers, see_Bender.________________
136
As Melville matches depth of character and
metaphysical themes with narrative indirection, London
expresses "pure opposition" through his creation of
characters and in his deployment of theme, as well as
through the "straight from the shoulder" speeches of
Ernest Everhard. On the rhetorical and thematic levels,
the novel's running diatribe against the capitalist system
never finds fault in those elements that resist the
business conglomerates who form the Iron Heel. London
even idealizes "The Terrorists," and honors them with
their own chapter. The dream of pure opposition is also
expressed in the creation of character (Ernest Everhard is
consistent to a fault), and the novel is dramatically
organized to develop his agon without benefit of hubris.
The pseudo-dialectical engagements between Ernest Everhard
and the block-headed bourgeoisie are pure shadow-boxing,
and we all know enough not to bet on the shadows.
These are the harshest criticisms we can make, at
least if we are going to criticize the novel London wrote
rather than the reputation he achieved in life and after.
I It is better to recognize the faults of the writing and
get on to its merits than to pretend the book is better
than it really is because we may identify with the
political work it does. Unlike the melodramatic
approaches to theme and character, narrative and style are
divided structurally and stylistically, as we shall see
137
when we look at London's use of humor and dual
perspective. When we interpret the novel with these
conventions in mind, the text is much improved.
ii. Humor and Dual Perspective in The Iron Heel
Rugged, pushy, macho— these are the qualities most
often attached to the name "Jack London" and to the title
The Iron Heel. Atavistic. Nietzschian. We do not value
him for trenchant ambiguity as we do Herman Melville.
London styled himself in this way, and Macmillan found
they could sell the books of such a man, but these
stereotypical invocations are as poor a surrogate for the
historical Jack London as they are for the actual books he
wrote. In the court of reputation he is guilty by
association, but in the hallowed halls of interpretation,
where we actually read the books, there is insufficient
evidence to obtain a conviction, even if there is too much
evidence to drop the case.
In any event, London felt he was caught between the
Left and the Right. He may have been thinking of the
rigidly socialist response to literature in general when
he complained about the hostile reception his novel met
from most critics on the Left. In a letter he wrote to
"Comrade Harris" (not Frank Harris) on 26 October 1914,
London thanked the good comrade for his appreciation of
The Iron Heel and complained that it "won me practically
138
nothing but abuse from the opportunistic socialists."
Apparently Harris requested a sequel of sorts, since
London went on to write the following:
There's no use in suggesting my writing another
book of that sort. It was a labor of love, and a dead
failure as a book. The book-buying public would have
nothing to do with it, and I got nothing but knocks
from the socialists."
As a look through London's own scrapbooks will show,
London's best reviews were from socialist publications
such as Appeal to Reason and Wilshire's Monthlv. These
last two seem to have gotten into something of a bidding
war in their efforts to distribute London's sacred text,
dropping the price from $1.50 to $1.20, and then finally
to $1.08. The penny-wise socialist could get The Iron
Heel and Sinclair's The Metropolis postage paid "for a
two-dollar bill." The letter to Comrade Harris tells us
more about London's anxieties as a commercial artist than
it does about his reception among socialists. It is true
that the Macmillan Company did not emphasize The Iron Heel
in the 1910 version of "Jack London: His Life and
Writings," but the novel received mixed reviews in over
150 American newspapers and magazines, it has gone through
a good number of editions, and it is in print to this day.
At any rate, London's political novel was not received
nearly as kindly as was his nature writing. The
practicing novelist knows or ought to know that he or she
139
risks just this sort of criticism by writing an overtly
political novel.
The reviews from the Right sometimes picture London
as the deranged anarchist with a bomb in hand, smiling
madly as the fuse burns down, but more often they would
have us see London as a man who has intellectually gotten
himself in over his head. This London is a sincere
craftsman as a writer, but always a "man's man," and thus
less likely to be very clear-headed about economics and
politics. London is, as we have seen, partially
responsible for this public image. We must not reduce him
to a caricature of himself, just because he was partially
responsible for the opinion that he was without delicacy
and without humor. London styled himself as a superman,
and the Macmillan Company found it a useful way to market
his books. The cartoon version of London was not the
invention of some malignant reviewer, nor can we rescue
The Iron Heel by asserting that its faults merely result
from antagonistic ideological interpretive conventions.
The cartoon version of London as a political novelist (the
Nietzschian individualist with ideas of personal and
racial superiority; the author hypnotized by the
dictator's power) draws him as an Ahab but never as an
Ishmael. The novel has stylistic and structural checks
and balances, although this is hardly ever acknowledged.
140
Though it is the sort of political novel that
sometimes preaches to the choir. The Iron Heel is not a
witless book. It has its comical-Ishmaelian side. London
was by no means primarily a humorist (that certainly was
not his reputation), and he referred to his 1908 dystopian
fantasy as "propaganda." His admirers in the socialist
monthly Wilshire's Magazine did not think less of the
novel for this reason, but for literary critics
"propaganda" is usually an entirely pejorative word, often
designating the degraded form of art that follows from the
failure to separate artistic from political commitments.
We come to know the political novelist as a writer who is
humorless and single-minded. These qualities are
automatically attached to the ghost-author floating above
the pages of "the political novel" or "the proletarian
novel."
The writer who gains a reputation as a political
novelist endures diminished hopes that other gifts will be
recognized. To write an overtly political novel is to
fight City Hall, and to fight City Hall is to endure a
curse. The idea that the political novel is a pedantic,
dogmatic, and otherwise oppressive kind of literature has
received abundant support from strike novels and so forth,
but it is also the case that reviewers identifying with
political structures under attack will often dismiss the
political novelist as nay-sayer. Reviews of The Iron Heel
141
published from London's scrapbooks show how hostile
critics chastised London as an "Ishmaelite": the reviewer
from the Morning News (Dallas, 6 April 1908) complained
that "That talented Ishmaelite, Jack London, has again
turned his attention to those social conditions against
which his hand has ever been raised in protest." The
review for The Banner (Nashville, 29 February 1908) agreed
wholeheartedly: "Jack London's latest book is in the main
a Socialist tract, with only enough of narrative and
romance to give it the semblance of a novel.... The fact
about Jack is that he is more Ishmaelite than Socialist.
If he should be born again in the supposed advanced era
419 B.O.M., he will be against the established order...."
These two reviews are typical of those that dismissed
London's ideas by equating radicalism with neurosis.
The writer who is aware that he or she will be
dismissed as an Ishmaelite, a nay-sayer, a neurotic, or a
humorless fanatic may attempt to circumvent the prejudice
against political engagement by demonstrating a sense of
humor. I shall discuss three kinds of humor available to
Josephine Herbst to Alfred Kazin: "I don't know
for whom I am doing this piece [a review of a book about
the International Brigades]; perhaps for the young people
who protest at California Univ. and elsewhere, or for
those who go to Selma and Mississippi. The sane can even
call them neurotics for all I care; it's what the big
athletic lugs at the Univ. of Gal. in my day called me,
throwing an arm affectionately around my shoulders and
saying, 'Now Jo, don't get neurotic.' And I thought, if
this is being neurotic, then let me go where there are
other neurotics." ______
142
readers of London's novel: unintentional, topical, and
structural. These kinds of humor, best approached in
order of increasing significance, are not separated neatly
from each other in London's text, but their purposes will
be clarified if we sequester them temporarily before
giving them a reunion.
If we read Avis Everhard's plea that the revolution
come at the right time "Oh, that it may not be premature 1"
as though we were reading Ladv ChatterIv's Lover or the
Molly Bloom chapter of Ulysses, we are bound to
misunderstand the contrast between Avis Everhard's
narrative and Anthony Meredith's footnotes. While support
for the double-entendre can be found in the name
"Everhard" and in Ernest Everhard's hyper-masculinity, the
reading requires that we sacrifice most of the thematic
and tonal patterns through which London constructs his
work. Worst of all, an interpretation of "The Ironic
Heel" dissipates all that London has achieved for the
political novel as a genre. What is interesting is that
readers today find a kind of unintentional humor in the
novel wholly different from the unintentional humor found
by London's contemporary reviews. Unintentional humor,
whatever its Freudian significance, is also a strategy of
readerly resistance, and it is interesting to note that
London's 1908 reviewers could resist the text and still
acknowledge its political ideas, whereas the kind of
143
readerly resistance we would expect today completely
ignores political ideas.
Not all of London's reader's snickered, permitting us
to proceed to the question. Would London's first readers
have described the novel as "prophetic" of horrors to
come, or would they have recognized it as a representation
of their own historical period, albeit artistically
refracted? Since today's readers are overwhelmingly of
the "prophecy" school, we must pause to ask whether or not
our own way of categorizing the book would have been
familiar or strange to readers from this century's first
decade. One 1908 reviewer found the "prophecy" and "found
manuscript" conventions— which have been used in novels as
recent as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or even
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale— to be
" hackneyed. "
The bias toward reading dystopian literature as
political prophecy distracts us from the author's
political satire : The Iron Heel— whatever it predicts —
While the most hostile reviewers attempted, in The
Iron Heel as in Before Adam, to catch Jack London at
plagiarism, one or two were able to recognize that London
was working within (rather than inventing, whole-cloth) a
literary tradition. See for excimple the San Francisco
Chronicle review from March 1908: "Jack London has
developed his Socialist ideas and gratified his hatred of
the capitalist class in his new story, 'The Iron Heel,'
which is brought out by The Macmillan Company. London
refers in this book in very complimentary terms to H. G.
Wells, and the framework of his story owes much to several
of Well's romances of the future, notably 'When the
Sleeper Wakes . ' "______________________________________________
144
also mixes topical humor (such as the dated humor of
intra-state rivalries) with political satire (in both
Ernest Everhard's polemical thrusts and in the deadpan
footnotes). When Ernest Everhard insists to the Missouri-
like philomaths that he is like the man from Texas ^
"You've got to put it in my hand,-" his humor^ expressing
as it does Everhard's tough skepticism and absolute
materialismy could be taken understood as expressing
socialist attitudes. It would be less ponderous to say
that the Missouri/Texas joke only works if we recognize
that Ernest Everhard can be characterized by exaggeration,
pride in place, regional competitiveness, and similar
trademarks of the American tall-tale hero. The humor can
be politicized, but in this case it would be better to
note that London blends American humor of the most routine
sort with distinctively socialist humor.
The fall of the Chicago Commune at the novel's
conclusion is perhaps the most apocalyptic scene available
to readers of the political novel.It too contains
^It also initiates the twentieth century tradition
of apocalyptic fiction. See Blotner. Though London draws
heavily from nineteenth century dystopias such as Ignatius
Donnelly's Caesar's Column, he had less patience with the
rosy future of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Many
critics describe Bellamy as an influence on The Iron Heel
without acknowledging that London's own novel, like
Donnelly's Caesar's Column, offers a critical revision of
Bellamy's optimistic future. There is no copy of Looking
Backward in London's book collection at the Huntington
Library. For an overview of London's political and
literary influences, see Johnston,_120_and_14On .,50-.________
145
moments of topical humor, in part as comic relief from the
suppression of the revolt. Here is a socialist joke on
the brutality of industrialized life, recapitulated for
the reader in the form of an Anthony Meredith footnote
early in the "Chicago Commune" chapter:
Chicago was the industrial inferno of the nineteenth
century A.D. A curious anecdote has come down to us
of John Burns, a great English labour leader and one
time member of the British Cabinet. In Chicago,
while on a visit to the United States, he was asked
by a newspaper reporter for his opinion of that city.
'Chicago,' he answered, 'is a pocket edition of
hell.' Some time later as he was going aboard his
steamer to sail to England, he was approached by
another reporter, who wanted to know if he had
changed his opinion of Chicago. 'Yes, I have,' was
his reply. 'My present opinion is that hell is a
pocket edition of Chicago.'
In this quotation the relationship between familiar humor
and politically pointed humor is somewhat closer. Through
such humor London undermines any suggestion that political
shrewdness and the enjoyments of ordinary people are
worlds apart.
Whether or not the Burns anecdote was common
knowledge among London's readers, we know he was fond of
the anecdote since it also appears in his review of Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle (Foner, 517-24). The lengthy
footnote is, in fact, lifted almost verbatim from the
beginning of the 1906 review. London also uses the same
epigraph, the Tennyson quatrain which begins "At first.
146
this Earth," for both the book review and his own
novel. These correspondences, as well as London's
enthusiastic response to The Jungle, indicate that London
had the Chicago of his own era very much in mind as he was
writing The Iron Heel. London's comments on Sinclair's
novel are prophetic of the book he would soon publish:
[Sinclair] selected the greatest industrial city in
the country, the one city of the country that is
ripest industrially, that is the most perfect
specimen of jungle-civilization to be found. One
cannot question the wisdom of the author's choice,
for Chicago certainly is industrialism incarnate, the
storm-center of the conflict between capital and
labor, a city of street battles and blood.... (517)
It is uncertain whether the review was a thumbnail sketch
of The Iron Heel's Chicago chapters, or whether a draft of
his own novel was this far along when he sat down to
praise Upton Sinclair's. What is unmistakable is the
degree to which London wished to turn his reader's
attention to the brutal effects of industrialization in
this century's first decade. We are certain of this after
considering London's reviews and manuscript jottings, but
the John Burns joke also invites such an interpretation.
Whatever London's contemporary reviewers felt, most
of today's readers are disinclined to recognize the
Muckraker aspect of The Iron Heel, which is especially odd
since the Muckrakers are so irritating to the Oligarchs of
^^In neither place does London attribute the lines to
Tennyson, though he does in the manuscript of the review
- (London -Col lection,—Huntington _ Library-)- -------------------
147
the Iron Heel. For exaimple, H. Bruce Franklin's
introduction to a 1980 edition of the book (an edition
picturing an iron heel crushing the face of the deposed
Chilean socialist Allende) credits London with tremendous
foresight (London, 1980, i-vi). This view, when presented
without provisions for artistic modification, can lead us
away from, rather than toward, the political actualities
London struggled to represent. Here is Franklin on the
book's foresight:
London foresees: the creation of attractive
suburbs for relatively privileged strata of the
working class while the central cities are turned
into what he calls "ghettoes" for the masses of
unemployed and menial laborers, shoved into the
darkest depths of human misery; the deliberate
economic subversion of public education in order to
spread illiteracy and ignorance; adequate food,
health care, and housing priced above the reach of
more and more people.... (iii)
It is true that The Iron Heel> if it continues to work as
a political novel, brings us to study the consequences of
social and political structures on our present lives.
But, if we respect London's artistry and meaning, it will
also return us to the world of 1908 and furnish our minds
with the elements that made that world seem real to its
first readers. Although politically engaged critics have
occasionally been sympathetic with London's intentions and
pleased with his achievement, they are bound to be at odds
with his political vision when they refuse to recognize
the topical political humor running through The Iron Heel.
148
Franklin gestures toward the past when argues that
London was able to create such a stunning vision because
of his own biographical particulars: "How did London come
to such a stunning vision of the future? the answer, I
believe, lies in his own contradictory experience within
different social classes." While he has very little to
say about how this varied experience bears on The Iron
Heel as a particular work of art, his interpretation of
the novel as one written in the prophetic mode
occasionally turns in the direction of close reading, and
these turns are far and away more valuable to a discussion
on the particular book than are the connect-the-dot
comparisons between London's 1908 novel and all subsequent
injustice in the twentieth century:
The novel is of course a warning to London's American
socialist comrades that their strategy of relying
entirely on the ballot box to defeat the capitalists
is a treacherous illusion. But the Everhard style of
roaring supermasculine confrontation with the
capitalists proves to be equally dangerous. As the
Iron Heel consolidates its power, the revolutionaries
are forced to rely on the intricate underground
apparatus developed by the aptly name [sic] Avis
("bird") Everhard, nee Cunningham (v).
