Sorrow's Rigging: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone 9780773587205

Table of contents :
Cover
SORROW'S RIGGING
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Quest to Find Hope in a Savage World: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy
2 Dark Hope: The Novels of Don DeLillo
3 Robert Stone and the Problem of Vietnam
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Sorrow’s Rigging The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone gary adelman

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-3978-5 Legal deposit second quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Adelman, Gary Sorrow's rigging : the novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone / Gary Adelman. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3978-5 1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. DeLillo, Don – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Stone, Robert, 1937 – Criticism and interpretation. 4. Meaning (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Despair in literature. 6. American fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. ps374.m42a34 2012

813'.5409384

c2011-907831-7

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10/13 Sabon

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 The Quest to Find Hope in a Savage World: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy 27 2 Dark Hope: The Novels of Don DeLillo

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3 Robert Stone and the Problem of Vietnam Conclusion

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Bibliography 163 Index

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Acknowledgments

No note on the text, or any part of the process working up to it, would be complete without mentioning my debt of gratitude to Phyllis Rider Adelman, my wife. Her insistence on getting things right – her tireless indenture behind the scenes – kept me from fatuities and errors too embarrassing to enumerate. And my debt of gratitude to Elaine Fowler Palencia, whose knowledge of literature and language, and the unwearied freshness she brought to editing these pages, also helped me to exceed myself. Thanks are also due to Daniel S. Wong, my research assistant during the whole tenure of this process. Thanks, Dan. And to Franklin Ridgway for his help this past year. My gratitude also to Susan Firestone Hahn, editor of TriQuarterly, for publishing my essay on Don DeLillo, which was taken from an earlier draft of these pages. As for Mark Abley, who read the manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press, I must borrow an image from Pynchon for his delight at my riding my winged pig through the ether. I’m also grateful to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, especially Curtis Perry, Head of English, for supporting this book.

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Introduction

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eye in the sky Using such writers as Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Dante as literary coordinates, in this book I explore the entire corpus of the American writers Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone, who can all be seen as wayward Catholic writers and disappointed secular humanists, whose work chronicles a search for meaning in the Vietnam War era and afterwards. The postmodernists, who dominate the critical literature on these Americans, see them hauling along the detritus of the European and bourgeois order that their readers don’t know is destroyed forever by American capitalism. I see overlapping quests for meaning in a desiccated world, and use the critics’ curiously complementary view of what amounts to the death of hope and the end of time as another coordinate for the light it brings to my subjects. I seek through my analysis what J.M. Coetzee calls in Diary of a Bad Year (2007), “the battle pitched on the highest ground!” That is, the level of honesty (and personal risk) the writer brings to the central conflict of his work. Like Coetzee, who is fascinated by his extreme emotion when reading of Ivan’s rebellion against God – “[s]o why does Ivan make me cry” – I likewise dissect and analyze my fascination with these authors, hoping to shed light on my subjects’ motivation. Coetzee discovers that Ivan’s rebellion brings him to tears because of “the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world.” Then another real-

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ization shocks him: the extent to which Dostoyevsky bares himself, puts everything at risk. “Glory be!” (exclaiming at the deep source of his fascination and tears), “the battle pitched on the highest ground!” (224–6). Can Ivan be vanquished and the Word of Christ vindicated? Stone’s mission in each of his novels is that question precisely. I suspect it’s the same with DeLillo, though the difference between them is significant; it lies in the level of Ivan’s anguish: piercing in DeLillo’s version, more like dismay in Stone’s. In McCarthy’s best work, life never leaves room for hope. The three working novelists, now in their seventies, are linked by a common aesthetic having to do with a vision of the world as irredeemable. Two of them, McCarthy and DeLillo, are at their best when, as with Samuel Beckett, the needle on the scale of hope to hopelessness quivers at the grating, geological sound of galaxial emptiness. With Stone it goes the other way. His most compelling work has, I tremble to say it, uplift, though that’s putting it much too strongly. Stone repeatedly tells the story of the water buffalo talked into carrying a scorpion on its back across a stream, persuaded by the logic of the scorpion: “If I were to sting you, I’d be drowning myself.” Predictably, the scorpion’s nature prevails. “I couldn’t help myself,” it complains to the dying buffalo. Though until that moment, Stone appears to feel a childlike rush of gratitude, and hope, before the feeling dissipates into dismay. In the first four of his seven novels, he creates a character in each who (quoting the poet) “cometh from afar,” “trailing clouds of glory.” All have violent deaths because they are ill-suited to survive in the world, while giving a glimpse of a world beyond the horizon, so compelling to Stone. I sense in the sweep of the work of McCarthy and DeLillo a secret story analogous to Beckett’s in Ill Seen Ill Said (1981). Ill Seen Ill Said tells the story of how a writer opens himself to inspiration, to getting off into something new. It enacts the writer-narrator’s revenge on Mother for his blighted writer’s existence. We see displayed the writer as a predatory eye stalking the old lady in a ghostly setting, familiar as the place of his childhood, where she betrayed him. We’re privy to a supplication to the muses, in the form of the recita-

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tion of Ill Seen Ill Said, which will be the secret story he needs to tell in order to write: another artistic rendering of his revenge fantasy, which is also a love poem. Similarly, the novels of McCarthy and DeLillo are revenge fantasies on the old lady, Mother Church, for the disaster of the authors being Catholic. Revenge in the form of inflicting upon her, in novel after novel, the death of hope in the world, and the viciousness of the world, made so by human tendencies. Brought home with particular emphasis in McCarthy’s Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985), and in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), novels that literally murder hope. I think particularly of the shock to those readers new to McCarthy’s caustic vision upon reading Blood Meridian, when the evil genius of the world stuffs our sturdy quester down the hole of an outhouse. Stone is different in that a Stone novel strives to preserve at least the illusion of hope. Stone doesn’t believe in miracles, but all seven of his novels fight outward (against an insuperable intellectual squeeze) to bathe in light. That fight is central to Dog Soldiers (1974). I think the danger of allegory cautioned Stone to suppress his enthusiasm for its hero, Ray Hicks, who founders in our fallen world and loses his angelic bearing trying to survive. The nun Stone creates in A Flag for Sunrise (1981) can be likened to the angel summoned by Dante’s guide when the way is blocked by menacing demons: unpolluted brightness in the stinking air. Sister Justin is anything but an abstraction. The point? Stone is remarkable, and most satisfying to himself as a novelist, when giving hint of the transcendent. He wants to believe but can’t. His novels become instruments of self-punishment. These three Americans didn’t fight in the Vietnam War, but it was theirs: the chicken bone they can’t retch, their bosom serpent, so to say. They launched their careers as novelists just as the war turned from its early, better days into the hideous story told by Tim O’Brien, Stephen Wright, and Larry Heinemann, whose novels deal directly with the war rather than use it as a metaphor. In that monstrous ogre Judge Holden (in Blood Meridian) I see McCarthy drawing inspiration from Lyndon Johnson. His deconstructed myth of cowboy America at the time of the Mexican War,

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the slaughter launched against the border Indians, might well be Vietnam. And lbj in caricature has a resemblance to the judge. Balloon blow-up of Johnson, huge and hairless. Something familiar and depraved about the judge’s albino hairless dome and sweet, tender flesh of his baby face. McCarthy’s changed attitude towards the Vietnam War in No Country for Old Men (2005) is a dismaying gauge, maybe, of old age. His two heroes of that novel are war veterans. Llewelyn Moss, to his everlasting praise, signed on to three tours in Vietnam, and Sheriff Bell earned the Bronze Star in the Second World War. In DeLillo, the Vietnam War looms significant as a training ground for our collective covert desire for destruction. In Vietnam, we developed the personalities, strategies, practices, and networks designed to grease the slide of our civilization into the bottomless pit. In “VC Sweetheart,” one of Bucky Wunderlick’s songs in Great Jones Street (1973), the seductiveness of the war is personified as a twelve-year-old prostitute who intrigues and destroys. In Point Omega (2010), a warning and prophecy of doom are embedded in a critique of America at war.

a good buffalo hunt: the critics In the past twenty years McCarthy has been excavated by an emerging group of scholars. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (2001) sketch the early development of the field. Now, for example, there’s ecocriticism, or the study of his landscape imagery as it relates to his “egalitarianism.” Is the extreme violence of a McCarthy book bound to his vision of a terrestrial equality of all things, what McCarthy calls an “optical democracy”? Would the spokesman for a world detached from any human reference point say that what counts is accepting and accentuating the sovereignty of one’s will: pure will, pure explosive force, pure thirst for pleasure – especially in war, in killing? Is it possible to read McCarthy’s novels as moral parables? How does his mythography of violence pertain to women – or history – or to the Vietnam War, specifically?

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“How the West was won” – the myth of the American hero run amok – is possibly chief among research priorities for McCarthy specialists, defining and imposing a context of ideas on the reading of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy. Richard Slotkin’s three-volume study of a cultural myth shaping America’s political identity, romanticizing and sanctioning the buccaneer and stoic killer lodged in the American psyche – Regeneration Through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992) – is the key theoretical source for the specialists’ take on McCarthy’s Western novels. Slotkin’s thoroughness is impressive, pursuing depictions of the frontier myth in literature, film, political speeches and documents, lithographs, calendars, textbooks, cereal boxes and gum cards, dime novels, and comic books. The basic facts of the frontier myth are these: the wildness of the land, its tremendous potential for fertility, the native peoples inhabiting it. Savage war became a characteristic episode of each phase of Westward expansion. The premise of savage war and its justification is that “our ancestors were heroes who fought the Indians, and died (rightly or wrongly) as sacrifices for the nation ... A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do” (Fatal Environment 19). The answer to why we were in Vietnam, says Slotkin, has behind it the same rationale – transmitted by the myth as an imperative proving the righteousness of the proceedings. To go to Vietnam was to tap into the frontier experience again; it was to put an end to the Indian wars, to bring light to the savage places of the earth, and to give a stern lesson about the will and capacity of America to punish its enemies. Central to Slotkin’s mammoth study, and to the ideological stance of the specialists of McCarthy’s Western novels, is how America grew in wealth and power through acts of violence. The speed of the expansion from colonies to a mighty nation justified American exceptionalism, its Manifest Destiny, and its mission to the world of promoting the conditions for capitalist development. Through Slotkin we learn that America’s path to a manifest destiny hasn’t changed from the time of the Colonies, namely, a heroic-scale Indian war pitting race against race, property there

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for the taking, providing the windfall profits to underwrite the expansion of capitalism. Slotkin’s study of the mythic expression of American ideology gives the critics of McCarthy’s Western novels heightened sensitivity to the buccaneer-killer heritage of America. The specialists unanimously agree that “Blood Meridian comes close to being a novel whose true subject is Vietnam” (Vince Brewton 65). They see the novel as a glaringly repugnant example of imperialism and the charnel house of American virtue. To Megan Riley McGilchrist, McCarthy’s four Western novels stand in the front rank of the protest against the Vietnam War, which vitalized the black revolt, the feminist attack, the acceptance of the guilt for poverty, opposition to America’s seemingly endless Cold War, and the civil disobedience of environmentalists. McCarthy shows us, she says, what the reality of America’s frontier myth looks like in a postmodern world. Citing Noam Chomsky and Michael Herr, McGilchrist further points to the parallel between America “‘scalp[ing]’ the economies of weaker nations” and “actual human scalping” on the battlefield (131). “Here,” says Sara L. Spurgeon, in Blood Meridian’s ceremonies of cannibalism and rape, “is the violent birth of a National Symbolic that has made heroes out of scalphunters and Indian killers and constructed the near-extinction of the buffalo and massive deforestation as symbols of triumph and mastery, the proud heritage of the modern American citizen.” (104) In short, McCarthy (in his Western novels) “savagely explode[s] the American dream ... of racial domination and endless imperial expansion” (Steven Shaviro 2009, 10). It follows that John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses is not the boy hero of a traditional Western, but the victim of conflicting metanarratives. He is a victim on two levels: of his own nostalgia for innocence, and, covertly, ownership; and of McCarthy writing postVietnam and repelled by the myth of American prerogatives. The argument proceeds that the boy hero is guilty in his actions and imaginings of national and racial superiority, of “exemplifying the project of Manifest Destiny at its worst” (McGilchrist 166), of being a “man on the make looking for the Big Rock Candy Mountain”

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(167) – trying, that is, at some level, conscious or not, to acquire Alejandra’s father’s ranch. He never matures as a character. Quoting David Holloway: “[T]he best that John Grady can do is absent himself in the kind of death he always wanted” (McGilchrist 137) – to die with his boots on, tall in the saddle. McGilchrist adds that he’s reduced from the dream of possessing a spread in the West with pretty horses to the fantasy of an idyll in a remote cabin with “a helpless, diseased, victimized child” (158). All this leads to the children’s clubhouse in which he bleeds to death. McGilchrist calls All the Pretty Horses a “terrifying, nihilistic tour de force of historical revisionism” in the guise of “the superficially romantic story of a teenage boy” (192). So maybe it is persuasive that John Grady and Billy Parham are victims of the bizarre bombardment from two sides simultaneously: of endless, virgin, passive land, the rightness of American possession and expansion, and land-grabbing, conquering and displacing, polluting and wasting; of being haunted by the opposing claims of conquest, mastery, destiny, and radioactive waste and the poisoning of underground aquifers; victims of the conflict between the imaginative perception of a promised land and the reality of a degraded environment. Overwhelmed by a profound nostalgia for the frontier, the boys foray into Mexico, the honourableness and rightness and goodness of being American almost concealing the leakage of guilty knowledge. Yet a part of me resists this frame, which holds the novels in a vise. All the Pretty Horses is terrifying indeed if it obliges us to feel appalled by John Grady. I am appalled by the way John Grady and Billy Parham are set up in the Border Trilogy and tortured. The specialists’ frame imposes the judgment that John Grady is incorrigible for being an American. To the extent he’s innocent, he’s a victim of being an American. I feel an irresistible temptation to mock this interpretation and the indictment of America in general that the Slotkinites derive from McCarthy: “[C]ivilization and extermination marched side by side through American history” (Owens 33). Slotkin aims, in his pursuit of a four-hundred-year-old myth, to provide something approximating, in the long chain of cause and