Professor Franklin reads insightfully (and, to take the
point of view of new readers, helpfully) when he reminds
us that Avis is the name of a bird and that in a
revolutionary vision and cunning (nee Cunningham) are
required at least as much as strength. London's novel
counsels that the revolution will require both masculine
and feminine talents, however London understood,these
149
talents to be divided. There is very little in this
interpretation with which one is moved to disagree, except
perhaps with the radical earnestness that remains even
after Franklin has so aptly drawn our attention to the
role of Avis Everhard. The ironies and qualifications
have been left out.
Readers in the literary era after James Joyce are
pleased more than anything else by a broad philosophical
irony, and so it is that writers of political novels after
the triumph of European Modernism have imitated the humor
structured by the novel's dual perspective. The modern
political novel, and to a large extent the postmodern
political novel, develop from the dual perspective of The
Iron Heel. Though London does not develop the dual
perspective in any way we would describe as "postmodern,"
the form he installs in the English and American
traditions of political fiction accommodates the
epistemological and ontological uncertainties that make up
the productive playground of fiction today, and the
divided perspective also solves a number of problems
inherent in the political novel as a particular genre.
MeHale argues that Postmodernism differs from
Modernism in its shift from epistemological to ontological
concerns; Hutcheon defines the postmodern as "complicitous
critique." London's achievement prepares the way for
postmodern political fiction in Hutcheon's sense more than
McHale's. Avis Everhard's relationship to Anthony
Meredith looks forward to Offred's faltering communication
with her editors. Offred recording over Elvis Presley is
a good metaphor for "complicitous critique,since much of
150
Most important, dual perspective in The Iron Heel
amuses the reader, such as when London creates comic
tensions between Avis Everhard's narrative and Anthony
Meredith's historical footnotes to satirize the
unreflective attitude that enables everyday language to
function ideologically. In the chapter "The Philomaths"
the proto-Oligarch Mr. Wichson sneers at a speech by
Ernest on the topic of proletarian nobility and proclaims
him a "Utopian." The footnote to this word offers a
utopian alternative to contemporary ways of conceiving of
"Utopia":
The people of that age were phrase slaves. The
abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to
us. There was a magic in words greater than the
conjurer's art. So befuddled and chaotic were their
minds that the utterance of a single world could
negative [sic] the generalizations of a lifetime of
serious research and thought. Such a word was the
adjective Utopian. The mere utterance of it could
damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of
economic melioration or regeneration. Vast
populations grew frenzied over such phrases as "an
honest dollar" and "a full dinner pail." The coinage
of such phrases was considered strokes of genius.
(1908, 79-80)
With its tongue-in-cheek appraisal of such strokes of
genius, this passage shows itself to be a grand-parent to
George Orwell's satirical language of doublethink.
As it makes us smile, the footnote satirizes the
uncritical attitude in which clichés and other staples of
The Handmaid's Tale expresses Atwood's love/hate
relationship with popular culture, birth mystique, and
other popular ideologies . ________________________________
political language are granted the authority of traffic
signs: one does not, for example, question the meaning of
a sign that says "BRIDGE OUT." In challenging this kind
of uncritical acceptance, the footnotes remind us that
phrases like "an honest dollar" may be truly or
deceptively applied. Through the satirical opportunities
provided by the dual perspective, London offers the reader
a humorous alternative to the unreflective kind of
language that authorizes ideological STOP signs such as
"Utopian." Instead of stopping without a thought at the
appearance of such a word, as we sensibly would do at the
STOP sign before a busy intersection, London urges that we
take political language with skepticism and with critical
attention.
The class-specific taboos of gentility do not inhibit
the novelist from discussing politics and religion, and
these are of course frequent topics for the novelist,
j There are, however, rhetorical rather than topical
I inhibitions. To wear the hat of a preacher or a
I politician is to risk one's status as a literary artist,
j We have all been taught that the writer must not preach,
I and he or she certainly is a lesser artist for preaching
I to the converted. To "preach to the converted" is to say
I
nothing that your audience, your congregation, will find
controversial. It is to speak from a completely unified
perspective. Bakhtin referred to claims of absolute
152
authority as "monological discourse." To "preach" at all
is to assume that one is the shepherd before a wandering
flock of sheep, which is not an image with which to
flatter most readers; it is generally assumed that
literary discourse is rhetorically distinct from religious
or political discourses.^® In combining literary and
political discourse, the artist risks that his or her
novel will become inadmissible evidence in the Court of
Literature. As the burden of proof is not the same in the
Court of Literature as it is in the Court of Politics, a
novel that pleases one jury may never even be presented to
the other. Whether or not they changed the law, when we
bring Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle into the classroom,
we will inevitably read them as literary texts.This
is not to argue that politics and literature can never be
I
j seated together at the same dinner table, but it does mean
I ^®By "generally assumed," I mean that we know the
difference between a prayer and a poem in ordinary
practice. This is not to say that we cannot stand up at
j the next funeral we attend to deconstruct texts that
I assert the priority of spirit to body. Most of us, when
; not trying to appear sophisticated in an academic journal,
would forswear such a rude exercise (the funeral of a
certain deconstructionist possibly excepted).
^^London referred to Sinclair's book as "the Uncle
Tom's Cabin of wage slavery" (Foner, 524). Neither London
or Sinclair considered The Jungle a plea for cleaner beef,
which is how it is is often skewed in today's classroom.
Another irony follows the reference to Stowe : "It is
dedicated, not to a Huntington nor to a Carnegie, but to
the Workingmen of America." London's papers are now the
pride of the Huntington Library/s_modern_collection._______
153
that we should acknowledge differences when discussing
distinct discourses (Alter, 23-48).
That many political novels have failed artistically
because they have preached to the converted is no doubt
true, but this does not separate the genre of the
political novel from other kinds of literature :
successful artistry always overcomes a number of risks
along the way. The primary risk of the political novel,
and the one that has the most profound effects on its
fictional form, is that it is by definition somewhat
pushy. That is to say, we recognize political literature
because of its rhetorical element, its ways of pressuring
readers to change their lives. If it is truly a political
novel, it pushes the reader in a direction in which the
reader may not wish to go. Literature, however, is often
characterized by its lack of pushiness. Rarely will that
which "beats you over the head" be admitted to the
category. It should be more polite. It is persuasive and
subtle, it captures more bees with honey, and so forth.
The Iron Heel is only partially successful in this regard.
but aficionados of political fiction must give this book
its due for commencing the lineage of political novels
characterized, first, by a willingness to engage political
issues directly and, second, by the artistic use of the
use of such narrative techniques as the dual perspective
to avoid reducing political art to political propaganda.
154
The Iron Heel employs the "found manuscript" fiction
to inaugurate the dual perspective. One perspective, the
view we receive through Avis Everhard, is the heroic
perspective. Avis Everhard reports on her own
experiences, but she is mainly concerned to give an
account of her husband Ernest Everhard. As we learn from
the Foreword and the historical footnotes. Avis Everhard's
narrative is interrupted just before the beginning of the
Second Revolt. Through the corrective lenses of the
historian Anthony Meredith, we see the short-comings of
Avis Everhard's glorification of her husband. Meredith
offers a fuller historical plot within which to figure the
discreet actions of the individual.
Politics and Literature frequently give each other
the raised eyebrow, and, likewise. The Iron Heel's two
jperspectives are often at odds. As the novel's two
’ perspectives are not harmonically aligned with one
'another, we have a cross-eyed vision of America's
political future. This cross-eyed perspective is
intentional and has a number of humorous and politically
thoughtful consequences. The most important consequence
of dividing the individualistic and heroic from the
collective and deterministic perspectives in this way is
that the division dramatizes the built-in consequences of
London's political philosophy. In this respect humor is
not a supplement that makes the political novel palatable.
155
it is a formal characteristic of a non-totalitarian
political novel. The author's wit acknowledges that other
kinds of experience are possible.
The art that makes The Iron Heel interesting to
contemporary readers develops almost entirely from
London's use of the dual perspective. The tension between
these perspectives replicates conflicts an individual
endures in resisting totalitarian oppression. Whether we
speak of resistance to the Nazis in Vichy France or
resistance to totalitarian rule in novels, the success of
resistance requires both individual sacrifice and
collective action. "Individual sacrifice" presupposes
heroism or heroic loss, and yet "collective action" often
depends on the suppression of the individual viewpoint.
Both approaches are absolutely necessary, and yet these
ideas erode one another when placed in immediate contact.
Given such difficulties, the politician and the writer
must bring about an orderly mixture of opposed forces, a
discordia concors. The political writer must do this even
when conjuring apocalyptic accounts of the near future.
The dual perspective allows antagonistic yet
interdependent modes of political resistance to coexist in
ways that do not impede the reader's pleasure. Readers
may at once recognize that the Oligarchy is not the kind
of historical entity that can be dealt with by an isolated
hero, yet they may identify with the hero's spirit of
156
resistance. If they understand the organizational fiction
of "heroism" in this way, readers need neither
underestimate the power of incipient totalitarianism, nor
fall into despair at the relative powerlessness of
individual persons caught within such a system. Since
resistance to the Oligarchy must be measured both in terms
of generational and individual struggles, and since
readers tend to approach novels within the limitations of
the human life, London uses the dual perspective to find a
middle way between rhetorically disabling extremes.
Although readers of The Iron Heel must occasionally
suffer through a monotone sermon on turn-of-the-century
socialism, London humorously deploys the dual perspective
throughout the novel to open up the question of political
resistance in various ways. His formal design and his
stylistic choices support one another in clearly
identifiable ways.
For example, when we approach the novel without
minimizing the importance of the author's framework, some
of the major critical objections may be seen, rather, as
elements in London's design. Earle Labor, the preeminent
London scholar, makes a strong complaint against the style
which begins the Avis Everhard section of the novel.
Labor finds The Iron Heel to be, politically,
London's bravest book, but he is not convinced that
London's use of dual perspective rescues the book from its
narrative quandary: "a major flaw lies in the telling— in
London ' s unfortunate choice of_narrator.. Even_Professor
157
Why, we might ask, does the Everhard manuscript begin
sentimentally with "The soft summer winds" while "Wild-
Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones"? The
Jack London who signed many letters "Yours for the
Revolution" was not writing only for the intellectuals and
activists, and so he develops narrative techniques that
will bring in a wider audience. In The Iron Heel the dual
perspective combines feminine and masculine sensibilities
(as London understood them). Avis Everhard's impressions
are framed by those of Anthony Meredith, the male
historian with little or no insight into the importance of
her talents.
Anthony Meredith's fictional foreword and footnotes
point up the failure of Avis Everhard's perspective, but
Avis Everhard's perspective almost never undermines
Meredith's masculinist assumptions. Herein lies a dilemma
for today's politically correct reader: we can smugly
judge London for his sexism and dismiss the fact that he
was considered progressive about sexual equality in his
age (it being the fashion of our age to appear morally
superior to the writer at all costs), or we can ask
whether Avis in any way undermines Anthony Meredith. He
certainly gets the last word, but London presents us, word
Meredith's dry, pseudo-scholarly footnotes cannot relieve
the cloying sentimentality of Avis Everhard's prose." The
Iron Heel is, for Professor Labor, 1984 as it might have
j3^n^penn^_by_Elizabej:h_Barrett_Browningl__(J03z=.0Æ)--------
158
for word, with Avis Everhard's view more than that of any
other character. Rather than ignore the balances of The
Iron Heel in self-serving ways, it is preferable that we
understand London in the fullest possible way. Avis
Everhard's narrative survives the historian's arrogance.
Despite the historian's seven centuries of hindsight, her
outcome is uncertain.
Although it may not resist cultural patterns that
recent feminist critics have been found to be oppressive.
The Iron Heel is hardly an advertisement for patriarchy,
however masculine its style. Even if we can find a
political resource in writers long dead, we must remember
that London was not fighting today's battles. It is also
important to remember that he frustrated the expectation
of his own era. As Professor Franklin reminds us, London-
-writing before women had the right to vote— imagined a
future in which several women play key roles in the
resistance to the absolutely patriarchal Oligarchy.
iii. Jack London and the Tradition of Political Fiction
As a political novel. The Iron Heel is bound to
assume a burden of sincerity, wear whatever protective
irony it will. As Gulliver's Travels begins with a
disavowal of verisimilitude. The Iron Heel opens with a
historian's certification as to the irrelevance of the
document in hand. When historian Meredith begins his
159
foreword with the sentence "It cannot be said that the
Everhard Manuscript is an important historical document,"
the reader is well aware that this statement is not a
direction to discard the 354 pages of main text that make
up Avis Everhard's part of The Iron Heel. The reader,
unanchored to either historian or revolutionary, may be
supposed to smile at this incongruity.
The first footnote appears at the end of Avis
Everhard's first paragraph, just after she makes her
emotive plea, "That it [the revolt] may not be premature !"
The footnote rapidly shifts the reader into an
intellectual and analytic register. In sharp contrast to
Avis's immediacy, Meredith glosses Everhard's plea with
the following judicious and distant prose :
The Second Revolt was largely the work of Ernest
Everhard, though he cooperated, of course, with the
European leaders. The capture and secret execution
of Everhard was the great event of the spring of 1932
A.D. Yet so thoroughly had he prepared for the
revolt, that his fellow-conspirators were able, with
little confusion or delay, to carry out his plans.
(1)
Avis Everhard's hopes are instantly deflated by the
information that Ernest was (will be, from the 1908
perspective) flattened by the Oligarchy in 1932. While
the juxtaposition of clashing perspectives adds drama to
Avis Everhard's account, the ironic authorial perspective
implied by the foreword and first page develops the
novel's political philosophy just as it enables the
reader's aesthetic enjoyment. _The_pleasure_of_this_kind__
160
of verbal irony is of course in the sense of superiority
it gives to the reader, who is invited to think "I see
through the doublethink that characterizes my age." We
may also call this "the humor of humility," though there
is some irony in applying this phrase to The Iron Heel;
the protagonist Ernest Everhard is dangerously good and
the novel's villains are purely evil. Though Anthony
Meredith discounts Avis Everhard's hero-worship,
Meredith's occasional footnote only qualifies Avis
Everhard's view slightly.
What humility there is in the novel should not be
overlooked. The function of the dual perspective can be
associated with "humility" only to the degree that London
did not endow his fictional historian with omniscience.
Many readers of the novel do get tired of Anthony
Meredith's condescension toward Avis Everhard, though it
is true that London limits his fictional historian in some
ways. By withholding information about the exact demise
of Avis and Ernest Everhard, London grounds his political
vision in the uncertainty which is necessary for skillful
political action. If we had a deterministic theory of
history that we believed absolutely— if we knew what was
going to happen— there would be little or no motivation to
act.
Humility in the intended sense addresses a particular
tension in some literature between a motivating "vision"
161
and the sense that inspirational ideals are dangerous when
they are not limited. This limitation, a counter-vision
of sorts, often takes the form of a high esteem for
tolerance. Political action is inseparable from a sense
of "vision," and yet the activist who surrenders
completely to his or her vision is blinded by it. William
James concerned himself with combining tolerance and
religion in "Pragmatism and Religion," but his thoughts
^Pply equally well to politics : "the great religious
difference lies between the men who insist that the world
must and shall be, and those who are contented with
believing that the world may be saved" (134). As we must
be humble about our religious visions, we must also beware
of fundamentalist political visionaries. The novel that
sets out to criticize the unbalanced concentration of
political power begins well when it limits its own power.
By this measure. The Iron Heel is well begun. If "well
begun is half done," it is nonetheless only half done. It
is not London's best novel, even if it begins a great line
of novels.
"Humility," to which one should return before
faulting London too long, is one characteristic of a
family-line of novels, those political novels that teach
us to recognize totalitarianism. By adding "The Newspeak
Appendix" to Nineteen Eightv-Four, Orwell suggested that
the totalitarian society of 1984 will undergo some change
162
by 2050. This form of closure undermines the admonitory
vision of a totalitarian form of government achieving
control that is absolutely static, not at all subject to
revolt or structural decay.
This structural demonstration of authorial humility
expresses the same ethic as the scene, late in the novel,
in which O'Brien (Winston Smith's would-be friend turned
torturer) plays back a secretly recorded conversation
between him and Winston. While being recorded Winston
swore he would throw acid in a child's face, lie, spread
venereal disease— he would do anything to resist Big
Brother. O'Brien plays back the tape to discredit Winston
in his own mind and therefore to break him, but the reader
will likely understand this moment differently. We are
more likely to notice that, however true it seems that one
must "become a dragon to fight a dragon," those who would
resist totalitarianism by becoming totalitarian forfeit
the moral ground on which they have staked their
resistance. Ethically, Winston Smith is "totalled" by his
resistance to totalitarianism.
The most recent novel in the line here heralded is
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. At the same time
satirizing the academics of the twenty-first century that
pour over Offred's found "manuscript," the [proceedings]
offer a similar anti-conclusion to the one offered in
Nineteen Eightv-Four. Atwood perfects this mixture of
163
dystopian vision and counter-vision by completely
withholding from the reader the fate of Offred, the
^ protagonist, at the novel's end. The academics are less
concerned about Offred's struggle than they are in the
name of the Commander, a reminder to Atwood's readers that
they do not have access to a transcendent plane of
political correctness. This humor shows an awareness that
one's own views may be partial. The dual perspectives in
London, Orwell, and Atwood's novels are there to heel the
I monologic impulses that follow from the author's own
political commitment.
As the novel proceeds, the footnotes should
! continually undermine Avis Everhard's narrative, but the
tension between Avis Everhard and Anthony Meredith does
r not develop throughout the novel. This static quality is
the book's greatest artistic failure. On occasion Anthony
Meredith becomes an absolute vehicle for Jack London's
. ideas, and at other times Meredith, London, and Ernest
Everhard are barely distinguishable sources of Truth. In
the chapter entitled "The Beginning of the End," Avis
Everhard reports one of her husband's prophecies, to which
this footnote is added:
Everhard's social foresight was remarkable. As
clearly as in the light of past events, he saw the
defection of the favored unions, the rise and the
slow decay of the labor castes, and the struggle
between the decaying oligarchs and labor castes for
control of the great governmental machine. (226)
164
The next footnote merely repeats the sentiment: "We
cannot but marvel at Everhard's foresight."
Even supposing London (and by extension, Meredith and
Ernest Everhard) did know the Truth, why bore the reader
with such repetition? In later footnotes London attempts
to make the historical apparatus less heavy-handed, such
as when the footnote glosses a word such as "fake" and
"bluff" to suggest that, in the future perfect, such words
will fall from the vocabulary of everyday language.
Unless we are prepared to imagine London as a socialist
Pollyanna, this use of the dual perspective can only be
meant to tickle the reader's cynicism. London, no
stranger to irony and sarcasm, occasionally cites Ambrose
Bierce's Devil's Dictionary in Meredith's notes.
Framed so as to combine the certitudes necessary for
political action with the uncertainties on which are
founded political civility, the novel ends en médias res,
as the narrative of Avis Everhard "concludes" with an
unfinished sentence:
The magnitude of the task may be understood when it
is taken into
Succeeding this fragment is a footnote to tell us that
this "is the end of the Everhard Manuscript" and that Avis
Everhard apparently had time to hide it before her
capture. By withdrawing certainty about the conclusion of
the narrative and about the fate of the Everhards, London
adds to the drama of what he felt might be a dramatically
165
deficient narrative. He also adds to the humor, since
this withdrawal of certainty ironizes the heroic formulas
of the popular media which often function as a safety
valve for dangerously populist sentiments. The political
novelist, unlike the "Great American Novelist" or the
"Modernist" cannot, however, disdain the popular, and this
is a risk the political novelist chooses to take. For
this reason the reputations of political novels are, like
the fates of Avis and Offred, never quite certain.
Whether or not we rank The Iron Heel as one of the
most satisfying political novels, people who care about
literature should disabuse themselves of the idea that the
novel lacks artistry or that it provides no amusement. As
we have seen, London combines socialist and prosaic
American humor seamlessly when it is to his purpose, and
he uses the dual perspective to explore political
contradictions and conundrums when such an exploration is
fitting. It so happens that the former kind of humor
tells us much about the original audience, whereas the
dual perspective appeals more to readers in the present
political age, divided and befuddled creatures that we
are. As the forerunner of the modern political novel, and
as a novel which uses the varieties of art to appeal to
audiences decades apart. The Iron Heel strongly warrants
fresh readings.
166
We have, to a large extent, been reading London's
I futuristic novel backwards, through our experience of
! Orwell's Nineteen Eightv-Four and Atwood's The Handmaid's
I
Tale. That is to say, we have travelled from the time in
I which Atwood's novel has redeemed the belief of many
readers that the political novel can be aesthetically
exciting back to the years during which London composed,
marketed, and underwent the publication of The Iron Heel.
,We have traced the course of the novel's past lives in
order to better understand its present incarnation.
The Iron Heel is in some respects akin to those
I dinosaur-like fish that are occasionally captured off the
coast of Africa.Our interest is drawn in two
directions as we try to comprehend both its blunt formal
; oddities and its peculiar survival into the present day—
! but there it is. In the present moment, such a form may
I strike us as genuinely eccentric, at least until we
I recognize those aspects of the form that not only survive
but thrive. A number of feminist utopian and dystopian
novels break up the time-line in ways that represent and
even inspire political activity. The novelist Marge
Piercy has written Woman on the Edge of Time, a political
novel that employs "time travel" to represent our own age
^^The Coelacanth, to be specific, was caught at forty
fathoms in 1938 off the coast of South Africa, and, again
at forty fathoms, off the Comora Islands in December of
1952. _____________
----- - 167
as "dystopian." Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home
portrays a future that really circles back to this
country's Native American past. Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale, which is formally akin to both London's
The Iron Heel and Orwell's Nineteen Eightv-Four, is an
exemplary political novel.
All of these writers create fictions that are
imaginary time machines. Because of the overwhelming
sense that the flow of time is fully determined (we cannot
really go back in time and change its course), novels
which would motivate political action must develop ways of
emphasizing the fluidity of time. Since political history
is something we usually envision as happening on a "time
line," writers who wish to encourage political activism
seek out and develop narrative situations in which time
can bend back on itself, or in which a human being can
step across a wrinkle in time to the future. Though there
is great pleasure in the illusion that we can transcend
time, writers such as H.G. Wells, Jack London, George
Orwell, and Marge Piercy all gear their time machines to
political purposes extrinsic to the entertaining functions
of narrative art.
168
Outside the Whale, Chapter 4
The (Impure) Art of the Political Novel: Moral Absolutism
and Political Resistance in The Handmaid's Tale
"By art Is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State--(in Latin. Civitas)
which is but an artificial man.
Opening sentence of Hobbes's Leviathan.
Not all political novels divide readers into partisan
camps as efficiently as The Iron Heel does, and the books
that do not divide readers absolutely will probably shrink
from the undiluted political commitment saturating
London's work. The "impure" political novel finds a
middle path between the submerged political novel and the
pure political novel. This kind of political novel has, I
believe, the greatest potential to bring about social
change without cost to readerly enjoyment at this time.
In the postwar period there have been a number of
interesting submerged political novels, and quite a few
pure political novels. In the former camp the best
example is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a political
novel gone underground. In the latter category, novels
such as William Melvis Kelley's A Different Drummer or
Marge Piercy's Vida are examples of the pure political
novel. These are books in which the hero is given access
to Truths inaccessible to the political opposition. Less
169
often have we had books of the third sort, impure
political novels that promote a political point of view
without having to demolish the possibility of an opposing
viewpoint. Before going on to say at any length why this
is so, and before looking at American authors who struggle
to achieve this form, it will be useful to look at an
exemplary "impure political novel," Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale.
When we think of the political novel, we often
consider books such as The Iron Heel by Jack London,
Nineteen Eiahtv-Four by George Orwell, or Robert Penn
Warren's All the Kina's Men. These books exemplify the
pure political novel in the sense that the novels
subordinate character, style, and so forth to the working
out of a political theme. In a second sense, London's
novel differs from Orwell and Penn Warren's: London's is
a pure political novel in that it imaginatively constructs
a morally absolutist vision, a world of good versus evil.
It attempts to convert us to its own brand of political
Puritanism. Orwell and Penn Warren, writing after the
final solutions and fanatical purges of Hitler and Stalin,
cautiously avoid setting forth a politically correct
program.
Orwell shows how easily a morally absolutist program
can be discredited. When Winston Smith's torturer O'Brien
plays a tape recording of the moment when Winston says he
170
will do anything to bring down Big Brother. As Winston's
own words reveal, he will throw acid in a child's face,
tell lies, or even spread venereal disease to bring down
!
Big Brother. Strapped to the table in Room 101, teeth and ;
hair falling out, Winston Smith is forced to confront his
own moral as well as physical corruption. Orwell quotes
from Nietzsche in one of his "As I Please" columns to
describe how we become defined by our enemy through
struggle: "He who fights too long against dragons becomes
a dragon himself..." (1968, 230). Orwell's Nineteen
Eiahtv-Four is a warning against becoming a totalitarian
anti-totalitarian. It has in fact been read as a
statement of moral absolutes, but it has been claimed by
so many kinds of readers, often political opponents, that
we can safely say that Orwell did not write a pure
political novel in this sense, though it has been in the
interest of many groups to receive Nineteen Eiahtv-Four as
though he had (Rodden).
Robert Penn Warren's novel, entitled "Brother to
Dragons" in an earlier form, concerns incipient fascism in
the American context, but in his novel political evil
pretty much self-destructs before it can prey on society
as a whole. Jack Burden, the narrator, has learned the
^^Orwell wrote in his 1944 essay on Arthur Koestler
that "The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards
is that they have wanted to be anti-fascist without being
anti-totalitarian." (1968, III, 244).___
171
most from Willie Stark's rise and fall. At the novel's
close he and his wife, having fed from the tree of
political knowledge, exit the garden. On their solitary
way, the Burdens "go into the convulsion of the world, out
of history into history and the awful responsibility of
Time" (438). For Penn Warren a contemplative withdrawal
was possible, and so All the Kina's Men does not polarize
readers along political lines. The novel warns us to be
good, but this warning descends from the realm of
political choice to the less divisive field of ethical
choice. When the reader is departs with the Burdens from
Burden's Landing with "the awful responsibility of Time,"
he or she is hardly in transit toward any defined
political viewpoint. Readers have been taught to
recognize fascism in its larval stage and to regard with
concern if not consternation Jack Burden's political
cynicism early in the novel. Impatient with idealistic
speeches, Jack testily implores the pre-demagogic Willie
to "Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't
try to improve their minds" (72). If The Iron Heel is a
pure political novel in the sense that it selects and then
rhetorically purifies a congregation of right-minded
readers, Nineteen Eiahtv-Four and All the Kina's Men are
"impure" political novels. These novels change our
political views and foreground specific political
problems, but they do not demonize the political
172
opposition. A recent example of this kind of novel, the
novel committed to political change but wary of moral
absolutism, is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
One reader of Jack London distinguished London's
writing from other writers by describing it as
"transitive" (Labor, 104). To say that the political
novel is a transitive form of art is to say that it does
something, that it is a form determined by its (intended)
symbolic action (Burke). It moves readers and makes
readers aware of movement in the world around them. The
first assumption in discussing any work as a political
novel. The Handmaid's Tale especially, is that it pushes
the reader in a political direction. In some sense the
book moves the reader's body in a way that relates to
particular political movements. Political fiction does
not just name politics or bring political themes into the
reader's mind; rather, it puts readers on the map
politically. What we have been calling "political
literature" differs from that literature representing
political themes and characters but which is found by
readers to be, in terms of its rhetorical consequences, an
island unto itself. Peaceful because isolated, the non
political novel can potentially have commerce with any
reader, whereas the political novel makes us aware of
alternative political views that border on our own. To
admit we are on such a map is to live with fears from
173
which the islander is more often free: border wars,
invasion, and civil strife in which one's neighbors take
an unfortunate interest.
The literary puritans and isolationists are not so
strong as they once were, but certain of their views
continue to hold sway. Political engagement in literature
is risky for the writer because many critics believe
politics to be an impurity within literature. If we are
to get beyond a critical mode that depreciates or even
ostracizes the political, we need to abandon cultural
Puritanism, and, as a small step in this direction, I am
suggesting that we learn to appreciate the impurities
inherent in political novels. One way of doing this is to
revise our sense of literature so as to accommodate
political and ideological conflict— that which has for
many been regarded as an impurity. Many readers
interested in ways of discussing conflict and impurity in
literature have found Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin
useful, such as when he theorizes a relationship between
ideological conflict and something as supposedly
apolitical as literary style:
The internal politics of style (how the elements are
put together) is determined by its external politics
(its relationship to alien discourse). Discourse
lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own
context and another, alien, context. (284)
Bakhtin was anything but an isolationist. He urged
readers to recognize the ways in which literary style puts
174
us on a map by making us aware of bordering styles.
Isolation is not an affordable illusion for critics like
Bakhtin. He has been embraced in the United States for a
I
variety of reasons, and a principal cause seems to be that
he combines politics and literature without resorting to
the kind of determinism that reduces literature to the
status of "symptom" of some extra-literary causality.
Though he uses the word "determined," and though he
attempts to discover the inner "laws" governing the
movements of literary genres, he makes it clear in his
applications that the heart of literariness is in genuine
; dialogue, not in a monologically or otherwise
predetermined organization of voices.
"Impurity" in the sense in which we are using it is
central to Bakhtin's conception of the novel as a distinct
. literary genre :
[Novels] become more free and flexible, their
language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary
heteroglossia and the "novelistic" layers of literary
language, they become dialogized, permeated with
laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and
finally— this is the most important thing— the novel
inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a
certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with
unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the
openended present). (7)
In this passage Bakhtin mixes neologism, interruption, and
accumulation to exhibit the kinds of virtues communicated
in the novel. By recognizing such bad manners as central
rather than marginal to the novelist's achievement.
175
Bakhtin helps us appreciate the artful impurities that
must certainly arise in political fiction.
I
Of course, Bakhtin— champion of the lower-body
functions— did not refer to the tendency of the novel form
, to distinguish itself from its predecessors as "impurity,"
but we are in this case comparing the messiness of
politics ("you can't play with coal without getting your
' hands dirty") with the generic messiness of the political
novel. When Bakhtin wrote that discourse lives on the
border between "its own context and another, alien,
! context," I take him to mean that the novel puts us on the
; map in terms of ideological struggle. If the language of
the novel is "free and flexible," that means not that we
, are beyond seeing the world in terms of Us and Them, but
that we will not fall into the fundamentalist mind-set
that sees a metaphvsical difference between ourselves and
our opponents. As Nietzsche put it in Beyond Good and
Evil, "The fundamental faith of metaphysicians is the
faith in opposite values" (10). To be "political" we must
imagine oppositions, and we sometimes pretend they are
metaphysical oppositions in order to describe an
historical situation so pervasive that we cannot approach
it empirically, but we must be careful to keep the mind
free and flexible. The political Other has a different
history rather than a different essence.
176
Bakhtin used words such as "freedom" and "dialogue"
to describe literature, and Henry Adams wrote that
politics is essentially the clarification of hatred. If
both are more or less correct, and I think they are, how
are literature and politics to be reconciled? How is the
political novel to organize hatreds without submitting to
its own brand of fundamentalism? The ideal-impure
political novel that I have been positing combines the
qualities of literature theorized by Bakhtin and the
qualities of politics theorized by Henry Adams. By
looking at an exemplary political novel, and, it so
happens, one of the most admired political novels written
in response to recent political trends, it can be shown
that the novelist can indeed write a novel that succeeds
both politically and artistically. Atwood demonstrates in
The Handmaid's Tale that the successful political novelist
can develop our mental flexibility in areas of violent
ideological conflict. By imagining a dystopian future in
which women are enslaved by a fundamentalist domestic
ideology, Atwood's novel invites us to ask. Where are
women todav? Or: how do women and men of our age relate
politically. Atwood's novel (and the 1992 Democratic and
Republican national conventions) centers these questions
around the question of reproductive rights.