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effect, a mechanical, scientific explanation of the life of the American psyche. As with Owens, this is too simple, except when used humorously. So when Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977) has fun describing that time in Washington when everybody (who was anybody), Ike, Nixon, Joe McCarthy, Cardinal Spellman, Foster Dulles, Emily Post, and Edgar Hoover (who took a cold shower), awoke with hard-ons and/or were blotchily incarnadined with pink and purple hickies, we crumple up with laughter. (Could Coover have been familiar with Regeneration Through Violence?) Clean as a hound’s tooth America is off to war in Korea, on a crusade to save God and country. Because, hubba hubba, we recognize the sudden, brutal invasion of the Presence, the Frontiersman, hitting our leadership like a ton of bricks. Out of the past come the thundering hoof beats. Can’t you hear those swinging doors slap and flutter? Our leaders feel as though they’re back in Arizona riding the big trail, massacring Kiowas in Morning Glory Canyon. Life’s too big to be wrapped up Slotkin-like. As readers, our engagement with Blood Meridian automatically imposes decent limits on how deeply we go to war, submit to its absolute rule of chance, put our own pitiable contingency into its midst. The novel’s a mercy, helping us prepare for the adult world. Furthermore, novels by Americans who fought in the Vietnam War are not celebrations of slaughter, but prayers for redemption, expressing, in Thomas Pynchon’s words, “a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are” (Gravity’s Rainbow 136). Peter Knight writes that “it is virtually impossible to remember what reading DeLillo was like before he came to be engulfed by the aura of postmodernism” (39). Knight means, read through the mediation of a handful of theorists who dominate the field of DeLillo criticism. Leonard Wilcox, Mark Osteen, Robert Nadeau, Tom LeClair, John N. Duvall, David Cowart, Todd McGowan, and Peter Knight, for example, discover that their fascination with Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical writing on information and media is shared by DeLillo, gripping his mind as well as shaping his novels. Fifteen novels to date on how America becomes postmodern: life increas-

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ingly lived in a world of the simulacrum, where images and electronic representation replace direct experience. In Baudrillardian terms, the end of critical thinking, the end of interiority; in place of subjectivity and imaginative vision, an ecstatic dispersal of consciousness into the world of screens and networks. Any notion of an essential identity is all but erased. Nothing authentic exists under the ceaseless bombardment of commercial images. In DeLillo, writes Robert Nadeau, the self is fashioned “for purposes of consumption” (15). Self-satisfied and disconnected in the lap of narcissistic pleasure, away we go into the glare and hubbub of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, spree killers, space walks, drive-bys, cruise missiles, motorcycle gangs, and bungee-jumping (Neal Stephenson 191), where everything’s on sale, every day a sale. No fleeting sense of emptiness, of unreality; no prescience that subjectivity emerges out of lack itself. The greatest consumer economy in the world discourages any such recognition that could imperil things continuing as they are. The postmodernist argument is that Oswald in Libra is America’s Everyman. Oswald tries to cultivate a heroic persona through his act of violence and escape his estrangement and helplessness; but he’s robbed by the media’s repetition and commodification of the shooting. He’s an image endlessly repeated on television. He’s a copy of a copy, an illustration – though of what is forgotten. For it still seems like the thing to do in America, shoot a president, kill a rock star, to escape one’s loneliness and sense of drift. The lesson of Libra is that there’s no escaping the all-encompassing system of capitalist control and its juggernaut, the commodity-driven electronic world that fashions the lives of people. Similarly, the narratives of Gary Harkness and Bucky Wunderlick depict efforts to “escape from commodification” (Osteen 55). For Gary, in End Zone, playing football excites “terminal delusions” (Osteen 34) in a flirtation “with self-annihilation through a fixation with nuclear holocaust” (Osteen 33). A longing for purity – one might say, the brain’s sacramental impulse for moral worth, regeneration – underlies his obsession with nuclear war. Osteen underscores the irony of postmodernist America destroying the world, prompted by spiritual longings.

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In Great Jones Street, Osteen says, Bucky’s music has become “a drug that deflects [his fans’] rebellion into consumption” (Osteen 54). Caring about his music, seeing its effect on his audience, he tries to escape commodification. In Ratner’s Star, DeLillo parodies important moments in mathematical history with adolescent pranks and allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, satirizing the hazards of scientific arrogance. The postmodernist argument for Players is that it critiques the structure of American identity in the post-Vietnam 1970s, by depicting “the violence and secrecy that fill the voids of needs unmet” (LeClair 14). Stripped of personality, one’s identity dissolving altogether, Pammy and Lyle need secrets; need, according to social theorist Georg Simmel, “inner property,” “adorning possessions” (qtd in Osteen 146) as a shield against depersonalization. Secrecy, says Osteen, “enables us to participate in social life without feeling anonymous, transparent, exposed” (164). In the DeLillo of the postmodernist critics, hope is like the force that drives the flower in a Bronx lot of choking garbage. Its manifestation is most curious in a reading of Americana suggested by David Cowart and inadvertently emboldened by Todd McGowan. In this reading, hope lies in the awakening of a craving for infantlike euphoria, a sensation of wholeness, a sense of self, once found in relation to mother, though sought by David Bell, who is twentyeight, maliciously, in his relationships with women. Maliciously because earnestly and despairingly, in repeated acts of revenge on self and mother. America is like a circle in the Inferno akin to that of the thieves, where everyone is self-satisfied, locked in his pleasure dome, except (hope springs eternal) those anxious few elected by lust “to wallow in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America” (Americana 119) as DeLillo puts it. In all these novels, the longing for transcendence persists as an urge to act violently. Hope manifests itself in Americana as oedipal rape. In End Zone, in apocalypse. In novel after DeLillo novel, hope survives in acts of terrorism – in seeking symbolic immortality through Hitler, the absolute politics of a cult, assassinations, even serial murder – as acts of regenerative violence that succeed not in establishing the individual but in obliterating him. Yet

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DeLillo’s affirmation of language, especially in such virtuoso performances as Ratner’s Star, The Names, and Underworld, seems to open the possibility of art mattering – of language having mystical and inexhaustible vitality, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” That is, nourishing our unfulfilled yearnings for transcendence under capitalism, albeit more likely paving the way to fascism, or hoarding. I can imagine a hoarder as a character in a DeLillo novel, one instantly recognized by the postmodernists as an avatar of consumerism, paranoia, and waste. Hoarding is what Cowart (2002) might call an “attempt ... to armor the mental immune system” (80) against dread. Shopping and shopping in order to shut it out. It’s pathetic, even endearing, that, in Richard Powers’s memorable words, “[s]omething in co-opted consciousness is still stabbing away, trying to find forever” (xii) by accumulating all this stuff. Peter Knight’s observation that it has become impossible to read DeLillo independently of the postmodernist critique, will appear true enough to anyone who reads through the critical literature. But tell me, do the politicized critiques tell us anything about the visible world? The specialists drain the blood from DeLillo, who is the very opposite of the bloodless (and often selfexempting and censorious) critics who explain him. Precisely because, to DeLillo, mathematics also leaves out the inmost self and would explain away Providence, he makes a farce of its arrogance in Ratner’s Star. I have to agree with Marilynne Robinson, who says of our best books that they’re generally acknowledged to be a standard against which truth can be judged. Now, unfortunately, “Dickens must pass through a filter of specialists who can tell us what we must see when we read him. Neither his nor our singularity is of value, nor are we to imagine his spirit acting on ours” (The Death of Adam 9–10). There is no field of Stone criticism yet. Literary critics writing about his books haven’t taken to citing one another, which is surprising, especially in light of Stone’s obsession with Vietnam and his prominence in literary histories about the war. There are many extraordinary books on the war. I’m Stone’s age. I grew to manhood

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protesting the war. We need novelists to generate new myths that contradict the propaganda. Yes, novels. Any day I prefer to put my trust in writers whose need to speak the truth about war has behind it a sorrow so aching that I trust it absolutely. Novels of Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, and Larry Heinemann provide dynamic history, more deeply probing for historical truth because getting it right matters that much. Which brings me to a question about Stone’s obsession with the war that I hope to clarify. Philip D. Beidler, in his first of two books on Vietnam narratives (1982), makes the distinction between books on the war that are the works of “an observer,” a literary point man, and the voice of the soldier in the field, the core narrative, the true interior history, works that have the feel of the worst dream becoming real. They’re the books, John Hellmann (1986) says, that question “the true nature of the larger story of America itself” and “our explanation of the past and vision of the future” (x). Hellmann calls Dog Soldiers, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato the three most highly praised literary works to emerge from Vietnam. I’d point out that Stone is at two removes from the war: he was not in combat and only observed from Saigon for two months in 1971, and his obsession with Vietnam is, at bottom, with something else. The mortifying shame divulged by Ivan Karamazov, in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” is that he knows the solution to his torment. He’s made to know in order, as a holdout, to drive himself crazy struggling with his own hypocrisy. Stone in A Flag for Sunrise creates a most resonant structure exemplifying his hero’s intellectual paralysis. He does for Holliwell what Dostoyevsky does for Ivan. Holliwell’s mortifying shame seems bound to his experience of Vietnam. But its source is the knowledge given him by Stone, the same unshakeable suspicion that Dostoyevsky implants in Ivan. Holliwell is a holdout against God. A Flag for Sunrise is a kind of prayer. It’s a begging for clemency, disguised as a beating. Stone isn’t really writing about the Vietnam War, not in the sense of Larry Heinemann in Close Quarters:

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I have traveled to a place where the dead lie above the ground in rows and bunches. Time has gone somewhere without me. This is not my country, not my time. My skin is drawn tight around my eyes. My clothes smell of blood. I bleed inside. I am water. I am stone. I am swift-running water, made from snow ... I have not come home, Ma. I have gone ahead, gone back. There is glass between us, we cannot speak. I hear voices, I have seen a wraith, Ma. (307) Is Stone less the historian than Heinemann because he doesn’t bring one to tears like this? Heinemann has achieved the right if he chooses – if it’s a matter of choice – to kick against the pricks in trying to make a go of things, to write a book. Fuck you, America, if it’s your eager hand I need to grasp to get on with my life, have a life. There’s so much anger mixed in with the depthless sorrow of a Vietnam vet like Heinemann remembering what happened and surfacing to write, that the idea of his being prompted by the notion of effecting an enlightened neighbourliness of understanding – “cultural sense-making,” in the argot of the commentator – is exhausting. This notion of cultural sense-making is Myshkin’s strategy for saving Nastasya in The Idiot. The world’s judgment, the enlightened, compassionate judgment of Americans in the street, is crucial to a relaxation of anguish, to friendship and family. It would be equivalent in the argot of the commentator to “self-reinvention.” However, it seems much too hard to care, even if it were possible to change the way of things. Which is also the way it is with the protagonists of Stone’s novels. With Stone, though, it’s the aftereffect of the trauma felt so immediately in Heinemann. Stone’s protagonists have no moral fight left. Whether they’re vets or not, it’s the given. Beidler (1991) mentions numerous books on Vietnam, books of poetry, drama, memoir, social documentary, oral history, and four novels right up front as major achievements: Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, and Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green. Furthermore, he says, “So completely has Stone come to be associated with the lit-

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erary legacy of Vietnam ... that he should probably be now considered the novelistic laureate of the post-Vietnam American soul. For indeed, throughout the expanse of his works, surely no single author in our time has created a collocation of Americans so completely haunted by such particular history” (237–8). Stone hero number one, in A Hall of Mirrors, offers himself as a puppet of a racist radio station, and, as bidden, incites a stadium of revivalists to riot. Rheinhardt at the microphone to put the jizz in the crowd – “Let us consider the American Way.” “Our legions, patriots, are not like those of the other fellow. We are not perverts with rotten brains.” “On the contrary our eyes are the clearest eyes looking out on the world today.” “Americans” ... “our shoulders are broad and sweaty but our breath is sweet. When your American soldier fighting today drops a napalm bomb on a cluster of gibbering chinks, it’s a bomb with a heart.” “The fiend stirs!” “Iowa’s never so pretty as in May.” (366–8) The little jig at the end is at the preposterousness of his cynicism, and it electrifies the house. Why does he do it? In revenge for America’s phony innocence. Rheinhardt is an example of the cost of the war to the American soul. He makes no effort to survive. He has joined the hyenas – he shits on everything. The other Stone heroes struggle to survive. I think, being simpatico with Stone, one must mildly detest all his heroes. In Dog Soldiers, Converse is disabused of his liberal self-consciousness when finding it a smoke screen for paranoid brutality, and Hicks – “a symbolic figure of American heroic virtue disowned by his culture” – becomes a grunt, a combat soldier again, but this time against the invaders (Hellmann 144). The whole amounts to an “allegorical thriller,” in a mixture of Conrad and Pynchon, of what it means to be an American after Vietnam.