The Handmaid's Tale, in forcing us to confront recent
political trends, puts us on a very uncertain political
177
map, but in Atwood's view literature is a continuous
experience of map-reading. In an interview Atwood once
said that "Treasure Island is one of my favorite books. I
love maps" and in Survival; A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature she wrote that "Literature is not only a
mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind." With
the idea of literature as a map in mind, readers of The
Handmaid's Tale are faced with a pair of related
questions: first, exactly what territory does this hovel
map out; second, where does this map get us? The second
question— -where and how does such a map position us
politically— appears to be figurative, but it is
thematically central to the novel. This becomes most
evident when we consider that the section entitled
"Historical Notes on The Handmaid's Tale" specifically
locates "us"— academics considering The Handmaid's Tale.
After developing the features of Gileadean moral geography
as well as Offred's response to it, I will discuss the
Historical Notes as the section of the novel that is not
only a satirical mirror held up to the academic mind but
also a map of where we are in terms of moral, mental an
political geographies.
The Gileadean world view follows properly from the
fundamentalist approach to language. The idea of a
, plurality of competing voices is completely antithetical
to the fundamentalist mode of interpretation, and so
” 178
Gileadean geography, or world-writing, is a monologic
discourse. Other ways of mapping the world are forcefully
repressed within Gilead, as are voices from beyond the
Gileadean border. The Montreal satellite station is
blocked, and the Commander is irritated when Radio Free
America's broadcast gets through: "Damn Cubans, he says.
All that filth about universal daycare" (209). The
Commander's moral geography demonizes voices that
challenge the Gileadean claims to righteousness: talk of
daycare is filth and Cubans are damned.
At the Rachel and Leah Re-Education Center where
Handmaids are indoctrinated, moral instruction dis-places
geography, such as when Aunt Lydia justifies the Gileadean
system:
She stands at the front of the room, in her
khaki dress, a pointer in her hand. Pulled down in
front of the blackboard, where once there would have
been a map, is a graph, showing the birthrate per
thousand...(113).
At the center of the Gileadean mental landscape is the
dwindling birthrate, but the environmental tragedy is
subordinated, in the Aunts's teaching, to the moral
significance : women were too lazy to have babies; they
53
were sluts, the Aunts say.
^^Offred lists myriad environmental factors : "The
air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the
water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes
years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your
body, camp out in your fatty cells. Who knows, your very
flesh may be polluted, dirty as an oily beach, sure death
to shore birds and unborn babies" (112). _
179
After the cattle-prod, the pedagogical technique
favored by the Aunts is the showing of old movies. Though
these porno movies do not document the primitivism of
Africa, but rather the sinfulness of pre-Gileadean
America, Offred notes the resemblance between these
bizarre screenings and traditional education:
What it reminded me of was geography classes, at my
own high school thousands of years before, where they
showed movies of the rest of the world; women in long
skirts...looking squint-eyed or afraid out of the
screen at us, knowing something was being done to
them by the machine with one glass eye but not
knowing what. (118)
Official education that captures the world through a
Cyclopean eye flatters "us" by objectifying "them." When
the Aunts do show the film of a place, it is not a
particular geographical location, but rather a moral one :
Offred sees the Unwoman documentary, and Moira is shown
one about the Colonies. These films persuade women to
make themselves useful to society, since the alternative
is a horrible death. One of the first lessons of the
indoctrination center is Either life in Gilead Or death in
the Colonies. Offred learns this lesson from Aunt Lydia
directly: "Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as
Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or." The
Gileadean map is divided into either/or.
The similarities between the Aunts' practice and
that of Offred's high school teachers is perplexing.
While the scene could be said to unmask the
180
totalitarianism of everyday life, it is important to
recognize how Offred's resistance to fundamentalism
demands that she not deceive herself into thinking that
there are fundamenta1 differences, such as the difference
between "good" and "evil" between herself and her
persecutors.
Readers of The Handmaid's Tale learn from the
Historical Notes that the Gileadean revolution followed
shortly after the development of a hellish form of
trilateralism, and Atwood's novel shares this feature with
Orwell's Nineteen Eiahtv-Four. It must be emphasized that
, we do not discover this from Offred's part of the
narrative. Though she "wants to know" how the world now
works, as she tells her Commander, morally inscribed
boundaries preclude such knowledge. "We have learned to
see the world in gasps," she says (30). "We" in this case
means "we women." Males in Atwood's future have a more
extensive view both literally and figuratively. Offred
differs from Winston Smith, who succeeded in obtaining a
compromised sort of overview of Oceanic society (he gets
to read "The Book," whereas the Commander gives Offred a
woman's magazine). When a male reads Offred's
observation, he can be sympathetic, but he might find
himself poised between "Us" and "Them." In this way, the
political present intrudes into the imaginary future. The
female reader is invited to ask if she sees the world in
181
gasps. Offred offers the male reader an opening, a moment
to consider his own advantages and social entitlements
based solely on gender.
Atwood's novel could have been written so as to
invite readers to see a morally polarized world— good
Canada versus bad United States, or good women versus evil
men. Atwood proceeds to make moral distinctions, but she
complicates the way in which such pragmatic and temporal
contrasts harden into metaphysical dualities. Atwood's
great achievement is to organize our fears and even hatred
of those who claim God-given power over others in such a
way that we do not become blinded by those fears and
hatreds. We see how Atwood avoids such a fictional
pitfall when we examine the chapters in which Offred is
alone in her room, pages which also lead us to question
any fixed contrast between the personal and the political.
Near the beginning of her narrative Offred says "not
mv room, I refuse to say my" (8), but by accepting the
limited space that she is allowed as her space. Offred's
commitment to survival deepens. The idea of "home," or
rather the Gileadean Ideology of the Home, is a mockery to
Offred, but she gradually learns that she must resist this
ideology from some place. In an ironic amendment to
Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," she says, "My room, then.
There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine.
182
even in this time" (50). Offred's acceptance of personal
space is, in the Gileadean context, a political act.
Enclosed by her Handmaid wings, and by the repressive
social structure that controls all her movements. Offred
must exercise her mind through scattered and seemingly
insignificant observations. Much of her private word play
in the "Night" sections is subversive of both Gileadean
morality and geography. When Moira escapes. Offred is
pleased to think that she is now a "loose woman" (133).
She is a gender traitor, and, therefore, morally "loose,"
but now that she is also on the loose, she is violating
the Gileadean laws that physically imprison women.
Offred's word play is the inner coefficient of Moira's
outer movement. Offred's word play makes readers aware of
the external language, the general language bordering all
our thoughts, which has moralistic and political values
built into it. In the context of Offred's pun, her sense
of Moira as "loose woman" confronts the assumption built
into our language that any woman without a male companion
is morally questionable. While Offred's word play is not
as daring as Moira's escape, it is integral to her
survival plans that she keep her mind free.
In her resistance to the mind-constricting designs of
Gileadean fundamentalism. Offred consciously avoids what I
will call counter-fundamentalism. It occurs when one's
resistance to a fundamentalism, religious or political.
183
becomes an equal and opposite form of fundamentalism. In
The Handmaid's Tale the solution to this problem is to
reveal the shallowness of moral geography, especially
regarding the U.S./Canadian border (Schlueter). The
binary opposition of Canada-the-victim oppressed by the
brutal Evil Empire to the south frequently surfaces in
Atwood's work, certainly in The Handmaid's Tale. In the
fictional appendix entitled "Historical Notes..."
Professor Pieixoto, a twenty-first century academic,
speculates on the question of Offred's escape:
Was she smuggled over the border of Gilead, into what
was then Canada, and did she make her way thence to
England? This would have been wise, as the Canada of
that time did not wish to antagonize its powerful
neighbor, and there were roundups and extraditions of
such refugees. (310)
: Atwood complicates her moral geography by refusing a bi
polar world of moral absolutes. This is why Offred's
tapes are discovered in an attic in Bangor, (Maine): the
novel subverts the heroic codes that demand a dashing
escape to free Canada, thereby repudiating the moral
geography of Hollywood, as seen in movies such as— sad but
true— "The Handmaid's Tale." By refusing a form of
closure that resolves all political tensions within the
novel. The Handmaid's Tale comments on very current
political contexts : we may enjoy the belief that we have
inherent rights, but we can only hold such truths self-
evident so long as there is no strong challenge from
within our community to those rights. Just as we do not
184
know how Offred's struggle ends, reproductive rights such
a abortion are currently up for grabs in the United
States.
In a sense the novel does allow for an escape to
Canada, if we recall that the Historical Notes provide a
I
fictional transition from Gileadian totalitarianism to a
post-Gileadian free (or freer) world. Although the escape
j into the "Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies...held at
the University of Denay, Nunavit" (299), a kind of Twenty-
First Century MLA section, is hardly dashing, the shift
into the Historical Notes does salvage the reader from the
■ hopeless situations writers like Atwood warn us about.
The denial function of this Canadian happy ending is
; signalled by the Swiftian place name, "Nunavit," and also
’ by the name "Denay, " which we might pronounce "deny.
Still, it has to be admitted that this ending is really
^^The dual perspective created by the Historical
Notes is similar to the dual perspective created by the
footnotes and apparatus around Avis Everhard's manuscript
in The Iron Heel (1908), an effect also achieved by the
Newspeak Appendix in Orwell's Nineteen Eiahtv-Four.
^^The novel is rife with Swiftian place names and
overdetermined names. Offred is of course the handmaid
"offered" in the Biblical passage, but she is also
"afraid," Moira is more "merry" than most, and Aunt Lydia
is an example of how church "laity" function in a
fundamentalist theocratic society. "Gilead" might bring
up "galled," "guilty," or "guillotine" for some readers,
and the name "Pieixoto" may bring "poised" or "posited" to
the minds of some readers— but this is stretching. Most
important in the last case is the realization the one
named Pieixoto is sprung from loins other than those of
Rockefeller, Morgan, Getty, and so forth.
185
janiform, since the denial function is counter-balanced by
^ the plain fact that researchers Pieixoto and Wade are,
like Offred, dedicated to the reconstruction of the past.
They are not recreating Gilead, even if the main purpose
of their meeting is to study it. Atwood is not proposing
that academics model future proceedings on the Nuremberg
Trials. Instead she complicates the "Canadian escape,"
the Historical Notes undermine any remaining counter-
: fundamentalism.
Which returns to the question. Where are we? In
I "Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid's Tale."
' Professor Arnold E. Davidson argues that the Historical
Notes do not let academics off the hook but instead unmask
, the sexism that prepares the way for Gilead. Yet, if
academics who make sexist jokes are on the hook, then the
novel operates like the Wall on which abortionists are
hung. If the novel were punitive in the way Davidson
suggests, it would be another example of the pure
political novel because of its intolerance of opposition.
If we attend Offred's story closely, we see that Offred
carefully avoids the vengeful attitudes implied in "Future
Tense."
Davidson does allow for possibility of not being on
hook, though he is, like Aunt Lydia, "in love with
Either/Or": either we read uncritically along sexist
lines, or we condemn such a mode of cultural discourse.
No middle.ground exists.
186
Professor Davidson sees the proceedings as marked by
institutional oppression and patriarchal sexism, such as
when Pieixoto commits double entendre in his keynote
I
address. Davidson writes, "A most dubious note it is.
His joke turns upon a bad pun conjoining the 'charming
I Arctic char' that 'we all enjoyed' last night at dinner
and the current 'charming Arctic Chair' that 'we are [now]
I enjoying'". Through word play, Pieixoto suggests that the
' group is sexually enjoying the chair of the session.
Professor Maryann Crescent Moon. Davidson correctly
points out that the remarks are to some degree sexist, but
I to argue that Pieixoto's reconstruction of Offred's story
"duplicat[es] the suppression her society inflicted on
her" (120), is to succumb to the narrowness of Aunt Lydia,
:"who was in love with either/or" (8).
Context is all. We should be able to recognize that
:Pieixoto's "chair" jokes do not make him fundamentally
sexist. We need not be "in love with Either/Or." His
desire to know more about the Commander than about Offred
can be interpreted as institutional sexism, but to
totalize his after-dinner remarks as Gileadean-in-tendency
I
! is to ignore the freedom of the post-Gileadean world. Are
we then to condemn Offred as "sexist" for not being as
committed a feminist as her mother? Did Offred's
political laxity bring on the Gileadean world? Such a
reading, it seems to me, requires that the critic ignore
187
those parts of the novel that warn us about ideological
hardening of the arteries. Consider, in this context.
Offred's "chair" meditation:
I sit in the chair and think about the word chair.
It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can
also mean a mode of execution. It is the first
syllable in charity. It is the French word for
flesh. None of these facts has any connection with
the others.
These are the kinds of litanies I use, to
compose myself. (110)
In the privacy of her room, in the "Night" sections of the
novel. Offred "takes back the night" through imaginative
word play. The slack in the language that she discovers,
the play in the system, is precisely what the Aunts, the
Angels, and the Commanders struggle to eliminate when they
deprive Offred of freedom of movement. Granted— different
contexts give the same pun different meanings, and so
Pieixoto's word play is not an act of resistance against
oppression as is Offred's— but this does not make him a
totalitarian. To conflate the Gileadean repression of
Offred's voice and Pieixoto's reconstruction of it is to
narrow the set of possible meanings considerably.
It is undoubtedly the case that Offred does not
escape the Commander's house by word play alone, and I do
not believe Atwood is suggesting that we substitute
crossword puzzles for political action. The references to
the "Take Back the Night" movement make this clear enough.
But within the world of the novel, political activity is
risky in a way we should not underestimate. Offred is
188
never certain about who she can trust (with the exception
of Moira), and this regular betrayal of trust in the
impure real world is part of what makes Literature
attractive. Political literature undertakes a similar
risk— it may be pronounced UnLiterature. Atwood, however,
is one of those writers who is willing to put her
imaginary world in jeopardy for the difference it might
make to readers in the real world.
It impossible to say exactly where we are on the
moral map, just as, at several junctures in her narrative.
Offred does not even say what happened but rather offers a
variety of reconstructions "because what you say can never
be exact, you always have too many parts, sides,
crosscurrents, nuances..." (134). The Historical Notes go ’
in at least two directions at once: they gently satirize
academics who make professional capital out of the
suffering of others, but at the same time the notes
celebrate the freedom to study odd topics and to make bad
jokes. The Handmaid's Tale teaches us that we can resist
moral, political, religious, or literary fundamentalism
without submitting to what Nietzsche called "the
fundamental faith of metaphysicians ...the faith in
opposite values." If this novel offers us a political
"geography" of our own time, it is one that helps us think
189
of boundary lines dialogically rather than a
moralistically.
' Definition by example circumvents the problem of the
general reader's response, however we are to imagine that
response. Since I'm arguing that this response is
1
essential to the political novel, insofar as that the
political novel attempts to make a rhetorical difference
in a given reader's mind, I am obliged to at least sketch
out how a different reader might experience the novel. I
extend beyond my own way of explaining puzzling aspects of
■ the novel in this manner to acknowledge the uncertainty
principle that, I believe, must be encompassed by any full
statement on how the political novel exists.
1 There are various ways of regarding The Handmaid's
Tale as a political novel, some of which overlap, and some
of which contradict my own reading. For example, a
"Canadian political novel" reading might emphasis the
escape to Canada problem even more than I have. Arnold
Davidson's approach, which I think is intriguing but
flawed, recognizes the book as a political novel
organizing our hatred of institutional sexism in the
academy. We can hypothesize yet another reader with a
political orientation not quite like my own who would see
Bakhtin: "no living word relates to its object in
a singular way: between the word and its object, between
the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic
environment of other, alien words about the same object,
the same theme" (276).
;■ ■ 190
Offred not as the heroic protagonist of the novel, but
rather as the butt of Atwood's satire. Or, my Other
I
Reader might interpret Offred less comically as an anti-
1
hero dramatizing the tragedy of post-feminism. In such a
reading Offred's mother becomes the ethical center of the
novel, and her mode of activism (burning pornography,
attending marches) should shame the reader out of
passivity. With Offred's mother as chorus, contemporary
readers should recognize their own political
vulnerability, political complaisance, and debt to
previous activists. This novel puts us on a somewhat
different political map than the one I delineate.
Wittgenstein offers a way to cross just this political
impasse in Culture and Value, his collection of essays on
humanistic topics :
What happens is not that a symbol cannot be further
interpreted but: I do no interpreting because I feel
at home in the present picture. When I interpret I
step from one level of thought to another.
My argument that the Other Reader has gotten the facts
right but has drawn the wrong conclusion has no
"foundation" to rest on— its just that I don't feel at
home in the argument. Some might say there is something
fishy about this explanation, that it blandly accepts the
weakest link in my assertion that the political novel even
exists. It leads to the question. Do our generalizations
about literature and culture express realities, or do they
merely reflect the ideological bias of the perceiver? Or,
191
Are our (mis)constructions of meaning the result of
unconscious political formations? Is the political novel
in the eye of the beholder? However cavalier I may be in
' supposing this Other Reader, or in putting on melancholic
airs about the loss of Meaning, it is precisely this
! uncertainty of rhetorical effect that most endangers my
claim that there is such a thing as "the political novel."
These questions are consequential insofar as they lead to
or away from the belief that authors can influence the
world through the written word, and my belief, perhaps my
quixotic hope, is that political novelists give us
equipment for living politically. A successful political
novelist develops a vocabulary that readers understand,
enjoy, and then redeploy.
Wittgenstein's contribution to the way we regard not
only the practice of philosophy but all human
communication— is far too big a subject to enter into for
my present purposes, though it may help to borrow an idea
or two. The meaning of a sentence (for the later
Wittgenstein) is profoundly social, and so we cannot hope
for a vantage point beyond the social context to provide a
paramount interpretation. One writer has summarized the
I
philosopher's view of sentences in a way that might help
! ' ■
US out of our generic uncertainty:
How a picture is used will determine what it is a
picture of. It cannot, therefore, be a fundamental
192
explanation of the sense of sentences to say that
they are pictures. (Dictionary of Philosophy, 337).
I
! In revising his "picture theory" of language, Wittgenstein
! tosses out the positivist notions of the relationship
between the sentence and the world, and we, likewise, must
dispense with a positivist notion of the political novel
as a genre. How a picture is used will determine whether
or not it is a portrayal of political events, forces, or
I influential persons. And how does one say "how a picture
I is used"? By using it.
i
I I am in a sense thrown back to definition by example,
I
^ but with a slight difference. Whereas anyone can claim
any work of literature as political literature (even
‘ something which no one else finds useful, politically),
and then publish an article on that piece of political
literature, and then receive points toward promotion based
on that publication, such a work political literature,
but not for many people. If an individual finds Truman
Capote or Donald Barthelme's short stories to be
profoundly revolutionary, very well. But when we begin to
talk of political art or political novels of consequence,
'then it becomes less likely that anyone reasonable will
claim that Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, and Raymond
Carver are political in a similar manner. Anyone who
makes such a claim does not know his or her A,B,Cs, as far
as political literature is concerned.
193
The uncertainty characterizing all recent attempts to
define the political novel should not be regarded as
accidental or as a flaw of critical method. The
uncertainty expresses the basic nature of the political
novel: Politics and Literature are truly at odds, but
that does not mean they never merge into a form. Like a
centaur or a minotaur, the political novel is a divided
creature. Though we are fascinated with its genealogy,
attempts to isolate its singular essence only beget
critical perplexity.
194
Outside the Whale> Chapter 5
Norman Mailer in the Age of Reagan: A Ghost Story
Since the country began the swing to the Right that
could be called the Age of Reagan, Mailer has told three
stories of major importance. The Executioner's Song
(1979) concerns the value and values of a man who was
executed for murder. Ancient Evenings (1983) presents the
stories of two ghosts entombed in ancient Egypt. Harlot's
Ghost (1991) is a ghost story in many senses; through its
corridors run the ghosts of American political history, of
the Cold War and of John F. Kennedy in particular. The
narrator may or may not be a ghost.
It would be hard to imagine three more various novels
by the same author, and his versatility and innovation in
matters of literary genre reflect Mailer's refusal to
simplify his part in what R. W. B. Lewis called "the
American dialogue." Mailer's novels resist being excluded
from any level of the American conversation. From the
language of headlines and case-studies in his 197 9 novel
The Executioner's Song, to his sounding of a cultural and
political unconscious for the Western world in Ancient
Evenings (1983), to the investigation of America's
political super-ego, the Central Intelligence Agency, in
Harlot's Ghost (1991), Mailer has traveled roads more and
195
less taken. No other writer of political fiction in
America has demonstrated his Odyssean range.
Homer left out many things that "actually" happened
to Odysseus to make his story memorable. American stories
I also conform to or resist a larger set of expectations,
, and Lewis characterized the American Ur-narrative as a
I dialectical exchange of voices. This dialogue, which in
I practice ranges from a simple conversation to a Babel of
I voices, is given unity by "the matter of Adam." American
innocence was at stake in many of the fictional and
I historical debates of Nineteenth-century American, and
: Lewis, borrowing from Emerson, named the three parties of
Adam (hope, despair, irony) in order to simplify, perhaps
to pacify, the welter of words. The Party of Hope is that
group of literary writers, historians, and so forth who
believed America to have an exceptional relation to
history. Emerson invoked this American when he wrote,
"Here's for the Old Adam, the simple genuine self against
the whole world." The Party of Despair is a worldly-wise
reaction to the Party of Hope, and it follows partly from
the Puritan insistence on original sin. The Party of
Irony does not have a fundamental belief in Unfallen or
Fallen America, but rather reworks the mythos with more
detachment so as to devise a Fortunate Fall. We might
say, with apologies in advance to Lewis, "Hope tempered by
Despair equals Irony." Lewis's triadic approach to
196
American self-perception is essential to an understanding
^ of Mailer's work.
Mailer does not move chronologically from one party
, to the other, though there is a general movement toward
Irony in his late work. These positions are inter
dependent, and, in his ambition to represent as much of
the American dialogue as possible. Mailer shape-shifts so
as to embody each of these separate voices within his
novels. The Parties of Hope, Despair, and Irony have
their separate conventions in the three sections which
follow.
"Adam's Ghost in the Age of Reagan" describes the
; reincarnations of American innocence in Mailer's recent
' novels. "Harlot's Ghost and American Apocalypse" sees
Mailer's writing against the backdrop of postwar
apocalyptic thinking to show how Mailer has come to
, understand the artistic and political pitfalls of
apocalyptic entitlement. Mailer regards the Party of
Despair, whether expressed through the art of the Absurd
or that of postmodern detachment, to be a political dead
end. In "Hoffman's Ghost" the spirit of Irony comes back
; to haunt the mood of political Despair. If the body of
the Left in the Age of Reagan has, like the body of
Osiris, been cut into pieces (Reagan and Bush call these
pieces "special interests"). Mailer draws on the ironic
spirit of Henry Miller to indicate the way of survival.
197
Only by blending our political desire with impious
laughter can this body be re-membered.
i. Adam's Ghost in the Age of Reagan
The American narrative has long been predicated on a
belief that we Americans are somehow not to blame for the
fallenness and impurity of history. The writer who would
address the American audience must factor in this belief
whether or not the writer happens to agree. It is
currently fashionable to condemn authors who uncritically
reflect this belief, and Mailer has been recently
criticized for presenting "official American history"
rather than something more like New Historicism in his
novels (Pease, 1992, 94). This is a fairly odd claim,
since in Mailer's writings there is never a clear line
between the fictions and myths with which we construct our
national identity and the political ideologies that
struggle for prevalence in our society.
We can see this conjunction of mythic identity and
political consequence in the first paragraph of The
Executioner's Song, a book most notable for the way it
challenges the border between history and fiction. The
book mainly concerns Gary Gilmore, a man who was executed
for killing two people in Salt Lake City in 1977.
Mailer's first description of Gary Gilmore portrays him in
the manner of the literary type described by Lewis as "the
198
American Adam." Mailer opens this book, "a true life
I
novel," by retelling the story of the Edenic fall with
Gilmore in the Adamic role:
Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
' She climbed to the top and the limb with the good
, apples broke off. Gary caught her as the branch came
scraping down. They were scared. The apple trees
were their grandmother's best crop and it was
forbidden to climb in the orchard. She helped him
drag away the tree limb and they hoped no one would
notice. That was Brenda's earliest recollection of
Gary (17).
Without Brenda's memory of Gary-before-the-Fall, it is
hard to imagine why we should care about this murderer.
^ By presenting Gary Gilmore's twisted life story as a
novel. Mailer calls for an American literature committed
to more than sanitized ideals or the myths and memories of
an undefiled landscape.
Archetypal fall and forbidden tree as prologue to
fear and memory--Mailer blends this theme into his "true-
life novel" The Executioner's Song, just as he does all of
his orthodox novels. It his favorite way of fusing the
motifs of American literature with the developing
phenomena of American history, which is why he frequently
reincarnates revered American literary characters into
highly political contexts. Gary and Brenda are resonant
of Quentin and Caddy Compson, and Gary catching his cousin
refigures Holden Caulfled catching his little sister
Phoebe. Mailer's 1979 book, like The Deer Park (1955), An
American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and
199
Armies of the Night (1968), mixes the transcendental theme
of the American Adam with the historical specifics of
I
I American political struggle. The ghosts of Hemingway and
Fitzgerald haunt much of Mailer's work, but they are
, particularly manifest in the McCarthy-haunted situations
of The Deer Park. Stephen Richards Rojack, a latter-day
Christopher Newman, finds himself on a double-date with
I John F. Kennedy in the first sentence of An American
Dream, Mailer's most surreal novel. Ike McCaslin, reborn
as the Texan youth D.J., encounters radical innocence on
I his way to Vietnam, and the self-mocking jeremiad of Henry
Adams, echoing in the Hay-Adams Hotel, is heard throughout
Armies of the Night.
It is a commonplace of Mailer criticism to note that
he follows in the Adamic tradition as defined by Lewis
(Adams 1976, Wenke). Readers of Mailer's work have noted
his tendency to regenerate past voices in a book-by-book
fashion (Leeds, Adams 1976, Cowan, Taylor), but so far
there has not been a satisfactory theory to explain what
this tendency means when regarded as an overall design.
If we note that Mailer consistently takes ahistorical
American selves and transfers them to explicitly political
situations, we recognize that there is a method to his
stylistic derangements. By wiring American mythology to
American history. Mailer reveals the politics of our
mythology without completely rejecting it as a source of
200
power. Unlike those authors who jeer from the margins, he
operates within American literary and political
mythologies.
Innocence is, in Mailer's cosmology, a floating term,
always defined by its twin-star, guilt.There is no
fundamental self (good or evil), and therefore it is a
poor substitute for inquiry to attempt to decide if the
C.I.A. is "purely" good or evil. Mailer indulges in
various kinds of rhetorical strategies in Armies of the
Night that oppose bad technocracy with good Mailer, but
his most recent novel refuses to simplify the drama of
American intelligence work by absolutely demonizing the
C.I.A. To maintain the possibility of a defining
opposition without giving way to a political
fundamentalism. Mailer stirs ontological uncertainty into
his familiar Manichean stew. He does this by becoming
^^For Mailer sex becomes "absurd" without the
possibility of guilt: "Without guilt, sex was
meaningless. One advanced into sex against one's sense of
guilt, and each time guilt was successfully defied, one
had learned a little more about the contractual relation
of one's own existence to the unheard thunders of the
deep— each time guilt herded one back with its authority,
some primitive awe— hence some creative clue to the rages
of the deep— was left to brood about" (Armies, 34). While
this sentence is syntactically hard to follow, it
nonetheless clarifies the relation in Mailer's writing
between sexual, political, and aesthetic dialectical
struggles. The simple genuine self can only exist in
defiance of guilty society, and so the suspension of all
ethical metanarratives (as Lyotard defines the postmodern)
is for Mailer a disastrous choice. It leaves the
individual or culture without any possibility of the kinds
of regeneration we have been calling "innocence." _
■ ' 201
radically Manichean, and his work increasingly discovers
struggle between the best and the worst at the heart of
human identity. Identity is never granted but is achieved
only through struggle.Without a struggle between good
and evil, we hardly have a self, and the same holds true
for corporate entities such as the C.I.A. The divisions
at the heart of the individual self have long been a
favorite theme of Mailer's, and he introduces this theme
in Harlot's Ghost when he quotes Roethke in an epigraph :
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My Soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly.
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
This sense of division and ultimate uncertainty in
Mailer's work connects the psychological and the
cosmological. It is in this sense of uncertainty coupled
with the need for action, that for Mailer the personal is
the political.
The idea that innocence can only exist in a dualistic
struggle with non-innocence is an extension of Mailer's
indignant revelation in the late-Sixties that the moral
postures of American culture and government were
^^The agonistic approach to human identity is
sometimes dismissed as mere machismo, and some of Mailer's
statements provide excellent material for this argument:
"Onanism and homosexuality were not, to Mailer, light
vices— to him it sometimes seemed that much of life and
most of society were designed precisely to drive men deep
into onanism and homosexuality; one defied such a fate by
sweeping up the psychic profit which derived from the
existential assertion of yourself— which was a way of
saying that nobody was born a man; you earned manhood
provided you were good enough, bold enough" (Armies, 34).
202
altogether meaningless. In Existential Errands Mailer
confronts this postmodern facade:
...to come to that slippery slope where one knows
that the Establishment is not good, not evil, but a
put-on even to itself is to cross the plastic curtain
which separates the world of the past from the
futures of technology, (xii)
Every word Mailer has written since can best be understood
. as attempting to find a handhold on the mind's slippery
slope. His primitivism and his "bargains with evil"
. (which are at times Faustian deals with sexism and racism)
; are all tactics in his war against the "futures of
technology." Except that, instead of a battle between
: light and darkness, the forces in contention are
essentially unknowable.
Like all of Mailer's novels, Harlot's Ghost is a
novel of political education in which a young man must
learn from an older man whom the younger man has reason to
distrust. This dialogue. Mailer's way of representing
"the simple genuine self against the whole world,"
constitutes the inner form of every novel Mailer has
published, including the unpublished novel he wrote in
1942 while still at Harvard. Mailer's younger men always
struggle with older men to achieve self-definition, and
this struggle bespeaks the political struggle of the
individual to attain and keep the independence that is
central to American mythos and political ideology.
203
The archetypal American, as described by Lewis in
I
i The American Adam and extended into postwar American
I literature by Ihab Hassan in Radical Innocence is defined
by his or her hostile approach to the idea of tradition.
However cut off from experience. Mailer's protagonists do
'not begin with the kind of Adamic purity that we tend to
I associate with Walt Whitman's brand of total acceptance.
I
tMailer's younger man relates to an older man in a way that
bestows upon the younger man a relative innocence, which
is for Mailer the only kind of innocence that makes sense
I in a world in which we may be put into death camps.
I
Absolute innocence is politically useless.
Nor must the young man be absolutely cut off from
: history to be recognizably "Adamic," although this is the
I case in the novels that begin with amnesiac narrators
(Poirier, 17-26). Barbarv Shore, Ancient Evenings. and
Tough Guvs Don't Dance are all narrated by characters who
are cut off from their memories on the first page. The
Mailerian hero, on the outside of tradition looking in,
moves from a position as "the simple genuine self against
^ the whole world" to one as a self within the world that
has not sacrificed all moral values along the way. Along
' this path the Adamic individual must make what Mailer
, likes to call "bargains with evil," and very often the
younger man must negotiate with the older man throughout
his educational dialogue. In Ancient Evenings the
204
meeting of Menenhetet I and Menenhetet II is both an
education and a confrontation in which the younger man
ultimately affirms the value of the older man's life as a
whole. Menenhetet II begins the novel with amnesia and
will not survive the Duad without his grandfather's help,
but Menenhetet I has a treacherous reputation and is not
someone to be heedlessly trusted. This dyadic conflict
resonates of larger and smaller conflicts, as the
relationship between the two men also represents the fate
of Egypt and also the struggle that takes place between
parts of the "individual" self. Menenhetet II, whose
nickname is "Men-Ka", may be the ka of his grandfather.