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I feel a stubborn contempt for Frank Holliwell, who’s let himself be trapped into choosing sides between a people’s revolution in Central America and America’s support of its client state. Stone repeatedly kicks him in a series of concluding scenes that disgrace Holliwell. Thomas Myers (1988) says, “Victims of the official failure to read history and often unable to distinguish friend from foe, [American soldiers] became too often agents of the most telling forms of human and technological retribution” (28). Moreover, the average American soldier of the Second World War was twenty-seven; the typical combat veteran of Vietnam was in his late teens. In other words, is Holliwell to be blamed for being spiritually and emotionally annihilated by the war? But Stone kicks him, blaming him, not for his cynicism about America, or history, or human nature, but for having no hope of regeneration, knowing damn well that the war isn’t the deep-down issue, but God.

all hearts alive: coordinates for reading I think of this book as a meditation on the literary imaginations of these three American novelists. I make use of a number of different writers as coordinates for exploring and developing ideas, and creating discourse, called to mind (and, it would seem, calling themselves to mind) by some intrinsic, felicitous confluence, or chime. I’m pointing out my way of thinking about literature, that is, by analogy to other books, to a moral viewpoint I’ve learned to attribute to such and such a writer, and that serves me in the instance because of the way it illuminates my subjects. This is not an “influence” study. In no sense am I illustrating the strategies a strong writer uses to escape orbiting a precursor. “Misprision,” the six subversive distortions, as Harold Bloom describes them in his original conception of how influence works, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), is always a version of Milton’s devil’s rebellion against God, in which one of His children, the upstart writer, inescapably reveals himself to be using one of a possible six selfmutilating disguises in a futile attempt to deny his parentage.

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However, like Bloom, I embed my criticism in literary contexts. Works across the centuries are my points of reference, as they are his. Thus, Harold Bloom is relevant to reading with coordinates but dangerous to enlist. Because to be at war with critical theory like Bloom, one had better be endowed with his genius, to put it simply. He’s too formidable to be ignored: “I read for the lustres,” Emerson said, echoing Plutarch and other ancients in the Platonic tradition. “Lustres” in this sense refer to the condition of shining by reflected light, the gloss or sheen that one genius imparts to another, when juxtaposed in my mosaic ... because I believe that much is to be learned by juxtaposing many figures from varied cultures and contrasting eras ... reducing literature or spirituality or ideas by an historicizing overdetermination tells me nothing ... A God cut off from the inmost self is the Hangman God, as James Joyce called him, the God who originates death. (Genius xv, 8, ix, xviii) Bloom must mean a self-appointed God “totally distinct from what is most imaginative in the self” (xviii). It is for this reason Bloom, in his collection of critical essays on DeLillo, refers to him as a “supposed Post-Modernist” (it would be the death of the writer DeLillo if he were in fact a postmodernist), calling DeLillo, rather, “a High Romantic Transcendentalist” (2). For convenience let me identify three tiers of writers to whom I turn (four tiers, if I count the single instances, such as similes). Samuel Beckett, Dostoyevsky, Dante, and Kafka are constantly recurring points of reference. Just below are Conrad, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Cervantes, Milton, Hardy, and Denis Johnson. Denis Johnson is a special case because of the way the main story line of Tree of Smoke (2007), his great novel on the Vietnam War, seems to give an intimate account of Stone’s psychological turnings in his thirst to believe. As if Johnson’s novel, about the destructive conflict between love of country and truth, is Stone’s little book all my own. The third tier contains the writers that came to mind as coordinates in more specific situations: Thomas Pynchon, Robert

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Coover, Russell Hoban, Larry Heinemann, Tim O’Brien, Malcolm Lowry, and Vladimir Nabokov. Rough for Theatre II, Beckett’s experimental play of the late 1950s, proved key in getting a grasp on the confused ending of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971). David Bell, the hero, becomes Moe of the Three Stooges in the novel’s final scene, at a commercial garage where in furious slapstick involving three Mexican prostitutes (who give as good as they get), David gets straddled and pissed on, whereas he’s been primed by the action of the novel to commit a murder. That’s what rankles. That’s his failing: his depreciation into a figure of low comedy. And why he’s likely now and then in the future to be found considering suicide before an open window, frozen by the mockery of a life he resplendently romanticized. Which is not to say he’s not a psychopath shamelessly addicted to shocking behaviour. Our understanding of the novel could easily get confused by DeLillo’s formulaic representation of sin, encoded as childhood trauma, usually involving Mother, which the author hadn’t completely worked out at the time of his first novel. Which David has invented for himself: incest, for the lewd delights it adds to sex with an older woman named Sullivan, and imagines (the full psychic investment) to be his mother. David wants to believe (and wants us to believe) that it happened when he was sixteen. We are audience to his filming the scene (the revelatory moment of a film he’s making of his life), in which a teenager plays David opposite Sullivan. David filmmaker finds the filming (or pretends to find it) overwhelming. Breaks down. And then continues the scene privately between him and Sullivan at a motel. We’re snookered. We’re part of the audience at the bedside. Though we’re also there for his deflation: David’s inability to perform at the next level of derring-do. In Beckett’s play, to my mind, the man, with his back to the audience, poised as if to jump from an open window, is David. The contemptuous mirth of interrogators A and B cleared up the confusion for me. Nothing untoward happened between David and his mother. The insinuation gathers him an audience at the motel, a

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preparatory step to murdering a travelling salesman. But there David flops, like one of the ridiculous Stooges. Beckett’s festive, pitiless mockery enabled me to see this novel. His version of reality puts me in touch with these American writers. Nobody expresses the Zeitgeist better than he. For me, Dostoyevsky is second only to Beckett in the aptness of his concerns and representations regarding the search for meaning in a Godless world. Stone is every bit as abusive and relentless as Dostoyevsky in his critique of the secular-humanist hero. Why? I can’t resist the facetious thought of two wires in Stone’s brain moving toward each other eventually to connect for faith. McCarthy uses the Dostoyevskian setting (tavern, drunks, scene of bathos, incident of brutality) to frame the beginning and end of the affair between the judge and the kid in Blood Meridian, employing it with malice. Again, aiming at the countertruth to Dostoyevsky, he shatters the last reserves of his hero, Billy Parham, in Cities of the Plain (1998), recasting the Myshkin, Nastasya, Rogozhin triangle of The Idiot into the situation of his novel, as if a hundredfold amplifying Billy’s guilt over the death of John Grady Cole, by casting Billy as Rogozhin. Scenes and characters from Dostoyevsky’s great novels come to my mind continuously when reading these Americans. As in Mao II, where DeLillo’s four main characters are played off the four brothers in Karamazov, to contrast the old morality with the aberrance of today. Dante, when summoned, imposes a harsh, threatening reminder of inflexible moral judgment and assurance. A powerful instance comes near the opening of Stone’s Bay of Souls (2003). Ex-Catholic middle-aged English professor and family man Michael Ahearn, the hero, is on the verge of a smash-up narcissistic adventure, heedless of consequences and bolstering himself in a deepening sullenness. He returns from a hunting trip on a late, wintry afternoon, smack into a terrifying moment of spiritual angst, condemnation, and judgment. On every lawn of every house (in his north plains college town) the body of at least one deer is thrown over a tree limb. Professor Ahearn, who knows his Dante, should recognize the scene as illustrative of his own belief

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that there’s nothing but dead meat ahead, and that he just got ticketed for one of those red hot open caskets heating over fires in the Inferno, where souls like his wake up for eternity. He will pay for his arrogance. DeLillo’s characters live in terror of payment due. As types, they’d be recognizable to the medieval Church of Dante’s time – all of them doomed and terrified of being called to account. DeLillo is cold, sculptural, ruled by a metaphysics: Dantesque. But no need to wonder, one would think, whether DeLillo implies that divine retribution and salvation lie behind the hopelessness envisaged by his novels. There is no such deus ex machina in DeLillo. Although, his answer about his dark vision, given with alacrity to an interviewer in 1988, could point in that direction. DeCurtis: There’s something of an apocalyptic feel about your books, an intimation that our world is moving toward greater randomness and dissolution, or maybe even cataclysm. Do you see this process as irreversible? DeLillo: It could change tomorrow. (Anthony DeCurtis in Conversations with Don DeLillo, 73) Kafka provides a perspective uniquely apposite to the central preoccupation of these authors, the search for an absolute along with a simultaneous mockery of the search. I think of him that winter/spring of 1922 when he wrote The Castle. He was going mad: time standing still, everything racing on the inside, his brain raving on its own, in terror of ceasing to be. And then, lucky man in his broken, posthumous existence, elected to write the masterwork of the soul’s yearning for a most elusive God. Split between a writer’s self in the quasi-immune state between life and death, and a character, K., in persistent struggle to keep death at bay by ceaseless motion towards an unreachable target, penetration into the Castle, and with the strategic help of allies all of whom, mind you, are the secret hirelings and swishy whores of the Count. What else but comedy? There can be no respite from the hero’s exertions. Respite can only mean collapse, inward collapse, time for

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the bug spray. The writer-self makes merry with K., a schizophrenic tramp, muscular ladies’ man, and stand-in for the corpse he’d be without his characters. While the Count’s crowd lights up, uncorks the champagne, singing, “One more time, ladies, love him as much as you can,” delighted by and gambling on the inexhaustible K., dumb as a cockroach. K. will do absolutely anything to get into the Castle. Deflection from his purpose means non-existence so he will tolerate no disparagement. His faith in what he strives to attain is absolute. Stone’s vision of yearning for faith and, simultaneously, the mockery of that yearning, frustrate characters, author, and reader alike, especially in Damascus Gate (1998). His novels always turn into vehicles for punishing heroes who are stand-ins for Stone. In McCarthy, the thirst for redemption is torture. “You’ve never seen a world like that. It belongs to the God who was God before the Bible ... God before he woke up and saw himself ... God who was his own nightmare. There is no forgiveness there. You make one tiny mistake and that landscape grinds you into a bloody smudge.” If you wander in, just by pointing your feet, say, and forward march: gibbering dementia, that’s what’s ahead, quaqua on all sides, the voice of us all. (Three cheers to Denis Johnson, whose colonel in Tree of Smoke (2007) is quoted above (71), for inadvertently describing McCarthy’s world while speaking about Vietnam. The divine inheritance: pleasure in torture. Of what use is hope against such inexorability?) Cormac McCarthy at his best comprehends the world as Paul Celan felt it. There is so much pain in his novels as a matter of course that I wonder if he writes in order to be in touch with it. Lester Ballard, Cornelius Suttree, the kid, Billy Parham. With Parham, the most pathetic of scenes ends The Crossing (1994): the outcast drifter finding refuge in a deserted gas station. He gets violent with an ugly, crippled, rheumatic, battered dog that comes in out of the rain. It is the dog’s lair. He chases it out, follows it in the rain down the highway, and flings a pipe at it, the creature hobbling and howling. The full impact of the identification coming after, Billy out there on the road, calling for the dog, and then sitting, collapsed, his face in his hands, on the highway in a sud-

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den, strange pre-dawn light. Billy is starting out on his long journey of redemption at the moment humanity explodes its first atomic bomb. McCarthy’s best novels are pageants of hope throttled. I say “best” novels, because after the year 2000, an evangelical note enters the last two, turning them toward allegory and sentiment. In all, forty-one books between the three Americans, thirty-two of them novels (plus five plays, a screen play, two collections of short stories, and a memoir). I’ve come to waver about DeLillo’s hopelessness, the full arc of his vision of America dominated by death in Underworld, the repeated striking of that note. I’ve come to think of it as double-edged, containing yearning behind the hopelessness. His characters live on high-alert, like the thieves in Dante’s Inferno, terrified of being found out and of undergoing some kind of agony. Rage is self-protective, a safeguard against unwanted self-awareness. His characters are ticking time bombs marginally held in check (by football, rock music, or mathematics). Others I think of as floaters: treacherous innocents, or characters who survive by knowing themselves only in the third person. Almost every DeLillo character comes on the scene with some broken central mechanism, having no future, having foreclosed on a future. His is a roster of borderline psychopaths and imposters, perhaps his contradictory cry of fear and belief from the heart to Mother Church. A conclusion I came to in writing about Stone, that he blames himself for the monstrous crime of the Vietnam War – guilty for abetting and being corrupted by it – led me to conjectures about his novels that are discussed later. The need for forgiveness for the war is a powerful secret in his novels, perhaps the most important of the engines driving him, and our being privy to it makes him both endearing and a little preposterous in his insistence on being punished through his characters. Most every novel on the Vietnam War is about the futile compulsion to be spiritually clean. Every one of Stone’s seven novels is likewise a prayer for healing, in which the war represents the unpardonable sin, and he’s the Ancient Mariner telling about it, frenetically enacting the guilt again and again. Stone needs to cast his feeling of infection into a narrative and to

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repeat it, hoping for a thunderbolt, for the miracle that befell Saul on the road to Damascus. In an interview with Robert Birnbaum (11 May 2003), Stone elaborates on a religious stance he explicitly gives to Father Egan in A Flag for Sunrise and which hovers in the rest of his fiction. rs: I am not a believer in God. I have been a believer in God. I am obsessed with the absence of God. I believe in that phrase from Pascal, that says – I can’t remember where I used it ... – “Everything on Earth gives a sign of the divine presence. Everywhere we look there seems to be evidence of it. And it never yields itself to our discovery. And yet it seems to be everywhere.” Or as in the Kabalistic notions, it is as though God has separated himself forever and would have to be put together by gathering up all these items of light which is a virtually impossible task ... and yet it has conditioned the way we feel and what we want for all eternity. I think we go without it, we go with this longing and with this kind of half hallucination that we are seeing it out there….I mean because I am finally a pragmatist when I come right down to it. I do admit that faith is not what you believe, it’s not about believing in a body of doctrine. Faith is something else ... Which is an insistence that somehow that things are all right and as they should be. I don’t have that ... And somehow [things are] working out in a dimension that we can’t understand. That’s faith. I would give my fingers for that. It’s baffling that not one of his novels comes readily to mind as essential Stone, the one to recommend, his best so far, or, if not quite satisfying, a favourite. A true assessment (of aim, ends, and means), to hear the vibrato of his frustrated longing, requires, more or less, the whole performance. The most satisfying of DeLillo’s fifteen novels are the three comic ones, End Zone (1972), Ratner’s Star (1976), and White Noise (1985). About the others, which seem to be cast out of a hotter furnace, and come immediately to mind when DeLillo’s name is pronounced, it’s no less difficult (as with Stone) to recommend any one of them.

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Underworld, maybe, except it’s over eight hundred pages, and has a structure that can be justified but is not compelling. McCarthy’s Blood Meridian ranks as a great book of the century. Suttree rivals it, having a texture to its narration that is choral and poetic. A good sampling of the rest of McCarthy would be to read Child of God against The Road. Or All the Pretty Horses for the sheer pleasure of it. Cormac McCarthy has, until recently, been intractable about preserving his privacy. Born in 1933, raised Roman Catholic, he lived his formative years in and about Knoxville, Tennessee, afterward settling in Texas and New Mexico. He is a career novelist: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). He has also published two plays, The Stonemason (1994) and The Sunset Limited (2006) as well as a screenplay, The Gardener’s Son (broadcast on pbs, 1976; published 1996). So far there are no published personal letters or private papers, and no biography. Don DeLillo, the son of Italian immigrants, was born in 1936 in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. He too was raised Roman Catholic. He went to an all boys’ Catholic high school, and to nearby Jesuit-run Fordham University. He says that New York City and his Catholic upbringing are the two most important shaping influences on his writing, which took off after the publication of his first novel when he was thirty-five: Americana (1971), End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), Running Dog (1978), The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), and Point Omega (2010). As well, there are three plays: The Day Room (1987), Valparaiso (1999), and Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005). Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937 into a ScottishPresbyterian and Irish-Catholic family. Because of his mother’s mental illness, he spent some time in an orphanage. He grew up on Manhattan’s West Side and attended a Catholic high school, but he left before graduation to join the Navy. After the Navy, in 1971, he

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worked as a journalist for several months in Saigon. On the basis of early chapters of a first novel, he won a Wallace Stegner fellowship to Stanford and discovered his career: A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), Children of Light (1986), Outerbridge Reach (1992), Damascus Gate (1998), and Bay of Souls (2003). He also has published two collections of short stories, Bear and His Daughter (1997) and Fun with Problems (2010), and a memoir of the 1960s, Prime Green (2007).

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1 The Quest to Find Hope in a Savage World: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy

born in a cage I’m not familiar with any writer who comes as near to the philosophical flavour of Samuel Beckett as Cormac McCarthy. Both put the reader in a moral crucible from which there is no positive issue. Reading Malone Dies, I suddenly lost faith in Malone’s integrity, an instantaneous fall from fierce loyalty to doubt. I recalled this shameful event when, at the end of McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain, I felt exalted by the agony and pathos of the hero. It didn’t matter that I was given a backstage view of an intricate plan of destruction: the set-up step by step, even to the laying of invisible rails. In both books, where was my indignation and bitterness at the excessive pain? We allow ourselves to be played like violins by the grand narratives of our culture. The heroes of McCarthy and Beckett are among the outcasts and scapegoats in these narratives. My response was scripted in the same way that D.H. Lawrence in “Snake” cruelly flings a log, compelled by some Puritanical constriction, and I wonder if McCarthy isn’t on a quest through his fiction to sign on to the grand Christian narrative and renew his faith. Does McCarthy lend his hand to the bow, or like Beckett, enable us to catch ourselves tuning up? Prior to Suttree (1979) the question has no pertinence because the characters have no notion of redemption. In Suttree and Blood Meridian McCarthy reveals his full genius in constructing pageants of hope throttled.

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Yet one word here about Outer Dark: that in its formal composition, and mixture of the tendentiously Gothic with incongruous flashes of festive gaiety, it is strikingly Beckettian. The protagonists, sister and brother, have a child together, whereupon they are expelled into a shared nightmare of countryside and interminable roads, but cut off from one another as if on parallel roads. The brother is always running for his life. Whoever succours him is violently slain by three pursuers, chief and subordinate maniac killers, performing to instructions impossible to divine, and possibly representing retributive justice in this nightmare universe. The sister is passed on by couth hands, abetted in her instinctive search for her infant son until she loses her mind. The little babe lost is killed and its blood is drunk. Two books later McCarthy is preoccupied with the spiritual quest of his hero Suttree in that same lost world where life is a punishment for birth. In Blood Meridian (1985) McCarthy fabricates his imagery in service of a story that is particularly compelling in the abstract, on the plane of metaphysical speculation. This is also true, to a lesser degree, for Suttree, which doesn’t yet have the audience. It is the fourth and last of McCarthy’s Appalachian novels, all set in eastern Tennessee, with Suttree centred on the slum life of Knoxville (the Knoxville of the early 1950s, when McAnally Flats sprawled down to and along the Tennessee River). Beginning with Blood Meridian, the next five novels are set in the Southwest on both sides of the US-Mexican border. Suttree and Blood Meridian, so ostensibly different, are alike in their operating laws: humanity lives with terror; the world is irredeemable; the longing for redemption adds to the torment of being alive; there’s no way to rid oneself of the agony except through violence. In the face of all this, both are quest novels. The heroes discover who they are in the world and then they try to survive themselves and the world. The idea in Suttree that giving birth is a crime – waking an infant into sentience, giving it bodily awareness and organs of sense, and then expelling the gasping creature into a life of torture – puts the reader in mind of Beckett. McCarthy’s educated bum, Cornelius Suttree, trying to survive (or, more accurately, to postpone suicide), appears to imagine himself in a world analo-

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gous to Beckett’s in The Lost Ones (1970) – as if he, and many another hard type he’s befriended in the slums of Knoxville, are among the numerous, naked “little people” rushing about the central arena of Beckett’s cylinder world, like insects caught upon a log in a fire. Everything about Beckett’s cylinder is craftily designed. Panicky terror is accentuated by a rapidly pulsing reddish murk that serves for light. Rapid fluctuation of temperature, producing sweat and freezing it, desiccates the skin; and it is contact of ravaged skin against ravaged skin that produces a ceaseless, maddening sound of swarming insects. The ready analogy to specific prose works of Beckett tends to impose Beckett’s authority on this reader, namely, the idea that Suttree’s vision of things is true. “Suttree coming up out of this hot and funky netherworld attended by gospel music” (21). The line prettily suggests an aspect of Suttree, who is a fisherman by trade during his three years on the river; he has chosen to live in the nether region of the city, among the helpless and the impotent, in a houseboat with a tin roof and small, Spartan cabin. When he and his brother were fished out of the womb, his twin was stillborn. He survives as an unworthy one survives a disaster, as if his death is due and life but a temporary and contemptible postponement. For which reason, perhaps, he feels impelled to live on and fish the squalid river, birth canal of fetal and fecal. Suttree is the solicitous one come to live among slum-dwellers. The poetic idea of his being a Jesus figure flashes out often even to the extent that the novel can be seen to follow the Stations of the Cross. He is also a drunk; his cronies are drunks and bums – men who drink to take the edge off, and for the fellowship of corpses; but also to feel their rage mount as they try to kick free of the coffin in which they are buried alive. (This “convulsion” Dostoyevsky calls the strongest human drive of the psyche in The House of the Dead.) Suttree’s story extends in time about three and a half years, from his mid-to-late twenties. He’s cut ties to family, a marriage, and his education to live at the river end of a slum section of Knoxville, where he scrapes together his needs by selling the fish he catches. He lives partially submerged, passively, without vital force or joie de

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vivre, and one senses in the course of his story a spiritual geography of two lower regions into which he descends: of squalor and surrender. The occasions in which he collides with the past are agonizing. He has many acquaintances: drinking pals, all of them drunkards; homeless bums whom he befriends; and several others for whom he tries to intervene against fate. Because he has chosen to live this way, he is not a victim of society. Our deep sympathy for him is a chief feature of the novel; it matters that his future is at stake. The fate of the others is relentlessly predictable. The opening pages consist of a prose poem, or proem, evoking McAnally Flats in the unmistakable voice of an author establishing the setting of his novel. Unmistakable, because McCarthy is keen even to pedantry on the eccentric particulars of a world he knows intimately. His narrator, by contrast, is a tormented spirit condemned to life and permitted ephemeral relief through projection into Suttree. He lives in and through Suttree, as the ghost of Suttree’s stillborn twin, haunting his unconscious and exerting the pressure of a mountainous debt. It boils down to this: Suttree has to take the place of the twin whom he instinctively killed in order that he himself might live. This, in a nutshell, is the squeeze, the quest, Suttree’s story. The narrator lyricizes and enjoys Suttree’s despair: he’s a lyricist of matter in its stages of disintegration. Molloy, too, apprehends eternal decay: an apocalyptic waste that no one would choose, if not cursed with life. Suttree’s is a cosmic gloom. He recognizes himself as a victim in a terrestrial hell. He wants to commit suicide but cannot. His sense of moral obligation won’t permit it. Instead, we see Suttree killing himself slowly with drunken binges. Nothing in the book directly explains Suttree’s break with family – respectable family connections privileging him to a Catholic education, then matriculation at the university – or his move to Knoxville’s Bowery, where he discards letters he receives from his mother, unread. Existence has him teetering on the edge of anomie. Inevitably, he sinks into lonely threadbare dereliction and drunkenness. The author produces a scene of bums in an alleyway trying to keep warm in an abandoned car, Suttree one of them, lying slumped beneath the wheel. They’re waiting for a bar

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to open at five a.m. The bingeing, as it grows to violence, leads to a connection also central to Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano. At ten that night more than a dozen cronies gather at a roadhouse, where “the music with its upbeat country tempo scored like an overture the gatherings of violence just beneath the surface” (185). In the brawl, it is McAnally against the world in an eruption that ends for Suttree when “[h]e dropped like a zombie among the din and the flailing” (187). The combatants, personified by Red Callahan, whose epithet is freckled fists and a pleasant smile, are warriors. There’s the possibility in drunkenness of climbing to the plains of freedom. Suttree runs errands among the down and out. He has his rounds, and occasional unwanted requests are thrust on him. Leonard, a friend, asks Suttree to help him dispose of his father’s corpse, decaying six months in the back bedroom of the house so that his mother can continue to receive welfare checks. He does priestly service for the rag picker and the old railroad man (confessing both, to exaggerate a point). And for Harvey the junkman, who wakes him in the middle of the night in pursuit of whiskey. Suttree tries to persuade him to spend the rest of the night with him. He offers to row him to his place back across the river. The next day he checks in on him. Finding him drunk, askew the bed and floor, he “eased him back onto the bed, solicitous yet somewhat loath to touch him in his leprous rags” (269). And there’s Harrogate, lost to the upper world and notice of Suttree for days, interuterine in the cavernous bowels of the city. He has used dynamite for entry into a bank vault, and is petrified now after the winds of concussive blasts have thrown him about and engulfed him in sewage and absolute blackness. Suttree rescues him, but first (small matter) the narrator chronicles Suttree’s rescue of one of Rufus’s hounds from drowning in a slop barrel. To find Harrogate, he descends by a well rope down a dry cistern, stooping his way through a low tunnel, and spends half a day searching. The next day he returns. On the fourth day, venturing into “a rising sulphur reek of sewage” (276), he finds Harrogate hallucinating. These are the actions of a saintly man, a truly good man. I’d like to think moral courage matters, is redeeming, relieves guilt, and use

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the epithet, priestly service, to emphasize the point. I use it also to vindicate Suttree from readers’ judgments: that he’s a callous bastard; that he has on the whole no follow-through, no will or empowerment really to help; that he controls how much he gives in all his relationships; that he’s a kind of hyena, feeding on whatever is at hand, including himself; that he’s a drinker on a path to becoming a drunken bum; or, most venal of all, that he’s merely slumming. It seems I’ve made an appeal to the powers that be, a kind of prayer for the screws to be eased for Suttree, for saving his “brother” in that harrowing adventure of the caves. Nonsense. If he were the Son of God incarnate dispatched to save humanity, how could we blame him for human failings when the world he discovers is a torture machine? What can we imagine him doing differently that would matter? When he enters the Church of the Immaculate Conception, possibly to confess, and is repelled by memories of a thousand hours performed as an acolyte, a notion takes hold: that his status as a fallen Catholic goes tortuously deep. In considering the terrible affliction he prays to have lifted, all his life has prayed to have lifted, that of having kicked his twin brother to death in kicking out into the world, his denial and rebellion are no light matter. After all, his Catholic upbringing has taught him that every human being is born crippled by Original Sin uniquely personalized, and can expect nothing but torment in the ephemera of existence except by His guidance. In fact, far from being a hypocrite, Suttree appears to be doubly afflicted: a guilty man thirsting for redemption in a Pauline world without God. So in late October, Suttree takes a bus to Gatlinburg and hikes up into the mountains, desiring pain, cleansing pain, mortification, to be alone, lost, in high altitude exposure, huddled in a blanket, staggering through snow, purged of memories, purged of identity, sustained on wild things, purged of flesh, becoming a scarecrow of what he had been formerly. Yet his soul and the world remain unchanged. And the knowledge of it has him sobbing uncontrollably and walking aimlessly the streets of a town in his rags.