The ka, or double, is the most important of the seven
souls (Breasted, 63-64). The struggle parts of the self
foreshadows the idea in Harlot's Ghost that all people are
composed of two distinct personalities, the Alpha and
Omega selves. In neither Ancient Evenings or Harlot's
Ghost is the struggle between conscious and unconscious
parts of the self. Mailer makes it clear in both novels
that, though either part of a self may dominate at a given
time, the divisions within are not founded on an ideal
hierarchical order.
Menenhetet II presumably learns all he needs to know
and proceeds to his next reincarnation on the novel's last
page; "Past and future come together on thunderheads and
our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the
■ " ' 205
Gods" (1983, 709). While the relationship to paternal
authority becomes clarified at the conclusion of all of
Mailer's novels up to and including Tough Guvs Don't Dance
(1984), with this clarification comes a burden of moral
uncertainty. At the end of Ancient Evenings Menenhetet II
says "I do not know if I will labor in greed forever among
the demonic or serve some noble purpose I cannot name"
; (709) .
I Mailer foists this same uncertainty upon his readers
'by mixing the noble and the trashy and by expressing
^ notions of questionable taste in exquisite sentences. By
positing moral and aesthetic qualities that are not
digestible to American society but which are not
necessarily bad qualities. Mailer challenges the
assumptions that ground "bad taste." In Armies of the
Night he defends obscenity and other kinds of low humor
for their salutary political effects in a language that is
; at once obscene and distinguished:
...in the Army he discovered that the humor was
probably in the veins and the roots of the local
history of every state and county in America— the
truth of the way it really felt over the years passed
on a river of obscenity from small-town storyteller
to storyteller there down below the bankers and the
books and the educators and the legislators— so
Mailer never felt more like an American than when he
was naturally obscene.... (1968, 58)
: The complaints that Mailer is nothing more than a literary
self-publicist, a seeker of shock-value for its own sake.
---------- - 2Qg
conveniently ignore the confluent political and aesthetic
aims of his obscenity.
Mailer's Egypt novel is truly shocking. In Ancient
Evenings the indigestible phallus of Osiris, an odd
metaphor that first arises in Mailer's study of Henry
Miller Genius and Lust (1976), expresses the painful but
necessary aspects of existence that must be honestly
confronted if we are to achieve (personal and political)
integration. Menenhetet tells his life story, warts and
all, on the "Night of the Pig" in the hopes of achieving
such an integration, but he is thwarted by Khem-Usha, the
High Priest who ultimately divides the power of the
Pharaoh to the detriment of the kingdom. In the final
pages of Ancient Evenings Menenhetet II, grandson and
protege of the experienced man, endures the old man's
bitter knowledge. The scene is exquisitely grotesque,
and, if we conclude that it is merely "bad taste," it is
beyond belief that Mailer does not know exactly what he is
doing. The art of the gambit is to give a piece away with
the design of winning back greater value in the long run:
as Beckett gambles with boredom in his novels. Mailer
gambles with bad taste throughout Ancient Evenings :
Then all of him came forth, and in great
bitterness. His seed was like a purge, foul and
bitter, and I would have liked to vomit but could
not. I had to take into me the misery he felt....
So, with the phallus still in my mouth, I knew the
shame of Menenhetet....
I also knew his exhaustion. It came down upon me
like a cataract. In none of his four lives had he
, ■ 207
found what he desired. That much I knew, and then I
swallowed, and all the venom of his Khaibit that
would now be my knowledge of the past.
I I would live by the guidance of his shadow. (689)
i
Of the seven souls, the Khaibit is known as the shadow and
is most strongly associated with memory. In imagining a
I
world view before the rise of monotheism, before Adam
became the first man. Mailer struggles to connect readers
I in the Adamic tradition with the history of what came
before their own time. The lesson for Americans is clear
but hardly attractive. Accepting the burden of history is
i
1 not merely a matter of dispensing with the ahistorical
mythologies that give our culture a form; we must endure
history, just as the ancient Egyptian ultimately had to
, swim across the horrible Duad.
Ancient Evenings circumscribes the limitations of the
Adamic mythology by crossing it with Egyptian mythology.
The notion of a hero cut off from history is inserted
within the highly eschatological locale of Egypt between
Ramses II and Ramses IX, and in this way the highly
individual character has a decisive influence on the
course of the Egyptian empire. We could approach Mailer's
"denial of death" via Norman O. Brown in ways that might
help us read Ancient Evenings, but in political terms the
novel is less a denial of death than of authoritarianism.
We are told by Breasted and others that Egyptian society
was rigidly hierarchical, and that only the Pharaoh had
208
access to the Gods through prayer. Mailer imagines an
^ individual who disrupts this orderly chain of command.
I In Armies of the Night Mailer ponders the Pentagon
and finds it comparable to Egyptian architecture:
He had made the grand connection between Egyptian
architecture and the Pentagon. Yes. The Egyptian
forms, slab-like, excremental, thick walls, secret
caverns, had come from the mud of the Nile, mud was
the medium out of which the Egyptians built their
civilization, abstract ubiquitous mud equaled in
modern times only by abstract ubiquitous money,
filthy lucre (thought of Norman O. Brown). And
American Civilization had moved from the existential
sanction of the frontier to the abstract ubiquitous
sanction of the dollar bill. (178)
This paragraph and others like it in Armies of the Night
form the secret passageways connecting Mailer's Egypt
novel and his novel of the C.I.A. As in all of Mailer's
novels, the effective resistance to totalitarianism is not
contempt but comprehension. Since the walls of the Great
Pyramid and the walls of the Pentagon are meant to baffle
any hope of knowing their inner secrets, the Mailerian
hero must somehow break through, as Ahab insists on
smashing through the paste-board mask.
, ii. Harlot's Ghost and American Apocalypse
His C.I.A. novel reincarnates the Adamic self in a
wholly different eschatology, that of Cold War America.
Harlot's Ghost also recapitulates the dialogue between the
younger and the older man in all of Mailer's novels, but
at the end the hero is cannot say with any more confidence
; ■ ' ' ■ 209
, than Menenhetet II whether or not he has worked for powers
: demonic or noble: the voyage from individual talent to a
’ place in the tradition must be paid for in the coin of
j moral certainty. In contrast to the magical hopes running
I through Ancient Evenings, Harlot's Ghost expresses some
despair at the novelist's prospects in the contemporary
world.
I
I
' Mailer insists that our moral action is predicated on
' a Kierkegaardian uncertainty, and his novels develop this
moral insight in a variety of ways. As uncertainty is
the defining condition of the individual. Mailer shows it
^°George Alfred Schrader has a much more disparaging
view of Mailer's Kierkegaardian aspect. His essay "Norman
' Mailer and the Despair of Defiance" is highly critical
Mailer's existentialism, but I would argue that Schrader's
essay describes the early Mailer. First published in 1961
it renders the philosophical corollaries to Mailer's
immature Adamicism: "He identifies with the hipster both
because the White Negro is in full-scale rebellion against
civilization (defiant) and unleashes the life-giving force
of primitive emotion. The very notion of the White Negro
symbolizes the opposition between civilization (White) and
instinctual passion (Negro). It is not only a dialectical
but a contradictorv idea in that rage and rebellion derive
, their force and meaning from civilized passion and can by
no act of violence gain reentry into the innocence of
immediacy. Mailer refuses to accept original sin as a
fact of human life and would undo the Fall of mankind. He
: will, if need be, carry the human race back to the Garden
of Eden on his own shoulders— even if he must tread upon
all the edifices of civilization to do it. The courage he
wants is heroic, epic, Promethean, but, also, futile" (See
Braudy 82-95 for the full essay). In later work Mailer
becomes increasingly aware of the insufficiency of the
absolute Adamic separation of individual and society. His
solutions in recent books have been to cross Adamic
mythology with other kinds of idea-systems, such as
Egyptian eschatology and a hand-me-down belief in "karma"
that Mailer apparently inherited from James JOnes.
210
to be the formative condition of the C.I.A.; it is
certainly at the heart of Harlot's Ghost, a thirteen-
t
hundred page novel that ends with the words "TO BE
CONTINUED." At this point in the novel the reader
I confronts a formal uncertainty, since we do not know if
the narrative is over, if Mailer is pulling our collective
leg, if he is in fact continuing and planning to finish
; the trilogy he began with Ancient Evenings. or if he will
' simply write a sequel to Harlot's Ghost that will take us
from the Kennedy assassination, through Watergate, and up
to the Iran/Contra scandal and beyond. The formal
; uncertainty is mirrored at the narrative level, since, at
the novel's inconclusive conclusion, Harry Hubbard wonders
from inside his Moscow hotel room if he will find Harlot
alive or not. Has Harry Hubbard defected? The novel
denies us all the assurance provided by the neat
conclusions of spy thrillers.
It would be a mistake to read Harry Hubbard as Adam-
before-the-Fall, and the C.I.A. as the fallen world,
strewn with apple cores, although Harry Hubbard does begin
his career as a spy from a position of naivete. But we do
not begin the novel with young Harry. The first hundred
On the dust-jacket of Harlot's Ghost. behind the title
and the name of the author, the repeated phrase "a novel of
the C.I.A." forms a brick wall when seen from more than a
foot away. The reader, of course, is being teased. We are
outside the secret world of the C.I.A. We should know
enough to doubt the movies and spy novels that give us
scenarios of life behind that wall.
211
pages of Mailer's novel are Harry Hubbard's Omega
manuscript. Written in 1984, it concerns recent C.I.A.
scandals, the (possibly faked) death of Harlot, Harry's
split with his wife Kittredge, and his ultimate flight to
Moscow with both the Alpha and Omega manuscripts. The
Alpha manuscript traces Harry Hubbard's life as a spy from
his youth (he is attracted to the C.I.A. because he thinks
it will bring him closer to his distant father) up to the
Kennedy assassination. At the beginning of "Alpha"
Hubbard knows little or nothing about the inner workings
of the C.I.A., and in this sense he is Adamic, but this
phase is very brief. When he quickly get caught in an
internecine bureaucratic struggle, his patron Harlot gets
him out of trouble by changing his code-name so rapidly
that Harry's antagonized superior officer will never know
who to blame. Harry Hubbard's introduction to C.I.A. life
is, then, an inversion of the simple, referential language
of Adam before Apple. Agency life trains Hubbard to
suspect every memo, every individual word, of falsehood or
indirection. In complicating his Adamic protagonist's
innocence. Mailer has moved beyond the fictions of pure
opposition, of simple genuine selves with whom readers can
identify in our narcissistic antipathy toward the fallen
world of political reality.
In placing his American Adam within "the Company,"
the affectionate name for the C.I.A. used by its
212
operatives. Mailer reveals the similarities between the
i ideologies of the American Adam and the American Century:
both of organized groups of ideas that entitle and empower
American activity. Both sets of ideas necessarily repress
the self-interest behind this activity, instead creating
the belief that an "unfallen" motive underlies the
endeavor. On the individual scale, the idea of the
I American Adam underwrites this activity by separating the
simple genuine individual from the corrupt society, and on
I the national level a similar idea is at work: the
' American nation is capable of its greatest debauchery when
j it believes itself to be the simple genuine democracy
against the whole world.Whether or not this is the
, case during other periods of American history, during the
Cold War it has sometimes seemed that the American Adam is
a double-agent in the garden. Mailer has attempted to
comprehend this figure, the harlot in the garden. His
fictional interpretation of American intelligence work
does more than any other work of literature to help
readers gain access to "the imagination of the State,"
successfully dramatizing the contradictions and
uncertainties that give the large and (generally)
unknowable "Company" its structure.
"American military power, consecrated by the
victory of the Second World War and reconfirmed by the
development of the atomic bomb, joined forces with the
power of American idealism to inaugurate a policy of
global interventionism," (Steel 51.
213
American mythologies such as those of Adamic
innocence or of the "melting-pot resolution" generally
serve to suppress the pain and division inherent in
history. Travelling between the unified world view of
‘ mythology and the divisions of history is a procession of
ghosts. "Harlot's ghost" is, then. Harlot's history,
which figures the secret history of America's intelligence
! field. The "Harlot" of the title, Harry Hubbard's mentor
Hugh Tremont Montegue, is an evolving mystery in the
novel, and so the younger man cannot clarify his relation
with an authority figure in the way that Menenhetet II
can. This amputated relation to authority is Adam's
condition after the Fall, and this loss has both political
and literary consequences. Just as the day is gone when
Adam could say "it is an elephant because it looks like an
elephant," so too is the period of absolute dominion over
the Earth. There is always a time, further back, when
there was entitlement without condition and when one could
name the world with assurance. Mailer's novel opens
with Harry Hubbard's rumination about Indian ghosts on
shores of Maine, and it concludes with the assassination
American writing, as distinguished from the songs
of this continent before the first contact with Europe,
begins with and is characterized by Adamic entitlement.
The power to name and political dominion are each assumed
by the same poetic flourish: Columbus renamed the rivers
without concern that the native peoples called them by
different names. (See Bartolomé de Las Casa's "Journal of
the First Voyage to America" for a portrayal of Columbus
in the New World.)
------------------------------ 214
of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The ghosts of Harlot's Ghost
make up a historical procession from the Revolutionary
period to more recent political history.
The inversion and frustration of Adamic simplicity
begins with the title and runs through the novel. While
"Harlot's ghost" can refer to the ghost of Hugh Tremont
Montegue, the name also refers to the narrator Harry
Hubbard. A ghost-writer in C.I.A., he also becomes a
ghost-writer for Hugh. In the years after Watergate, Hugh
asks Harry to help him investigate the possibility that
the C.I.A. as a whole is on the verge of becoming an
, essentially private organization. Harlot is, from this
1
particular perspective, a defender of the C.I.A. 's
"innocence." While acting as Harlot's ghost-writer, Harry
Hubbard also writes the Alpha and Omega manuscripts. In
creating this document he is not sure if he is selling out
the C.I.A. or saving America. Like Menenhetet II at the
end of Ancient Evenings, Harry does not know if his work
aids the demonic or if it helps "some noble purpose I
cannot name."
The structural relationship between Harry's Alpha and
Omega manuscripts reflects the psychological thesis his
wife Kittredge has pursued as a C.I.A. analyst. In order
to explain theoretically the inner workings of the double
agent, Kittredge develops the notion that each person is
not an individual but is instead inhabited by two
215
personalities, the alpha and omega selves. Large sections
of Harlot's Ghost are made up of correspondence between
Harry and Kittredge, and so his apprenticeship years in
the C.I.A. test Kittredge's theories (although it is also
intimated that her unfinished work The Dual Soul follows
from a life-long effort to comprehend her first husband,
Hugh Montegue). This bicameral approach to the human
personality is an adroit way for Mailer to explore
parallels between individual and national identity.
Large-scale political formations, such as the Cold War
face-off between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., organize the
communal identities of both sides and of smaller groups,
and this encounter forms an overall identity that becomes
teleological. (Nuclear war only becomes an option when
this overall "person" feels despair; so long as one
superpower has hope, it will not back the other into a
corner.) This paradoxical approach to relationship runs
through the novel at all levels until we are left
wondering if international divisions follow from the
^^Mailer has denied that Julian Jaynes holds the keys
to his castle. "After paying due respect to Julian
Jaynes," Mailer wrote that his ideas seemed "awfully
fancy" (Mailer 1984). Clearly Mailer has considered
Jaynes's argument that our bicameral attitude toward state
and self-government follows from a biological development,
but this idea is too far removed from human agency for
Mailer to find it useful. Mailer's most interesting
statements on this topic are from "The Psychology of
Machines" in Of a Fire on the Moon; "psychology assumes
free will. A human being totally determined is a machine.