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In the fall, after his third year on the river, he takes to wandering the city endlessly, a reeking, filthy figure, his belt a piece of twine. A drunk and a bum, he finds a room at last in the deeps of McAnally, down steps of an unpaved alley, in a cellar, a cubicle behind a furnace, pipes hanging from the ceiling. What else can one expect but this descent? He’s wedged in, buried alive. He might kick for all he’s worth, like a man waking in a sealed coffin. The bourgeois life that he’s born to squats on the lid. It’s another great enforcer. There’s no going back and nothing to be done. It’s all a slide from the first. Activity, a slowing down, entropy, inanition, death; a seasoning of frenzy and terror – like in The Lost Ones, even to there being a solicitous one like him who goes about looking into and closing blinded eyes before positioning himself (as in a final tableau), and the cylinder world shuts off. But suppose this variant: that the solicitous one does not die when the cylinder shuts off. In that black and cold, a seed of consciousness that knows itself doomed to waken – all in that world to be relived and all but one as if for the first time. Again to be singled out in the role of the solicitous one, and to have no means of escaping who he is. All to ask, go on? Struggle on (past the end of the novel)? We might imagine Suttree the divine Son trapped in a human destiny and inviting debauchery in protest to a compulsion to fulfill an impossible behest. As if, on one level, he has been commissioned to clean a river of the filth of human intercourse by fishing; and on another, having thrown in his lot with the little people, he feels toyed with by the Maker as the vanquished multiply. “In their faces signature of the soul’s remoteness. Suttree felt their looming doom, the humming in the wires ... Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster” (381, 383). He finds Ab Jones semi-conscious in an alley, beaten by police. Epitaph: “erect with a strength and grace contrived out of absolute nothingness” (440), vanquished. Gene Harrogate carried off for a long term in the state penitentiary, vanquished. Also among the vanquished, Red Callahan, shot in the brains by a bouncer, his hands still in his pockets. Wanda Reese, the teenage girl Suttree loved

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briefly (like he loved the fidelity of the motion of heavenly objects), crushed under a mudslide. And the old railroad man buried in an asylum. And the old rag picker dead in the hole in the ground he called home. Suttree curses the creator of the torture, but breaks his promise to burn the old man because he so wretchedly succumbed to it. Others shot to death. An aged black family dispossessed. A girl gang-raped in the back seat of an abandoned car. Leonard, his face covered with carbuncles, dying of what appears to be aids. Drinking buddy Hoghead, shot dead when “he was twenty-one years old forever” (403). And Joyce, joyous prostitute who adored Suttree, trashed. “Suttree gradually going awash in the sheer outrageous sentience of her” (393). A big woman with expansive thighs and full breasts. “You said you were under indictment. What for? Selling my pussy. Her impish grin. Watching him” (394). He’s kept, is their story in a nutshell, doing nothing, literally, idling when she’s out of town building their bank account. She tells him everything about herself, “all the towns and cheap hotels and a couple of lockups and a few sadistic pimps and tricks and the cops and the jails” (399). She buys him a wardrobe, rents an apartment for them. She in Chicago ten days, he “in the airy front room above Laurel Avenue and staring into space” (402). And so she gets or seems to get fatter, and more intrusively the hooker that she is – coming and going, abluting and douching and laving herself with creams. She buys him a Jaguar. And they have a holiday, impostors at a swanky resort, and another at a lake. But he can tell her nothing of himself. Then one drunken Sunday morning she tries to destroy the car, kicks knobs off the radio, kicks out the windshield; begins tearing up whole handfuls of money, ripping it up, crying, and throwing it out the window. Vanquished. He walks out of her life. “He lay in his bed half waking ... his feet together and his arms at his sides like a dead king on an altar. He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth’s cooling seas, formless macule of plasma trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come” (430). As to say, waking to a stridulence of sound, the booting on again of the solicitous one’s world, and Suttree’s compulsion to scour his room.

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The end, the only ending possible for Suttree, would be a fizzling out. I’m thinking that the fate of narrator and character in Beckett’s “Fizzle 3” would be truer to McCarthy’s vision than the ending we’re given. Suttree is one of those books that opens a space where we go to savour the pain, a book that must be fiercely loyal to its vision. To the rag picker’s hole in the ground, cracked open by the vibrations of a bridge stanchion. It should be Old Sut’s place now. keep out, in yellow paint. Old man solitary as some kind of feral creature surviving by its snappish nastiness. Instead, Suttree falls sick unto death with typhoid fever, and the authenticity of McCarthy’s vision of the lost ones is compromised by a scrupulous attention to the corruption of his flesh. The real issue is not overcoming a physical illness, but going on despite a sense of cosmic futility. In delirium, Suttree’s preyed on by sexual nightmares. He is separated from himself, “interested” in these productions, a spectator at a carnival, until he is threatened by a vendor selling a turtle from a wet sack, and rises up in bed “gagging his cries”: “Those are not turtles. Oh God they’re not turtles” (455). Puling, “affront[ing] the nostrils of God” (455) with his dire stench, he’s wheeled off by Death. Suttree’s Sin, one of the fetuses, gelatinous mess in the wet sack, is inseparable from the affronting stench of his body and his life. So his terror is paraded and mocked in the pitchman’s language and the gaudy colour of carnival. This Suttree, who sneaks out of the hospital and is collected by fellow drunk J-Bone, is given a ticket for continued passage, the assumption being that he has shown himself to be a bulwark against his worst fears. Hasn’t he turned much of what his psyche throws at him into laughter? And so the author is complacent at the end to see mounted a carnival show, and to see it as Suttree’s healthy resistance to dissolution. And why not see it this way? For me, the ending is fraudulent. There is no basis for the renewed vigour of Suttree’s will to live, for the sky’s pink and the covey of symbolic gestures accompanying him to a new life. Unless we contrive to believe that it’s a trick: his soul’s made to struggle, hope, yearn, forget that the past was an impaling and that the future will be another. He’s cozened, he can’t help but be because –

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because human nature has been fashioned to endure torture. How else explain its endurance? In Beckett’s terms, Suttree survives because our hatred of life is trumped by our stomach for giving and receiving pain.

captain horror and kid christ Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is an epic narrative that explores the problem of redemption in an irredeemable world. It rises to spectacle in the moral imagination, where the actors clash on a metaphysical plane. The novel is grounded in a treatment of the myth of the American West, which McCarthy deconstructs. In its deconstructed form, its violence, sensationalism and genocide define that ineradicable part of human behaviour that dooms the planet. In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of the kid, a fourteen-year-old runaway from rural Tennessee, who, drifting southwest after the war with Mexico, joins the Glanton gang of scalp hunters. John Joel Glanton, a historical figure of the period, contracted with governments on both sides of the border to exterminate Indians. The kid’s story becomes one with that of the gang, of hunting down Apaches in the desert regions of Chihuahua and Sonora. His terrible immersion in slaughter and scalp-taking extends over a year, during which he grows morally. By repelling the seductions of the judge, Glanton’s satanic second in command, the kid develops a spiritual dimension that haunts him for the rest of his life. The judge is one of those largerthan-life characters of recurring fascination. He’s a giant (with, it seems, superhuman knowledge and power), at war with human weakness, the need to make covenants, the need for worship, the idea of the sacred. The kid’s story after the period of carnage and his struggle with the judge is one of aimless drifting as he searches for closure. In this world of savagery, it is as if the Son of God awoke to a dim awareness of himself incarnated as a fourteen-year-old kid: a stocky, illiterate runaway filled with an exasperated rage that has him bloodied in desperate fights. Moral consciousness in opposition to

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such a predisposition and the viciousness of the world will come to define him. One can see from a primary source for Blood Meridian, that is, Samuel E. Chamberlain’s memoir, My Confession, how far McCarthy pushes the material he uses and towards what end. Chamberlain is fifteen in 1844 when he leaves Boston to go West. His narrative goes up to 1850, recounting not only his army experiences in Mexico, but his time as a member of the Glanton gang, the period taken from the memoir to form the storyline of McCarthy’s novel. (Chamberlain worked on it until the Civil War broke out, when he was thirty-one. My Confession was first printed a century later in 1956.) McCarthy’s character the kid is only superficially based on Chamberlain’s Sam. Both work numerous jobs, acquire a fondness for strong drink, go to New Orleans, indulge there in all kinds of dissipation, and end up in a town in Texas where it seems to rain all the time. But there is no hint in the memoir of a special token of grace, of Sam’s dimension in the speculative abstract. Sam is all for adventure, and the kid, although he doesn’t know it, is on a quest. The treaty of peace ending the Mexican War was signed 30 May 1848, and ceded New Mexico, Arizona, and California to the Union. When Chamberlain’s memoir recounts his journey west with a portion of the army (El Paso to Santa Fe), it becomes rich source material for the novel. Sam deserts and is recruited into John Glanton’s gang of scalp hunters, where he meets ex-priest Tobin and others mentioned in the novel, especially Judge Holden. The Glanton of the memoir seems to have struck McCarthy as the kid’s alter ego and double – to be dead-ended as Glanton is, head stove in and spiked on a lance, if made the judge’s protégé and pet. The memoir provides a rudimentary motive for Glanton’s character – the abduction and murder of his wife-to-be by Indians. Whereupon, he becomes a renowned Indian fighter and brooding solitary. A policy of extermination of Apaches after the war, with its bounty of fifty dollars a scalp, makes a gang leader of him. In the novel there is no such explanation. Glanton, rather, is the judge’s unruly darling of the moment.

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The judge in Chamberlain’s memoir is huge, physically and as a presence, but not in the dimension McCarthy creates for him. Sam reports: “he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women” (271). And little girls, too, he goes on to add, telling of the judge’s rape and murder of a tenyear-old. “The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out” (271). Sam hates him at first sight, but goes on to relate with awe (as Tobin does in the novel) the judge’s mastery in what seems every field of endeavour: “[H]e conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians ... He was ‘plum centre’ with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy” (271). He’s a reader of nature, Sam records. He smiles, he’s affable, meaning his face tips off nothing of what he’s thinking. A man of astonishing genius and brutality. In McCarthy’s treatment, it is as if Faust rules the world. Two adversaries in Blood Meridian act out the novel’s internal debate. The judge embodies the ferocity and depravity of the species. He speaks for it. He is what has come and is coming – the power and determination of Authority to control lives and destiny. How to state the kid’s meaning as he evolves? Holdout, among the best defences that can be mustered against the ageless, unkillable judge, who can’t die unless the human species dies, or until the species changes so that the line of its descent changes. Pondering the kid in the judge’s post-apocalyptic world leads me to the subject of survival. I think of Des Pres, Todorov, Blanchot especially – touching bases, warming up on the question, what constitutes responsibility in a situation in which one is more or less posthumous, at the whim of power? And if one is among the wreckage, in the aftermath of a gala dance (as the judge might well call the Holocaust, or Vietnam), the question of what matters, of what one can possibly seek, has me pondering the kid in the context of other literary treatments of human wreckage.

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I think of Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker as the post-judge world. People in packs, among ruins, in ceaseless rain and mud; atmosphere growing perhaps less poisonous, sun perhaps coming back. What matters is restoration: seeking the past, recreating language and values. I think of Beckett’s waste assortments. Nothing to be done. What matters is keeping the unspeakable world at bay. I think of Larry Heinemann’s novel, Paco’s Story – Vietnam veteran so thoroughly killed in the war that he won’t finish himself off, not out of contrariness, but hurt, deep, continuous, manageable. The kid knows what he knows – that he likes to kill – and so feels cursed by having survived. He believes his death is due, because of a psychic wound worse than Paco’s. He can’t be allowed to escape his suicide. The kid’s visceral aversion for the judge is seeded at the beginning. The massive figure – all of seven feet, three hundred and forty pounds – calmly informs a revival congregation that Reverend Green by the pulpit was run out of Arkansas for congress with a goat. The kid is a witness. Witnesses again at the tavern (where the judge buys him a drink), the judge readily admitting to men at bar that he never laid eyes on the Reverend Green before. Laughter erupts, that universal laughter conspiring with viciousness, in a tavern, with the kid looking on, taking it in. The scene is reminiscent of Raskolnikov in the dream of himself as a kid looking on at Mikolka beating his horse to death outside the tavern. The last scene between the two adversaries is also set in a tavern unmistakably Dostoyevskian. What atmosphere better for the debated big issues of redemption and the shape of the future, if only for the contrast of his moral stance with the judge’s postapocalyptic world? The judge’s eyes are on the kid from the first. Those “great steady sucking sounds like a cow” is the judge coming to the kid’s rescue when he’s at the mercy of Toadvine’s Bowie knife (9). Clubbing the kid with a shillalegh saves his life. The mud that is the town of Nacogdoches, Texas, where these events occur, is not gratuitous. The novel begins and ends in mud – the kid nearly killed in mud on the way to the jakes in chapter 1, and smothered in the mud and shit of a jakes at the end, in chapter

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23. Perhaps that world of mud and shit in How It Is, that Beckett wrote in 1960, is one of the masterworks influencing McCarthy’s artistic thinking about where we are as a species. In brief, we find in Beckett’s stylized grotesquerie the universal use of torture as a means of quickening the sensation of being. The prelude to the action proper of the novel establishes the kid as a quester in a long line of the type. The kid’s flight from the Comanches ends the prelude. It is the first of three of the kid’s miraculous escapes over uncharted desert, each narrated as pure adventure. He’s like a fairy prince, some special station accorded him by these desert transits and risings from the dead. He is arrested, shown the severed head of the captain whose reckless foray nearly undid him, and taken to the capital city of Chihuahua, May 1849, for sentencing, where he meets up with the judge, who is now a member of Glanton’s mercenaries, and the story proper begins. It begins with a set piece processional of the gang down main street of city: [A]nd they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs ... Foremost among them, outsized and childlike with his naked face, rode the judge. His cheeks were ruddy and he was smiling and bowing to the ladies and doffing his filthy hat ... He and the reeking horde of rabble with him passed on through the stunned streets and hove up before the governor’s palace where their leader, a small blackhaired man, clapped for entrance by kicking at the oaken doors with his boot. (78–9)

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When next the kid rides out, he’s in the ranks of these heroes, contracted by government to exterminate Apaches, redeeming scalps for gold. Tim O’Brien thinks, in his Vietnam story “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” that just about anyone may be lured in and disappear into violence. With the kid it’s different. He comes on as a runaway with a brooding taste for mindless violence, but is stopped short by a self-awareness that he owes to the judge. Something rudimentary is born in him by his aversion for the man: an ethical striving not to be afraid of him. Covenants between gang members are brittle. The kid is the only one who answers appeals for help and treats his cohorts as comrades in arms. The ex-priest, Tobin, is attracted by such ingenuousness, and especially by the kid’s obvious distaste for the judge. Disgust not too strong a word, even in the early stage, before accumulation of little evidences of the judge’s “craziness,” the kid’s word. Even suspect in the early going is the unaccountable broken neck of a mixed race boy (in bondage to ore prospectors and not much younger than the kid) whom the gang comes upon. That the judge murders him, probably solacing the boy, winning confidence, and then breaking his neck, is more than plausible – perfectly in line with similar behaviour all are witness to. Also about this incident hangs a suspicion, a feeling about the judge that later enters the kid’s nightmares and lies behind his horror, not too strong a word, of being gathered against the terrible immensity of the other’s flesh. Unlike Tobin, he’s not the least awed by the judge’s mastery. The judge literally knows everything and can do anything. “That great hairless thing,” remarks Tobin, “[y]ou wouldnt think” (123). The kid is unimpressed. “I done studied him” (122) and “I seen him before” (124). Which makes all the rest a secondary matter to him, the judge’s strength of Heracles, his knowledge of Dutch and Romany, his mind and strength of a superpower shaping lives and destiny. Glanton is inexhaustible, ferocious, pursuing signs of Apache encampments: “They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them ... At a desert well they dis-

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mounted and drank jaw to jaw with their horses ... When they resaddled and rode on they went for miles through cobbled ice while a polar moon rose like a blind cat’s eye up over the rim of the world” (152). Glanton is their steersman, their embodiment, gives them agency, conjoins them, makes them a thing that had not been before. The partisans, nineteen in number, bear down on the encampment where upward of a thousand Apaches lie sleeping. Glanton like an Achilles, the narrative riveted on him and his kills. When we see the kid, he’s offering assistance to one of his confederates, McGill, who’s been skewered with a lance. Glanton orders him away before shooting McGill through the head and scalping him. This godlike man is a hatchling of the judge. When the judge lectures, it is to us out there, embodied by the kid’s hostility to him, that he would appeal. He is sitting naked at the campfire scribbling in his ledger. The others are quiet now, each in his round of darkness after so much killing. Says the judge of a sudden, “It makes no difference what men think of war ... War was always here. Before man was ... It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them” (248–9). Not a creature, not a dog left behind. Shambles of the scourged Apache encampments. And ride into the city of Chihuahua on 21 July 1849 to a hero’s welcome, bearing on poles innumerable bloodcaked, blackened scalps and decorative assortment of desiccated heads to a fantasy of music and flowers. And on to the carnage of a defenceless village, and deeper into the Sierra, another collection of mud huts, where the collective sob triggers something in Glanton, an absolute conviction of agency. And ride again into Chihuahua to receive bounty in gold for scalps of peasants they contracted to protect. Tattered, stinking, ornamented like cannibals, huge pistols in their belts, they ride into and encounter one hundred and twentytwo ore-burdened mules labouring up the sheer rock wall of the mountain towards them. Following their leader, every man of them fires point blank at the muleteers, and, pushing methodically between the mules and the rock, shoulder every last one of the animals off the escarpment.

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Yet, the variety of scenic imagery for the gang’s riding forth monumentalizes them, makes them and their enterprise larger than life, confers a grandeur. Even where implicit indictments are reinforced by authorial interjection, the numerous, marvellous stylized backdrops cannot be neutralized. On the day following they crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood ... They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable as the burnedout floor of hell and they climbed up through a low range of barren granite hills to a stark promontory where the judge, triangulating from known points of landscape, reckoned anew their course (251). The effect is celebratory. “[T]hey rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun” (185). This glorification of war, at the same time experienced as bestial, might serve as diagnosis of the kid’s affliction at the end of the story. The judge regards the kid’s condition quite differently, as defection from him, from the truth: a soft spot, disappointing. The judge half-naked, sketching and scribbling in his ledger. Nearby, an idiot in a cage hooting softly and gnawing on his feces. The kid squats in his blanket watching these two, the judge and his moral double. On the plane of ideas, the argument is put forth implicitly (and in the religious cadence of the prose) that the judge’s view of things, whether true or not, cannot be accepted. The unspoken alternative is to don faith, like a heavily furred great coat, as Tolstoy thought of it in his struggle to believe. In Blood Meridian, science is the eruption of the devils out of hell, and faith performs like comfortable and stultifying blinders. McCarthy oscillates in point of view, maintaining a narrative resonance I think of as schizophrenic ambivalence – apt for the kid. At the Colorado, where there is a ferry trade and an encampment of Yumas, Glanton seizes the ferry, slaughters the Yumas, robs

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and murders travellers at the crossing, and enslaves the young women, chaining them by their necks to posts, stripped naked, with bowls for food and water. The chaining is a whim of the judge. What happens at the ferry during the twelve or so days Glanton is away buying provisions is reminiscent of Kurtz’s unspeakable rites. The judge satiated in bestiality. Glanton’s return, unannounced, triggers a Yuma attack that decimates the gang. The judge is to blame. What is it about the judge’s behaviour that seems important to the debate? I think the answer is, reducing him. With the kid looking on. John Joel Glanton’s head is split to the throttle. The kid and some others escape: Toadvine; Tobin, the ex-priest; and Brown, who is somewhere else. The judge, of course, manages to extricate himself from an engagement with a twelve-year-old girl and slips away. Each of three miraculous escapes is teased with iconography of the kid’s special grace. In the second escape from Mexican cavalry, solitary, in high altitude cold, he’s given life warmth by a burning tree in the foothills of the desert, and so forth. In the third miraculous flight he carries an arrow in his leg butting against the bone, which never infects, and he outmanoeuvres the judge who tries to kill him and Tobin. In San Diego the kid is taken for an old man. He’s arrested, which is what he waits for and wants. His jailer reports that he’s become unhinged by acts of blood in which he’s participated. The sudden identification of the kid with Child of God’s Lester Ballard is surprising. Later, displaced, drifting on, like Paco in Paco’s Story. The kid carries a Bible with him, which he cannot read. He comes across penitents in the desert, naked to the waist and flailing themselves with whips of yucca, barefoot and leaving a trail of blood; others in the procession are harnessed to carts loaded with stones. The kid by and by finds them hacked and butchered, without heads, disembowelled. One survivor before whom the kid kneels and begs to be of service is a mummified corpse. Not knowing this, he tells it his story, pouring out his heart. “She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years” (315). “[T]he essential is to go on for-

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ever squirming at the end of the line” (Beckett, eloquently, in The Unnamable, 338). Late winter 1878. The kid is forty-four. Time has come for his last scene: a low-life tavern in a North Texas prairie town. It’s out of Dostoyevsky, and Leonov after Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov parodying Dostoyevsky. The boisterous rabble, the beggar with hat held out shuffling between the tables, the little girl cranking a barrel organ and the dancing bear twirling in a crinoline. The kid at the bar drinks a whiskey and sees the judge at one of the crowded tables watching him. In essence, the judge merry, and no new disclosures to the kid, who is tensely wary. Mainly to say, nothing happens by accident. The kid denies that he’s been looking for the judge, but the judge knows better. The kid passes an unsatisfactory interim with a whore. Then out the back down the walkboard towards the jakes. Opening the rough board door, steps in. The judge is seated naked on the closet. And is gathered against the immense and terrible flesh, and hears the wooden bar latch jammed behind him. A foreordained end, alas. The kid’s quest, the traditional quest for Christian salvation, plays into the judge’s hands. The kid is led along that stony path through desert and mountains. His life becomes a penance. Only, the author can’t give any satisfaction, or show, in good faith, any religious answer. The script is the judge’s, of course, to his dictation. Imagine, the kid all along playing right into the judge’s hands. That’s where it has to end, gathered against, flag snapping crisply, foreordained. There follows in an Epilogue a parable on the post-judge world. Wherever there is a sign of life the need and means are found to extinguish it. What else, what more does the novel mean? That in a world ruled by the judge, Beckett’s trilogy is the nearest we have to the Bible. The arresting question is how much regenerative power to assign to the kid? Perhaps being at war with the judge is the only redemptive act. Georg Guillemin argues in The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (2004) that savagery and lust for extinction are inherent in the

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novel’s aesthetic order. Human beings (the narrative insinuates) have no more distinction than any other creature or, for that matter, tree stump or stone. Reason and culture are explicitly erased and “the novel ends in a powerful incantation of Death triumphant” (98). Steven Shaviro (2009), whose essay first appeared in 1992, anticipates Guillemin. There is only “the clash and testing of wills” that “must end ... in the sacrificial consumption of everyone and everything. And such is finally our inmost, most secret and most horrific desire” (20) – to kill and be killed, uttering (I would add) savage cries of violence from the heart, Ahab to Moby-Dick. Which may be in Shaviro’s mind when he says of Blood Meridian, death’s “baroque opulence is attended with a frighteningly complicitous joy” (10). I find spiritual value, a sense of hierophany, in the kid’s struggle against the judge, none in a version of the novel as an allegory of the war in Vietnam. The notion that McCarthy wrote the book to explode the myth of the good-guy cowboy, our national icon, so as to show the US mission in Vietnam for what it was is benumbing. This is what Sara L. Spurgeon (2009) does. The judge, in her reading, personifying America’s hegemonic ambitions, is put in the role of sacred hunter, that is, exhibited in barbaric display within the moral context of hunter-gatherers in relation to their prey. There’s America for you, shown for what it really is, says Spurgeon. “Through the course of the novel, the judge will turn the old myth on its head, pervert it and cannibalize it ... shaping the attitudes that would come to justify American devastation of the natural world, genocide of native peoples, and imperial adventures from South America to Southeast Asia” (93, 96–7). Spurgeon doesn’t for a second imagine that McCarthy is preaching salvation through Blood Meridian: that the earth is holy, and we must keep aggression in check, the lessons of a compassionate life learned by the practice of a disciplined and habitual benevolence. Reading Blood Meridian as an occasion to hiss at John Wayne for being caught turning into the wicked, perverted, cannibalistic symbol of American capitalism seems ridiculous. I feel prodded to ask if there isn’t some legendary violator of the covenant, defiler of the sanctuary, avatar of the judge and pervert

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twin to our cowboy, that gave legitimacy to Egyptian, Assyrian, and Persian power, to Greek, Roman, and Ottoman power, to Spanish, French, and British imperial power, and what the rewards were for all those historical perverts who walked in such ways and founded empires. Now America is closest to the sacred centre of power, a nation to match the mountains and the sea, a transfiguring glory in its bosom, that with a smile of Christian charity lets fly, Kaboom!, and decimates a whole paddy field of contentious gooks. Force rules the world still. Robert Coover’s spirit of inexhaustible satire in The Public Burning (1977) is a welcome ally to the mood history sooner rather than later dumps on anyone. McCarthy must shudder at being used for high-minded bashing of America. Here’s a riddle concealing a mystery that should shake all exegetes to the core. Who is he, this avatar of a creature that if slaughtered would be present in lubricants, paint, varnish, ink, detergent, perfume, leather, and food; in vitamin A and corticotrophin to treat arthritis; in brake fluid, ice cream, soap, shoelaces, fertilizer, pet food, cosmetics, tennis rackets, and the manufacture of film (Philip Hoare 340)? The answer to the riddle is Judge Holden, who is huge, albino, and hairless, like Moby-Dick; who, like MobyDick, is at the heart of a quest in which the Pequod crew lines up with Glanton’s gang, and butchery of whales with butchery of Native Americans, and Ishmael with the kid, castaways left to figure it all out, though in the final analysis both writers play with their colours like a cat plays with its tail – for inscrutable reasons.

all the pretty cowboys The inspired attention McCarthy gives to certain types of victimheroes, the ones embracing their pain and perpetually tormented by it, might suggest that he’s looking for a loophole in his negative thinking. His world is much the same as Beckett’s. Pain is the human condition, and reconciling it with the Christian God is impossible. And this means that persistence in this matter is a kind of necrophilia; there’s nothing left to pick through but funeral baked meats. Notions of grace, indwellingness of spirit, and election, beg for mockery. Notwithstanding, the Border Trilogy has me

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wondering. All his best fiction is about victimhood, about heroes consumed by pain, and none more so than Billy Parham of the Trilogy. Perhaps in touch with such pain McCarthy is as close as he can ever be to the nub of himself, to something real. How deep goes his Catholic training after all? To dreaming of the unthinkable, unspeakable reward for bravery? That the Master may walk along the corridor, contemplate the writer, and say, “you must not lock up this one. He is to come to me.” The Border Trilogy is the story of two heroes, John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parham of The Crossing; and the two together in an agonizing consummation, Cities of the Plain. In All the Pretty Horses John Grady’s is a charmed adventure. Tamer of horses, beloved of a Mexican princess, he is the author’s darling, and though created by an author inspired by victimhood, is featured without hint of the later, shattering convergence. Memorably treated by striking literary embellishments, as when the author makes use of D.H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died to display John Grady’s spiritual beauty while emaciated and physically scarred from a term in a Mexican prison; and as when he uses Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” to suggest John Grady’s depth of feeling. John Grady does it all, wins and loses in love, triumphs over gloom, defeats the evil captain, rescues the pretty horses, and rides off into the sunset. Yet the author of this romantic story contrives the destructive fate of its hero in the second novel of the Trilogy, The Crossing, which is the story of youthful Billy Parham, of how he chances to be elected for a special destiny – in a victimhood that will implicate John Grady. Cole will again figure prominently in the third novel of the Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, as a reincarnation of Billy’s dead younger brother, and it is marvellous that the author has discovered the perfect narrative subtext for the psychic casting and shattering towards which the separate adventures of his two heroes move. In Cities of the Plain McCarthy resonates, as with a gigantic bell, the pain and sad wreckage of his heroes by paralleling or scripting the narrative to that of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. The haunting presence of Myshkin, Nastasya, and Rogozhin behind John Grady, Magdalena, and Eduardo, creates anguish for the reader and an empathy

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akin to love for Billy, who will blame himself for John Grady’s death at the hands of Eduardo. Cities of the Plain is like a terrible dream of judgment condemning Billy for what happened to beautiful Boyd Parham twelve years before. Billy embraces his perfidy and worthlessness when it happens again with John Grady’s death. Eduardo is the manager of a brothel in Juarez, Mexico, just across the river from El Paso. Magdalena is one of the whores, a sixteenyear-old ethereal-looking girl. She’s been made to learn, like Nastasya, that there can be no escaping who she is to the world (even, possibly, to herself). She rather than Myshkin is the epileptic. John Grady loves her at first sight with an excruciating tenderness deeper than anything else in his life, precisely the feeling Nastasya solicits from Myshkin. “Prince Christ,” as Dostoyevsky calls Myshkin in his notebooks for The Idiot, is helplessly drawn by the lost, plaintive, terrified appeal of her soul, and he dreams of being able to console her. But Eduardo has his own exclusive relationship with Magdalena, and is in love with her. Like Rogozhin, he murders her out of jealousy: cuts her throat, kills her prince and is killed by him. Billy reads himself into this story, split between horrified witness and murderer. In Suttree, the hero struggles to recoup, having survived his stillborn twin. Again, in The Crossing, the hero blames himself for the death of his “twin,” his younger brother Boyd, and can’t recover. There is no question that Billy, like Suttree, is of the elect. He is bushwhacked at sixteen when a hungry, predatory Indian presses the boys to get him food. In effect Billy brings home a wolf, who later kills his parents and steals their horses, while Billy unaccountably runs away from home with a real wolf he’s trapped. He is returning it to mountains across the border when the terrible consequences he fears, and hopes to prevent by his propitiatory actions, occur. He believes himself most culpable for thoughts and feelings in retrospect become enormous, though blame, if one insists upon assigning malice to happenstance, lies elsewhere. He’s become the trapped one in this affair of wolves. Boyd hides in the woods during the killing of his mother and father, all that rendered agonizing by the Indian calling out to him, cajoling him by name. Upon his return, Billy kneels to a new load

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of guilt, his surviving brother’s troubled state of mind. It’s useless to look for agency behind the events which follow, not to say malicious intent. He returns to Mexico with his brother because at the moment it seems necessary to track the killers and reclaim the horses, though in hindsight, the journey back to the US without Boyd will seem a desertion. And then the damning repetition a decade later that shatters him. These victims of God’s election, like Parham, and the kid, and Suttree, are spectacles of pain. In Cities of the Plain, John Grady is Boyd’s reincarnation – to Billy, of course, who reads himself into the story behind the story (supplanting Eduardo) as the Rogozhin figure, the jealous one and murderer of his noble and beautiful friend, because reverberating into these events is the jealous part he played years before in his brother’s romance with a Mexican girl – as if his perfidy lay behind their secret elopement and Boyd’s death. Billy’s pain is unbearable; punishment alone can sustain him. There’s something exalting in the contemplation of Billy Parham at the end of the Trilogy. At the same time, there is something excessive and unwarranted about Billy’s suffering. The heroes’s lives converge and flow on into the narrative of The Idiot, like a ship destined to run into an iceberg. In the confrontation with Eduardo in the alley of the brothel, John Grady gets carved up, his stomach cut open, his chest and his arms slashed, before his lucky underhand thrust. He lurches away pressing down on a great tube of gut. A boy helps him to the far corner of a lot and into a clubhouse made of packing crates. “Help me ... If you think I’m worth it. Amen,” he prays (257). When Billy gets there, he’s finished. What Grady says before he dies is not the chief thing: that she was so beautiful, that when he found her body at the morgue he knew his life was over and that he felt relieved. The chief thing is what Billy thinks to himself, carrying the dead John Grady in his arms. Who can make it out, the perverseness of his friend, so inherently gentle? Why him? Thinking, you should have taken better care of him, you should have helped him more, you should have been there when he needed you, you were jealous again. “He was crying and the tears ran on his angry

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face and he called out to the broken day against them all and he called out to God to see what was before his eyes. Look at this, he called. Do you see? Do you see?” (261). The questions, whether God sees or not, and what, if anything, one is to make of these spectacles of pain, are reserved for the epilogue. (Although, interspersed through The Crossing, authorial wisdom on these matters appears in the form of stories, set pieces, parables of a kind told Billy by a priest, a blind man, a gypsy, which are appliquéd to the action.) In the epilogue he drifts, working at this and that, increasingly reliant on charity, taken in when the cold weather comes. The sketch is tiny for the years of miserable loneliness. Seventy-eight, and afforded a shed off the kitchen by a family just outside Portales, New Mexico. The children are twelve and fourteen. They have a pony. Sometimes he’s invited to play cards. One night he shouts out in his sleep and wakes to find the woman sitting on his bed with her hand on his shoulder. Boyd was your brother. Yes. He’s been dead many a year. You still miss him though. Yes I do. All the time. Was he the younger? He was. By two years. I see. He was the best ... I’d give about anything to see him one more time. You will. I hope you’re right. You sure you dont want a glass of water? No mam. I’m all right. She patted his hand ... Betty, he said. Yes. I’m not what you think I am. I aint nothin. I dont know why you put up with me. Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I’ll see you in the morning. (291–2)

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Who Billy really is, is given in the final scene: Billy is a downand-out, holing up here and there, haunting the country of his youth. He is sheltering from rain beneath a concrete overpass, sharing vending machine crackers with another vagrant, the author, no doubt. The man says that he once traced all the places he had been to on a map to see if the impression of those tracings told him anything about himself. However, such constructions never work, he says, because it is impossible to stand outside one’s desires. He then gets to the point. Why, God, such pain? providing for answer something like the following commentary: The desire to be released from suffering is an affront to God because it is equivalent to desiring not to be born. Furthermore, it is a criticism of God’s plan. Agency, meaning, are a matter of chosen narrative. Each of us is the bard of our own existence, stringing the events of our life into a story of our own making. This is how we join ourselves to the world. Crossroads are an illusion. We read our fate onto the world, which we are acting out in any case. Propitiations are thus mendacious. One’s life may as well be the dream of another, and that man’s of yet another, and men but infinite threads on a loom, and pain can only be contained by worship. “Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained” (287). It seems to follow, love him who can stand for all men, who is our unmistakable stand-in. Love him and honour the path he has taken. Billy is the Prince Christ of the story (more so by far than John Grady), because Billy has judged himself in his soul, and his calvary eases the way for the rest of us. Something wrong here. I’d like somewhat more bitterness in the residue. It seems to me undignified otherwise – to feel exalted, tearful, pacified. As Simone Weil offers in speaking of the Iliad “Never does the tone lose its coloring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop into lamentation” (24). This aim may be a motive for the heavy inclusion of wisdom parables, chiefly in The Crossing – portentous parables with commentaries, presented as the metaphysical framework to the novels. Critic Edwin T. Arnold reads them to imply, for example, that the external world, our terrestrial life, is one of three inextricably connected worlds, and that we have prescience of the other worlds, the one of light and the one of dark-

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ness especially, it being so closely conjoined to our external life; that evil preponderates over good, wrath over mercy and peace; that what seems chance and contingency are the workings of Providence; that the best one can do is to start out again. Such wisdom, which Arnold says is based on the seventeenthcentury religious mystic Jacob Boehme, brings to mind Kim Stanley Robinson’s anaerobic bacteria that live in poison, yet slowly excrete the necessary condition for the emergence of a fully oxygenated life. And Beckett’s mockery of the way it is: everyone on the move through the shit like the “scissiparous frenzy” of latrinal slime worms, a peristaltic forward motion like turds to be “shat into the open air” (How It Is 113, 124). Hallelujah! As to why Billy cannot turn aside from his fate, I like Hardy’s answer in his poem on the Titanic. Because the Spinner of the Years is enjoying himself. Suttree is a watershed, in which McCarthy discovers what he is up to – that the process of writing is a palliative for the loss of faith, a simultaneous longing and squelching of that longing, and that the writing process revitalizes him (through his empathy with the hero’s pain) to engage in yet another hopeless, fictional quest. Not so with The Stonemason, his play of 1994, in which he mocks his hero. The play is a set-up, a confidence game, and a Bronx cheer at those who are taken in. We witness the past events of a family drama, and a hero looking back at his part in them (from the future stance afforded by a lit podium), struggling to cling to his faith, and to dampen the pain of his cowardice at dealing with the messiness of life. As specified in the stage directions, these soul-throbbing monologues are delivered as performance, “Chautauqua,” suggesting William Jennings Bryan’s famed evangelical oratory. Because Ben controls the play from the podium – his pseudo-heroic delivery, casting himself upon the bosom of the audience – he is at best a self-promoter, not a witness for faith. The play’s action is set in a large Victorian house in a black section of Louisville, Kentucky, 1971. In addition to the hero Ben Telfair, thirty-two, a stonemason, the cast includes his centenarian grandfather, mother and father, sister, wife, and his sister’s teenage son.

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Ben feels responsible for his father’s suicide, and for his nephew Soldier’s protracted isolation from the family, which ends in Soldier’s death from an overdose and causes the break-up between Ben and his sister. He deserves the hard fall because he’s a holier-thanthou good man who, for so long as he can blame himself and wallow in his guilt, will lose his wife’s love, and remain estranged from his sister’s family, in order to keep his faith intact. The tendency towards the evangelical dawn at the end of The Road (2006) is especially clear in McCarthy’s published scripts. The Stonemason pillories inauthentic Christians. The Gardener’s Son casts himself out of the Garden by rebelling against his lot. In The Sunset Limited, the battle is explicitly joined between an evangelical Christian and a secularist. In The Gardener’s Son, which was broadcast as a pbs film in 1976, McCarthy tells how and why Bobby McEvoy kills the mill owner, James Gregg, and shows, then, as if in slow motion, the destructive consequences of the murder. The plot and tone owe much to Child of God (1973). Bobby, when seventeen, loses his leg on the job, and is handed a broom to be office sweep, an acrobat on a crutch. When he quits, he’s evicted from his mill-owned home for being a vagrant and troublemaker. He leaves Graniteville, a nineteenth-century mill town in South Carolina, to scrounge for an existence as a hobo. He’s brought home two years later by news of his mother’s illness, arriving too late. He’s still the graceful, one-legged wonder, indicating that he had had all the promise in the world. He carries a gun for his personal protection. Searching for his father, he approaches the mill, confronts the mill boss in his office, provokes an incident, and shoots him. Remorseless, bitter, self-justifying, Bobby can’t bear acknowledging what his crime has done to the community, to his father and to his sister, Martha. Eventually they go out of their minds. His hanging is shown up close – the loud, violent falling of the trap, the camera below. After the hanging, McCarthy draws out the play, insisting on the issue of consequences, especially to Martha, who is fourteen at the time of the celebrated murder. Years later she’s interviewed by a film

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maker (and grandson of the Gregg family) at the state mental hospital. She relates how destructive Gregg’s murder was both for her family and for the town. The message is that Bobby should have borne his cross patiently. Perhaps McCarthy is more and more the lapsed Catholic who wishes the fairy tale were true, and who will increasingly evoke it as if it were. Later, as here, the turn toward Jesus is by default. Otherwise there is only madness and death. The Sunset Limited had two stage productions in 2006 and was published in October of that year, immediately following the release of The Road. Disappointingly, it portrays the hatred of life, the deathdriven, unbreakable stranglehold McCarthy has come to identify with secular humanism. In this regard, it advertises the evangelical underpinnings of The Road. The one-act play opens on B and W in B’s tenement room in a condemned building. B is a big black man in his mid-forties, a hardened ex-con who has found Jesus and a new sense of purpose nursing junkies. W is a suicidally depressed, balding white man in his mid-fifties, a cultured professor. The energy flow is completely one way. It’s as though W is clinging to a rock, or is the rock itself, and B continuously washes over him in a tide of evangelical good will. The professor, rescued by B from attempted suicide on a subway platform, finds himself constrained by B’s determination to save his soul. Finally, says the professor, who has frustrated B’s every move, his horror of horrors would be to waken to an eternal life in bliss where “the forms I see ... no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life ... Your God must have once stood in a dawn of infinite possibility and this is what he’s made of it ... Now there is only the hope of nothingness. I cling to that hope” (139, 141). In short, the blessed get an eternal ringside seat to the suffering on earth. McCarthy’s late turn to God feels like capitulation. I find moral sustenance in the struggle of Beckett’s protagonists in the trilogy to survive despite, and because of, the “professor’s” truth, which is also Beckett’s (and Suttree’s, and is the truth implicit in the kid’s

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and Billy Parham’s narratives). Whereas the professor, who can’t go on, has become the straw man of an author who has lost the austerity of vision of his best fiction.

necrophilia and sunday sermons The contrast between Child of God (1973) and No Country for Old Men (2005) convinces me that spiritually, McCarthy’s best work comes from the same dark place as the writings of Samuel Beckett. McCarthy’s true muse is a hostile planet with no quarter given. Heroism constitutes a doubtful virtue. How define it in a universe in which a necrophiliac pervert has an identity more authentic than that of a fatherly officer of the law? It’s loners, drifters, and outcasts McCarthy’s instinctively attracted to because they endure in extremis, in a world in which enduring is always hopeless. A wind blows through McCarthy’s novels – all but the last two – a cleansing wind of caustic, hygienic anti-sentiment. It is McCarthy’s perfume, pleasing to the muse, whose true darling, and the pole star of this kind of performance, is Beckett. The Beckett of the late prose does not equivocate. That this isn’t the case with No Country for Old Men disappoints us. Its hero’s Sunday-school teachings are artistically insupportable. Which is to say, yes, McCarthy’s in his natural element when he’s like Beckett. Child of God relates the story of Lester Ballard, legendary in the east Tennessee county of Sevier. It begins as an exhibition of eyewitness accounts and pictures of the orphan who became a necrophiliac and murderer. At the outset, he is being evicted, the property on the auction block overrun by the curious, as if it were a fairgrounds. He’s a small man, ill-shaped, with a rifle in hand. Someone at the auction hits him with the flat blade of an axe. Lester can’t quite seem to support his head from that time. The sale of the house to John Greer, whom he later tries to kill, is legal – probably a repossession. He retreats to an abandoned cabin where he sits cross-legged, with his few possessions, blackening potatoes over the lamp chimney. He had a grandfather who was hanged for outrages against Negroes. And then his father hanged himself. Ballard was nine or

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ten at the time. “The old man’s eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish” (21). His mother had run away from home by then. Little is known about the care he received as an orphan. We know he went to school because we’re told of an incident in which he bullied a younger boy. In his mid-twenties, at the beginning of the novel, Lester never holds a job. When the blacksmith at Sevierville shows him the knack of repairing an axe head, “Reckon you could do it now from watchin? he said. Do what, said Ballard” (74) – meaning, ain’t interested. He’s a mountain bum. Emphasis on Lester’s mistreatment effects a haze of distraction. What we relish is seeing him out there in his momentary existence – indeed, portrayed by a balladeer in a language of fierce spareness. Eschewing echoes, foreshadowings, and such ornaments that are the imprint of the author where he oughtn’t to be, puts the emphasis on seeing. Let the inner eye alone occupy itself with suggesting (through Ballard) the plight of the writer, who, for one thing, can only get along with people if they’re dead. The dump keeper greets him in a friendly manner, but Ballard has no such luck with any of the man’s nine daughters. He perseveres, showing up at the dump alongside country boys with their big feet and hot rods. There’s also a girl, whom he’s shortly to murder, who lives at home – in bondage because lame and stuck caring for a disabled child she cannot think of as human. She is repelled by Lester. The backstory ends when Ballard finds a dead teenage couple on the back seat of the boy’s car, poisoned by exhaust fumes. He pulls the girl from beneath the boy and copulates with her. Then he takes her body back with him to the cabin along with money, whiskey, and the girl’s lipstick. Other necessaries he purchases in Sevierville, including the red dress displayed in a show window. And so would arrange her in different positions, and after a while just sit holding her, or feeling her body beneath her new clothes. “He undressed her very slowly, talking to her” (103). This goes on till fire burns his refuge to the ground, cremating the girl’s body. The fire is the result of carelessness on his part, and indicates what soon enough becomes evident, an emerging aspect of him that wants to selfdestruct.

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Ballard’s new abode is a mountainside cave an hour’s climb away. Rifle, axe, a blanket-load of provisions, and a pail of hot coals are dragged through a crawl way of red mud into a large area with a roof hole. For company he brings three stuffed animals won at a fair. Stalking Greer keeps Ballard going for the time being. It gives him a destination while wandering about in the snow – to spy on the man who’s living in his house, and to fix him in the rifle’s sights. The next event has been gathering; turnings and choosings have all led to this: Ballard visits the girl taking care of the handicapped child and gets thrown out. He circles around to the back of the house, and perhaps is playing the game of sighting the back of her head and going “bang!” when she rises from the sofa and turns to face the window. He kills her. He kicks the stove over, setting the house afire, hoists the dead girl on his shoulder, and leaves the child behind in the burning house. In fact, Lester’s necrophilia and serial murders have been so exquisitely prepared for that this first instance of his brutality, though shocking, doesn’t altogether surprise us. His quarters at the cave amount to a fire pit below the roof hole, his stuffed animals on a pile of brush, and his other possessions tossed about. Ballard has daringly explored the cave to a depth of over a mile, ultimately crawling into a tunnel that brings him to his belly, and then up a chimney entering into a tall, bell-shaped cavern. Here, on ledges like stone pallets, he has laid out the body of his victim and will carry the others and likewise visit them. At this point he splits in two – inexhaustible animal cunning on one side, crazily blatant exhibitionism on the other. “He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well” (140). Is this a genuine insight into necrophilia? Most of his days now he lives underground, dreaming and thinking and lying with corpses he imagines to be alive. No one could see it coming, his desperate frolics on the mountain – raiding Greer’s chicken house noisily, unabashed. He takes to watching the house from an overlook. He watches the road for Greer. Dressing as his victims is an event, and it seems slipped in almost too casually. But it also may explain why, for the most part, he keeps his distance from Greer. It’s still a game of hide-and-seek.

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Until he kills two people parked on the mountain, or thinks he does. He drags the corpse of the girl into the woods. While making love to her still warm body, he hears the motor of the car, and runs with his pants down after the boy, shouting to himself, “You won’t get far, you dead son of a bitch” (152). This ends his anonymity. On one night of heavy rain with a multitude of searchers hunting him, he drags each of his rancid, mould-covered corpses to higher ground through a sinkhole. He weeps with loneliness and hopelessness. Soon he has an arm shot off by Greer, acting in self defense. The curious little creature, rousing bemused loathing, lies wounded in a dress and in what appears to be a woman’s wig. He has taken to wearing head pieces “fashioned whole from a dried human scalp” (173). Three of Beckett’s four short stories of 1946 (the Nouvelles) begin with an eviction – from the parental home, or charitable institution, in either case enacting the infant’s expulsion into life. Indeed, one might imagine, as Beckett does, the souls of the dead in restless torment at the prospect of living again. These remarks are meant to answer the reader repelled by Child of God. Even Tolstoy (I say even because of his posture of erectness) said he could imagine himself doing anything and committing any crime. There are those in this tale who grant Ballard a humanity for which he does not thank them. But that’s neither here nor there. He lives on his own (from the age of ten to twenty-seven) before crossing a line and killing, and is then hunted as he howls in his solitude, nothing but wrath to sustain him. Whatever he is, crazily perverted, deathdriven, he seems also a piece of creation, a figure of nature, an aspect of the deity that created the world. He is not an animal. “He dreamt that night that he rode through woods on a low ridge ... Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again ... He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death” (170–1). When men enter his hospital room and order him into the cab of a pickup, one of a caravan of cars and trucks, he eludes them. Three days later he surfaces on the far side of the mountain and

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checks himself back into the hospital. He understands where he belongs. No Country for Old Men is a pale version of Dostoyevsky’s Demons; it has the same theme, at any rate, the imminent take-over and transformation of life by demons. And it has a chief demon who is fascinating enough, but hardly the repulsively clownish and unkillable Pyotr Verhovensky, not to mention Stavrogin. I wouldn’t mention the parallel to Dostoyevsky if No Country for Old Men didn’t have a hero who insists on it. This is Sheriff Bell, and the role McCarthy creates for him seems to me unsustainable. Sheriff Bell enters, setting the stage for Chigurh and the action of the novel. “What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? ... But he wasnt nothin compared to what was comin down the pike ... Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction” (3– 4). He doubts that it’s possible to defeat him. To confront such a person, “a man would have to put his soul at hazard,” he says (4). Your own vestiges of decency will end up killing you, is what he means. The anti-hero announced by these words is shown in action bursting the carotid artery of a deputy with the chains of his handcuffs. (We later learn that he had allowed himself to be arrested on a whim.) He wears strapped to his body a stun gun propelled by an air tank which can kill without noise, and unlocks doors by blowing out the cylinder. His name is Chigurh; his Christian name is seldom used, Anton Chigurh. One catches a sense of the reptilian. There is definitely something exotic about him. Sheriff Bell is the chorus of the story, pointing out the signs of Godlessness, and reminding us of bedrock truths. The novel zips by like a film script that is easy to visualize. We see Bell, full face to the camera, for the choral refrains. We get a cartoon version of two rival drug-running gangs, beetlefaced, swarming and biting. And we see a Vietnam veteran, Llewelyn Moss, a strongly built, handsome man in his mid-thirties, following the trail of a wounded antelope. He’s married to a nineteen-year-old, Carla Jean. They live in Bell’s jurisdiction and Llewelyn gets mixed up in a drug war. The plot explodes out of that wide-angle scene, Llewelyn moving across the desert and coming upon vehicles and dead men. One man, still alive, begs for water. Llewelyn walks away with

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a satchel containing over two million dollars, but then forfeits his life by returning later that night to bring the survivor water. In the meantime, the man he’s come to succour has been shot through the head; and though Llewelyn outmanoeuvres his pursuers and escapes, he knows that he’s henceforth hunted quarry. They have his truck. Thereafter the action shifts from open desert to cheap motels. The Mosses separate and run off to hide. The rival gangs converge on Llewelyn’s hiding place in Del Rio. They’re like grackles noisily signifying their presence. Chigurh alone is individualized. We watch him obliging the proprietor of a gas station to flip a coin on whether he’s to live; we see him picking up the signal of the sending device in the money satchel. He’s mica-eyed and deadly as a Gila monster. He likes to watch the capillaries break in the eyes of a man he shoots through the forehead. His shotgun makes a strange, deep chugging sound, muffled by a silencer. He’s vicious, but he’s not the Devil. He’s a far cry from the amazement-inducing Judge Holden or Stavrogin. At one point, having escaped to a motel in Eagle Rock, Llewelyn uses the transponder to outsmart Chigurh. But he doesn’t blow his head off – because of compunction – and they wound each other. Bleeding heavily and blacking out, Llewelyn makes it across the border, flinging the satchel into a cane field on the Mexican side. Outside the Eagle motel, the rival gangs are blasting away at each other. Intermittently Bell enters the foreground, pursuing the course of events and feeling impotent. Facing us in the posture of resignation, palms held outward, he would set the tone for our dismay with his own. However, he has no spiritual force because vital interest in the sheriff depends on the scene of violence rising to the level of universality. Instead, it’s all so tawdry, like a battle of ants. This effect may be intentional, but Bell’s reduced by it to a tedious curmudgeon. “[G]oin to hell in a handbasket,” he’s saying, whenever we’re listening (196). This time, because people like his wife Loretta are getting scarce, criminals are becoming more aberrant. He commends her to us as an answer to recidivism:

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I never worried about her bein safe. They get fresh garden stuff a good part of the year. Good cornbread. Soupbeans. She’s been known to fix em hamburgers and french fries. We’ve had em to come back even years later and they’d be married and doin good. Bring their wives. Bring their kids even. They didnt come back to see me. I’ve seen em to introduce their wives or their sweethearts and then just go to bawlin. Grown men. That