Psychology is then a study of the style of choice provided
there is freedom to choose" (147).
bicameral personality, or if the divisions in the self
i follow from the polarization of human experience by the
j
: Cold War/^
Just as the two superpowers shape each other's
identity, Harry and Kittredge are similarly
interdependent. When they meet Kittredge is about to be
married to Harry's mentor Hugh, but after many years their
^^Mailer has used the word "bicameral" on several
occasions. His use of the term in the preface to Pieces
and Pontifications is proleptic of the interrelationships
between literature, psychology and politics in Harlot's
Ghost ; "I would say to the reader that you hold in your
hand the work of a divided man. Not schizophrenic—
! divided. His personality is bicameral and built on two
points of reference. (Perhaps this is why his body,
t whenever he eats too much, is shaped like an ellipse.)
The reader, however, need feel no vast superiority.
1 Metaphorically, all too many of us are, these days, in to
: pregnant women, and feed not one person within us but two.
Here, then, are two sides of myself as I survived the
Seventies— my literary ghost looking for that little
refinement of one's art which becomes essential as one
grows older, and the cry of the street debater, front and
center, who always speaks in the loudest voice."
The ghost, we notice, is what holds the halves
together. These ghosts are what separate Mailer from
postmodernism, as I will discuss below. Fredric Jameson,
in a talk defining postmodernism in terms of pastiche and
schizophrenia, asserts that postmodern art is essentially
coterminous with "the disappearance of history, the way in
which our entire contemporary social system has little by
little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past,"
which Jameson blames largely on the media. "Think only of
the media exhaustion of news : of how Nixon and, even more
so, Kennedy are figures from the distant past. One is
tempted to say that the very function of the news media is
to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly
as possible into the past. The informational function of
the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the
very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia"
(Jameson, 1983, 125). Mailer's American Adams, rousing
, themselves in book after book, attempt to know such
ghosts, and thus to know history. _ ^
217
; love affair begins when Harry senses that Kittredge will
commit suicide. From that moment on, Kittredge structures
jHarry's life, just as her ideas about alpha and omega
determine the form of his literary memoirs.
I The pattern of the book (and thus of Harry's life)
forms an implicit critique of the sexist division of good
and evil expressed in the Fall from innocence in the book
of Genesis. In the Biblical story Eve is the temptress
who pulls Adam down, and in Milton's retelling it is worse
for women— noble Adam cannot abandon his domestic partner.
In the Omega manuscript we are initially presented with a
gothic story very much in keeping with the Biblical
, narrative. Upon the death of Harlot (if he dies),
Kittredge runs off with the devi1-figure Dix Butler, and
Harry Hubbard, like Ishmael, Huck Finn, Dick Diver, and
Jake Barnes, takes flight alone at the novel's end.
Kittredge, like Deborah Mangaravidi Kelley in An American
Dream, has been running all kinds of operations under her
husband's nose, and this manuscript ends with revelation
upon revelation of corruption. What came before that
flight seems, retrospectively, like innocence. Innocence,
as Leslie Fiedler has told us, is what you are kicked out
of. But Kittredge is certainly not the scapegoat by the
end of the Alpha manuscript, and Harry makes this clear
when he begins to read through the manuscript, smuggled
218
into Moscow on microfilm. She is at once paradise lost
and the muse that connects him to that lost world:
Even as we and the Soviets had spent years jamming
each other's radio broadcasts, so would I recite the
manuscript of Alpha whenever Kittredge became too
alive. Such observances did not always work, but
when they did, I could turn the corner. The ghosts
of long-gone deeds would not appear, and I could live
with Kittredge. Alpha was all I had of her now. I
began, therefore, to recite my first sentences aloud,
slowly, quietly. Intoning the words; the sounds
themselves came forward as forces In the unseen war
of all those silences In myself that rode to war when
I slept. (107, original emphasis)
Instead of the Adamic entitlement that names the world
freely because of an uninterrupted relationship with
I authority, Harry Hubbard names the C.I.A. , he gives it a
1
history in a prayerful observance of its ghosts.
The coexistence and interdependence of good and evil
run through Mailer's work but receive supreme expression
in Harlot's Ghost. Mailer begins this theme with the name
of the novel, as we note from "Harlot." The word
apparently has nothing to do with "innocence" we usually
associate with American Adamicism, but if we track it to
its root we see that the Harlot and the American Adam have
some rough similarities. The word is descends from the
Middle English herlot, meaning "rogue" or "vagabond." In
this sense, the harlot has a freedom from ethical,
economic, or other kinds of historical constraints, and in
this freedom the harlot resembles the adventurous Adam
whose absence Lewis laments in the final pages of The
American Adam.
219
Not all political novelists have worked through
American mythologies as skillfully as Mailer. Other
novelists have offered the reader an Adamic opposition to
American political identity by constructing fictions in
which our hero lights out for the territory. There is no
such territory for postwar Americans (excepting perhaps
the "sexual landscape" after the introduction of
penicillin and the pill). To take the title of a wise
John Updike story, American readers want to know "How to
Love America and Leave It" at the same time. The pretense
of pure opposition to the culture from which one draws
sustenance is one of the key pleasures of the Adamic
tradition.
The utterly cynical political novel offers an
imaginary stairway to transcendence. Because it results
so frequently in a morally crude vision of history, Robert
Alter dismissed the cynical tendency of recent American
political fiction:
If the conventional political novel tends to assume
that, despite troubling agitations of the surface,
all's well with the Republic, what the adversary
political novel of the past two decades has generally
assumed is that the Republic is rotten to the core.
(1982, 39)
If one knows that government is "rotten to the core," why
detain oneself with the messy details of history or the
delicacies of art? Alter's complaint suggests a new
meaning to Adorno's comment that poetry after the
Holocaust is barbaric. We can understand the comment
220
aesthetically rather than ethically if we believe, after
the death camps and the totalitarian organization of
■ modern societies, that History has revealed its
apocalyptic face. In these days, the idea would go, we
> know the meaning of history in an absolute sense; fine
distinctions, formerly the poet's province, have become
outdated: the only appropriate poetry in this barbaric
I age will be barbaric poetry.
In the days of Apocalypse Now, the argument
continues, artistic subtlety is a form of nostalgia. In
I the days of Moloch, poets may howl. Mailer evokes Nazi
■ genocide to justify the excesses of the hipster in the
first sentence of "The White Negro," and he howls against
Cold War conformity when writes, in Advertisements for
Mvself, that "the shits are killing us." Mailer's
collection of essay, short story, semi-poetry, and less
classifiable forms of self-awareness is a "Howl" in prose.
Like Ginsberg's poetry. Mailer adopts the attitude of the
outraged outsider, although to some readers he may seem to
be exploiting the Holocaust, fifties conformity, and
literary gentility for the sense of entitlement he can
garner.Our judgment of his work as a whole will
In his critical yet essentially sympathetic essay
(Baldwin calls it a "love letter"), Baldwin points out
that Mailer very often plays the "bad boy." By pretending
to be an outsider, a "hipster," the misbehaving insider
gives other insiders a sense that they know the "real
world" of the outside.
221
likely hinge on whether we are convinced that he has
gathered power from various sources for ethically
honorable or for spurious reasons.
It can be considered true that the writer's barbaric
yelp from the rooftops is the sweet and fitting response
to the age if and only if the historical backgrounds of
which we speak can properly be called "apocalyptic." In
America, where we have economic slumps, periodic foreign
wars, and above-average scores in terms of old age,
sickness, and death, we see writers oddly scrambling for
personal affliction. We all know that "writers need to
suffer," and this notion succeeds directly from the
entitlement granted to the Storyteller who has suffered.
We pause to hear the story of the car accident or the
dramatic fall. Catastrophe confers authority. The Party
of Despair needs apocalypse.
In the post-war period the apocalyptic mood receives
its greatest support from the revelations of Auschwitz,
and confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath have latched
onto such horrors so as to achieve an amalgamated sense of
entitlement. Poets such as Plath have been criticized for
mining the Holocaust for powerful images when they
themselves have not suffered its horrors directly.
Against such horrors, what can a poet not say?
Totalitarianism has, in the same manner, been the source
of power for many Cold War era political novelists. Willy
222
Stark, ominously, has a forelock in All the Kina's Men.
General Cummings predicts an Americanized version of
Fascism in The Naked and the Dead, and Lieutenant Hearn is
proven to be short-sighted in his belief that Liberals
will band together to form an adequate response. William
Burroughs's anti-heroes are chased across the galaxy by
fascistical Divisionists and innumerable other political
forces dedicated to exterminating whatever is eccentric or
individual. Billy Pilgrim finds a "world elsewhere" in
Trafalmador. American versions of the Holocaust and of
totalitarian oppression have been adapted to American
themes, particularly to the myth of the American Adam.
This kind of post-war Adamic entitlement does not sit
well with Alter, however. He expresses irritation with
American political fiction in the days after Vietnam and
Watergate not because it is a spring of protest, but
rather because it is a kind of protest that will settle
for nothing less than pure opposition: by casting the
Republic as an absolutely diabolical figure (Alter argues
that Coover does this in The Public Burning ^, the novelist
forsakes the moral variegations of history. The aesthetic
result is often somewhat melodramatic, a chiaroscuro of
good and evil in which the authorial voice is conveniently
identified with the forces of Good. Alter's complaints do
not rightfully apply to Mailer, but Alter is on the money
about most political novelists of the postwar period. If
223
we keep in mind Alter's demand that political writers be
historically responsible, we avoid being charmed by the
t
! sirens of Cynicism. Mailer's greatness as a political
novelist is in shocking us out of our coffee-house
antinomianism, which is largely why he is vilified by
today's cappuccino crowd.
iii. Hoffman's Ghost
Cynicism as a world-view is ultimately contemptuous
of history, and this is especially true of political
I fiction. For this reason Mailer rejects cynicism, the
absurd, and other broadly ironic world views. To many
readers Mailer has seemed passé precisely because he does
not dispense with Emersonian optimism in the postmodern
age, but what we find in Mailer is not an anachronistic
romantic, nor a knee-jerk antinomian. Lyotard's
proposition that postmodernism is best characterized by
"distrust in metanarratives" finds a sophisticated
opponent in Mailer's work. We find that Mailer distrusts
this distrust throughout his work. In an age increasingly
characterized by political cynicism. Mailer reworks
imaginative structures in order to keep alive Emerson's
"Party of Hope"
The hope of the Left is apparently a dead thing— a
coat upon a stick— but in Mailer's cosmology death is a
fine beginning. It may continue as a ghost or be
224
reincarnated. Though wrinkled and sweaty from its last
owner, the garment of hope may be cleaned and ironized.
To say we are in the Age of Reagan is not to say we
are in the wake of the New Left so much as it is to say we
are at the Wake of the Left. Abbie Hoffman's suicide
provides an appropriate body for this wake, for if we
conceive of his death in relation to the Age of Reagan, we
immediately confront the divide between cynicism and
paranoia. Did he kill himself because he was worn down by
years of resistance to fascistical tendencies in America?
In the paranoid version of his death, Abbie Hoffman is a
latter-day Walter Benjamin. More cynical visitors at the
wake will prefer to think that the whole New Left
enterprise was built on the neurotic grandiosity of
counter-cultural figures such as Abbie Hoffman and General
Marijuana (a.k.a. Norman Mailer). Mailer, the archetypal
survivor, counsels that we steer a course between cynicism
and paranoia.
Mailer's literary and political choices may be
understood in part as a life-long refusal to accede to the
postmodern condition that Mailer's refers to as "the
Absurd." This refusal is the key to any understanding of
Mailer's uncertain influence on contemporary American
literature, his fluctuating political attitudes, and his
sometimes startling artistic choices. To postmodern
readers Mailer often seems naive precisely because he
225
refuses the ironie pleasures that are, say, Nabokov's main
harvest, but Mailer has given much thought to the
; philosophical implications of authorial irony. While his
position has altered over the years, it has always been
consistent with his literary and political aims.
Mailer has reflected on the relationships between
literary irony and politics in his writings on Abbie
Hoffman. When he wrote an introduction to Hoffman's
collection of essays Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture,
the novelist praised the activist's lack of irony. It was
Abbie's ultimate seriousness that, to Mailer, separated
Abbie Hoffman from mainstream politicians.
Mailer revised this sentiment in a foreword to The
Best of Abbie Hoffman, collected after Hoffman's suicide.
In the later appraisal Mailer confesses that he had
previously regarded Abbie Hoffman as a clown, which, in
retrospect, was an unfair assessment. Through the
spectacles of hindsight. Mailer saw fault in Hoffman's
lack of irony. We can only wonder if, in this capsule
biography. Mailer is gazing at a possible fate of his own
but one which he avoided:
Abbie was serious. His thousand jokes were to
conceal how serious he was. It makes us uneasy.
Under his satire beat a somewhat hysterical heart.
It could not be otherwise. Given his life, given his
immersion in a profound lack of security, in a set of
identity crises that would splat most of us like
cantaloupes thrown off a truck, it is prodigious how
long he resisted madness and death. He had to have a
monumental will. Yet it is part of the civilized
______trap of literature than an incredible life is not
226
enough. The survivor must rise to heights of irony
as well. This was not Abbie's forte. His heart beat
too fiercely. He cared too much. He loved himself
too much. All the same, we need not quibble. We
have here a document of a remarkable man. In an age
of contracting horizons, we do well to count our
blessings. How odd that now, Abbie is one of them.
Our own holy ghost of the Left. Salud! (1989, viii-
ix)
I A man profoundly serious, but cursed with a reputation for
clowning. A monumental will that, in vain, defends an
; hysterical heart. These oppositions are put to the test
I
by Mailer's writings as much as they are by Hoffman's
■ life. In acknowledging the demands of the civilized trap
I of literature," Mailer avoids the problematic position of
!"naive" Adamicism: he does not sentimentally condemn
civilization and align himself with civilization's
discontents.
The ghost of Hoffman reminds us of the fate Mailer
avoids, at least if we look at his progression as a writer
through Harlot's Ghost. He seems to have determined,
somewhere between the novels he wrote in the sixties and
those he wrote in the eighties, that the obdurately heroic
mode he was attempting in novels such as An American Dream
is not the most skillful response to our time. While the
Absurd is always yerbgten, he does come to argue
consistently that our political resolve, our Hope, must be
tempered with a profound sense of irony if it is to
survive the disappointments that are the promise of
history. In Ancient Evenings the balance of Maat, a
227
tendency of all forces to in the universe to come to
balance, debunks many an affectation. It would be hard to
say exactly when Mailer's tolerance for irony shifted, but
. "Miller and Hemingway," a pivotal essay that demonstrates
how Mailer approaches political ethics through an
; essentially literary vocabulary, divides our philosophical
relation to postmodernity into the "grace under pressure"
,and the "swim across the river of shit" alternatives. In
this essay Mailer contrasts Hemingway and Miller's styles
as responses to a culture increasingly characterized by
waste, interruption, and disorder. However heroic
Hemingway's invention of the Jake Barnes persona may have
been. Mailer no longer believes it to be a posture that
sustains life in this world (1982, 86-93). Miller's
laughter in the face of all that is obscene and
humiliating is a greater source of strength. Just the
same, an Absurd world view is a sin in Mailer's novels;
, Mailer can never laugh away the social consequences of a
man's life with the assurance of Henry Miller. Though
Miller's laughter will better enable one to swim across a
filthy river than Hemingway's grace, this life and the one
' on the other side are the karmic fruition of desire. In
that all actions have consequences, there is nothing to
laugh about; in that we never really know what will
happen, we might as well laugh.
228
Mailer is not alone in seeing an antithesis between
I ironic and politically engaged world-views. Hayden White
states this position most succinctly in his study
Metahis torv:
Existentially projected into a full-blown world
view. Irony would appear to be transideological.
...[A]s the basis of a world view. Irony tends to
dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive
political actions. In its apprehension of the
essential folly or absurdity of the human condition,
it tends to engender belief in the "madness" of
civilization itself and to inspire a Mandarin-like
disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of
I social reality (38).
I
White is careful to say that irony can be used
I "tactically" by politically engaged persons, but as a
world view it is incompatible with political engagement.
The novelist who uses postmodern strategies of parody and
; fabulation to dramatize the dislocation of the
contemporary citizen from the "realities" of the political
world does not necessarily have an ironic world view, even
if verbal and dramatic, or epistemological and ontological
ironies appear on every page. Mailer, so often
misunderstand as a tactless aryan, is really a tactical
ironist.
Mailer picks up American politics by the
"affirmative" handle, though the nature of this
affirmation becomes increasingly qualified throughout his
work. In strictly political terms, his novels can be
shown to profess a belief in the "balance of powers,"
.which is perhaps the most intellectually defensible tenet
... ' 229
of American civil religion. Nonetheless, his books hardly
offer that all is right with the republic. Mailer agrees
that everything has two handles, one good and one evil,
but for Mailer there is no Emersonian confidence about our
ability to properly choose between them. For him we are
tragically divided in our moral outlook. Mailer's novels
put into play the most unlikely Manichean scenarios— he
can find gods battling in the sexual act as well as in a
grain of sand— but it is important to realize that the
greatest failure of human life is not to enlist on the
"wrong side" of the vast moral battle, but rather to
refuse to face the Kierkegaardian uncertainties that are
the painful foundation of existence. Totalitarianism
results from the refusal to acknowledge the pain of self
division .
Despite his assorted comments about "American
schizophrenia" over the years. Mailer's obsession with the
self-division in An American Dream. Whv Are We in
Vietnam?, and Armies of the Nights and more recently in
Ancient Evenings and Harlot's Ghost, does not merely
attempt to reflect a multitude of American voices. Mailer
is concerned, as Lewis suggested the artist must be, to
capture the dialogue of American life. Mailer not only
tries to imagine conversations that matter politically,
but he also tries to enter into these dialogues. Critics
such as Richard Poirier have suggested that we see
230
Mailer's writing as a huge work in progress, and the
democratic fantasy that the individual citizen can engage
! in a dialogue with power is precisely what holds this
(
huge, sprawling work together.
1
Mailer has attempted to communicate with political
powers directly, and his imaginary personas have
petitioned God, gods, pharaohs, presidents. Thrones,
; powers, dominions : the Satanic machinery of Paradise Lost
; also has a necessary place in this essentially mysterious
world. The puritanical division of good from evil is a
I condition that Mailer has worked through, and his late
novels are built on the interdependence of Heaven and
slime. Having almost driven over a cliff on the way home
; from his earthy mistress's trailer, Harry Hubbard realizes
I in great fright that
"Millions of creatures." I said aloud to the empty
car— actually said it aloud I — "walk the earth unseen,
both when we wake and when we sleep," after which,
trundling along at thirty miles an hour, too weak and
exhilarated to stop, I added in salute to the lines
just recited, "Milton, Paradise Lost," and thought of
how Chloe and I had gotten up from bed in her trailer
on the outskirts of Bath a couple of hours ago and
had gone for a farewell drink to a cocktail lounge
with holes in the stuffing of the red leatherette
booths.
Millions of creatures...Manichean battles. Intolerable to
Mailer is the absolute separation of gods and devils, of
the high and the low, of the cosmological from the red
leatherette. His whole career has been a struggle to
discover the meeting place of God and the Devil, to get
231
, Ishmael and Ahab to sit at the same table, to get readers
to talk back to the "electronic malignity" of the
I television set. Each one of these conflicts could serve
' as a metaphor for the others in Mailer's work. His work
is disturbing because it closes off the possibility of a
virgin land or a world elsewhere in which we need not
weigh the political consequences of our actions or our
inactions.
Harlot's Ghost is in a sense an advertisement for the
Central Intelligence Agency, but not in a direct sense.
f
It is a reminder that we all have some "agency," whether
or not we wish to admit it. We are, like Mailer's
apprentice spies, positioned uncomfortably between the
, "Theater of Paranoia" and the "Cinema of Cynicism"; Hugh
Montegue, guru within the C.I.A., warns that we must not
choose whether to be cynical or paranoid about politics,
but must learn to see both shows :
"it helps for us to recognize that our discipline is
exercised in the alley between two theaters— those
separate playhouses of paranoia and cynicism.
Gentlemen, select one rule of conduct from the
beginning: Too much attendance at either theater is
imprudent. One must keep shifting one's seat."
(410)
True, there is a dualism to this metaphor that echoes the
fundamentalist moral divisions founding the Cold War
mentality. Mailer does not reject this dualism in an end-
of-ideology way; instead he suggests, in the voice of his
in-house Agency intellectual, that the way out is through.
232
Harlot argues that we must become "sophisticated
I fundamentalists" (1280), which is a way of saying that we
'must approach the dualities that constitute political
reality with the subtlety of an artist. Hugh Montegue
1
,gives a sermon on the subject to the spies-in-training:
"The man with talent for counterespionage, the
true artist,"— now using the word with as much
nesting of his voice as an old Russian lady saying
! Pushkin— "draws on his paranoia to perceive the
I beauties of his opponent's scenario. He looks for
t ways to attach facts properly to other facts so that
they are no longer separated objects. He tries to
find the picture that no one else has glimpsed. All
the same, he never fails to heed the warnings of
cynicism.
I "For cynicism has its own virtues. It is
j analogous to the oil that wells up from every crushed
seed, every damn plan that went wrong.... Cynicism
' teaches you to distrust the pleasure you feel when
previously scattered facts come into a nice pattern."
(411)
i
I Mailer is the exemplary political novelist of the present
age precisely because he does not imprudently spend too
much time in either theater: Harlot's Ghost offers
neither a cynical reduction of history, nor a paranoid
organization of facts serendipitous.
Perhaps it is best to say that Mailer's philosophical
, dualism ripens from a kind of fundamentalism into a figure
I of speech. Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us that everything
has two handles and that we should be sure not to pick the
wrong one. However many voices from American history or
political handles he works with. Mailer has stubbornly
refused to pick up American politics by the cynical handle
233
of postmodern detachment, and this refusal is a mark of
his integrity as a political novelist.
After giving a talk on contemporary American neo-
fascist movements in the pacific northwest, Elinor Langer,
biographer of Josephine Herbst, was asked how today's
political writers compared to engaged writers such as
Herbst, Upton Sinclair, and John Dos Passos. Her answer,
tinged with sadness but suspicious of nostalgia, was that
"it would be more interesting for everyone if writers got
out more. " Even in today's more^Left-than-thou
academic sessions, her witness in favor of public
responsibility is unimpeachable. Writers need to get out
more, and those writers who do get out deserve more
recognition. If we discontinue the slogan "everything is
political" and ask, instead, how this or that writer is
politically significant, we can at least avoid the
embarrassment of speaking to ourselves as though we were
speaking to the world at large.
We often think of the thirties as a time when
American writers were less squeamish about political
involvement. During the present time, which some cultural
critics have termed the "Age of Reagan," it has become
increasingly difficult to make working distinctions
^^The conference, entitled "Fascism(s): Roots,
Extensions, Replays," was at the University of Oregon,
Eugene, April 3-4, 1992. Langer is now writing about
politics and racism in the northwest.
234
between the personal and the political (Moi,Said). One
I consequence of this difficulty is that many writers offer
'essentially private or specialized political engagements
as "political opposition" in ways that are valid but
certainly exaggerated. Against the popularity of what he
calls the New Regionalism (which he believes to be both of
and for the Age of Reagan), Frank Lentricchia offers a
refinement upon the slogan that "the personal is the
I
political" that helps us out of this thicket: "political
fiction is not fiction that forsakes the personal in order
to blame the public sector, which it surely does
critically assess; it is fiction that refuses the
opposition of the personal and public altogether"
(Lentricchia, 1990, 242). Lentricchia writes specifically
to praise Don DeLillo, but he links DeLillo's novels with
those of Didion, Mailer, Morrison, Ozick— each of whom
refuses to offer us a "myth of political virginity
preserved" (241). The political writer, then, revises our
myths, but in a way that will have political consequences.
The most ambitious writers set out to alter the direction
of American literature as a whole, and the most ambitious
political writers alter the ways in which readers regard
the American political process. This has been Mailer's
experiment, and it is within the context of the American
literary tradition that we should examine Mailer's fusion
235
of politics and literature to create "a revolution in the
consciousness of our time" (1959, 17).
236
Outside the Whale. Afterword
Art with an Attitude
"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will send you to hell."
Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by his brother, William
Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe narrative.
The political novel^ as I conceive it, willingly
takes on an element of public stigma for the purpose of
public, political change. By this criterion, the
political novel is always an "oppositional" form insofar
as books expressing mainstream values do not wear the
stigmata. It is an agent of change, though we cannot
fairly expect to judge the political novel as a novel
solely on the basis of its public, extra-literary effects.
But we can never ignore the public dimension when
evaluating the achievement of a political novelist.
On 17 November 1851 Melville wrote to Hawthorne in
reference to Mobv-Dick: "A sense of unspeakable security
is in me this moment, on account of your having understood
my book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless
as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me" (Melville,
1967, 566). This relative sense of security, this freedom
from the fear that his novel would alienate potential
readers, is part of what separates Melville's novel from
"the political novel," as we have been using the term. If
the author comes out feeling like a lamb, then the book is
probably not a political novel. It would be different if
all readers understood the book in the way Melville
; ' “ 237
believed Hawthorne might have, but Melville was well aware
: that most readers would not penetrate his boggy, soggy,
' squitchy picture with Hawthorne's discernment.
In Outside the Whale I have discussed Mobv-Dick as a
novel that turns away from political activism, whereas
Jack London's The Iron Heel exemplifies the risk of
stating a political position in a novel too directly.
Though we have been careful to distinguish between the
political attitudes London's novel contains and those
attitudes that are attributed to it somewhat erroneously,
the book nonetheless exemplifies the risks of overt
political expression. Certain ideas are erroneously
attributed to London precisely because he told his truths
without slanting them. This is not to fall overboard in
the other direction and say his novel was without artistic
qualities. I chose his novel because it demonstrates both
the successful strategies and the failures to which
political novelists have been liable.
I believe that activists who work for social change
must risk the sort of exaggerated and sometimes aggressive
displays that characterize The Iron Heel. even though they
risk being dismissed as complainers, lunatics, or
"Ishmaelites" in doing so. Civil rights have never been a
gift freely given. The abolition of slavery, the women's
, suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the
238
political struggles that now define our cultural landscape
are just that— struggles.
I have been presenting the political novel as a
! confrontational form, and some readers have suggested that
my research neglects feminist criticism of anthrocentrism,
masculinist values, and so forth. I have not neglected
such work, though I have avoided entangling arguments that
1 would probably distract from my philosophical and
political aims. I do not believe that masculine-
identified literary forms mechanically reproduce systems
! of patriarchal entitlement, though masculine values, as
they are often presented in literature and other cultural
forms, is frequently an apt tool for such a purpose.
I In general, I agree with Deborah Tannen that there
are separate "genderlects," that there is a great
possibility for misunderstanding between men and women
because of these slightly different languages, and I also
believe that the political novel is primarily a thing of
the masculine genderlect— whether it is written by George
Orwell, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, or Norman Mailer.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale represents the ways
in which a book written in a male-identified form can
serve feminist ends. Atwood clearly had London and Orwell
'in mind as she organized her novel. Some would say that
she is capturing or subverting a masculine form; I have
argued that she learns to be bilingual. Deborah Tannen
239
recommends in her book that men learn to speak the
I
language of women and women learn to speak the language of
i men. I have, in recent months, made it a point to role
down the window and ask directions instead of consulting a
map. Especially in matters of moral geography.
Those who wish to demonize masculine language and to
equate it with patriarchal and other ideologies considered
I oppressive to women may wish to criticize my reading of
Atwood's novel. I might have said more about Offred's
ambivalent memories of her husband Luke, for example. As
my own reading values the novel in particular for its
sensitivity to other points of view, even those of its
political enemies, I can hardly be the one to say that my
reading is the only reading. Those readers who are
appalled by the notion that Atwood found anything at all
to honor in a predominantly masculine form might, however,
do well to suspect themselves of a variety of
fundamentalism.
When we move from literary to political discourse, we
come to a genderlect impasse that could be forded, I
believe, if other political activists understood The
Handmaid's Tale in the way I do. Many feminist activists
are committed, in "The Year of the Woman," to the
; feminization of power (meaning not only the substitution
I
of female for male politicians, but also the replacement
of masculine by feminine value structures). The
240
embarrassing moment in all this is when the activist must
demand the implementation of feminine values through the
masculine genderlect. This moment need only be
embarrassing if ohe is a feminist fundamentalist who
insists on demonizing masculinity absolutely. To separate
the masculine genderlect from patriarchal values (granted:
they often go hand in hand) is to free oneself from just
this bind.
I
For example: In 1989 Operation Rescue, an
organization opposed to abortion rights with connections
to many fundamentalist Christian ministries, chose Los
Angeles as its "test case" city. Los Angeles was chosen
largely because it offered unique opportunities for media
exposure (pace Vice President Dan Quayle's attack on the
television character Murphy Brown), and so, since
Operation Rescue first began to blockade clinics, there
has ensued a media war between the pro- and anti-choice
coalitions. The Fund for the Feminist Majority organized
Clinic Defense Alliance of Los Angeles, an organization
committed to frustrating Operation Rescue. In the media
battles that have followed, both sides attempt to portray
the opposition as demonic, which is testament to Henry
Adams's idea that politics is always the organization of
hatreds. The amusing part of all this (and I speak as an
activist, for I was there, at the clinic gates, as the
rain came down in Whittier, cutlass in hand) is the way in
— 241
which men who were involved in Clinic Defense were
expected check in their masculinity at the door when they
went to business meetings. This was amusing because we
were all, men and women, supposed to be hard as nails when
confronting Operation Rescue, or when engaging in other
kinds of polemical activity.
My point, simply, is that the demonization of
masculine qualities is as untenable for women as it is for
men. It will surely happen, but it will probably waste
energy and undermine the fellowship that is the sought-
after chair in the game of musical chairs known as grass
roots politics.
In earlier drafts I considered referring to the
argument between Margaret Atwood and Norman Mailer at the
P.E.N. Convention in order to make a dramatic transition
from my Atwood to my Mailer chapters but have decided that
this sort of fight, however much it tells us about the
political infighting of writers, has little to do with the
novels they have written. In the argument (Atwood said
the program should have had more women; Mailer said 'We
tried to get Doris Lessing') Mailer apparently comes out
the weaker, but I have not seen the program.
I cim more concerned with the way these vignettes and
other bits of literary gossip pass for political activism.
A graduate student today is very likely to know the story
sketched above, but would very likely not have thought
242
about Mailer's politicization of self in his
novel/history/autobiography Armies of the Night in
relation to Maxine Hong Kingston's similar experiments in
gender and genre in The Woman Warrior. Since Mailer is,
in most graduate seminars, a Bad Man and Kingston a Good
Woman, it is almost unthinkable to link them as I just
have.
Almost any other female novelist could be substituted
for Atwood, and the parable would have the same meaning.
One would not learn from a write-up of this argument that
Mailer began his writing career with almost no insight
into women, moved through a number of cartoonish
characters, but has in the Age of Reagan been creating
female characters that are great literary achievements.
This is especially true of Harlot's Ghost. Though we must
attend the public effects of political fiction, we are
just as constrained as any other critic to separate the
insightful from the trivial detail.
Los Angeles, 1989-92
243
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Asset Metadata

Creator Whalen-Bridge, John (author)

Core Title Outside the Whale: Reading the American Political Novel in the Age of Reagan

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag language, literature and linguistics,OAI-PMH Harvest,Social Sciences

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c37-46106

Unique identifier UC11633308

Identifier DP71342.pdf (filename),usctheses-c37-46106 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP71342.pdf

Dmrecord 46106

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Whalen-Bridge, John

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA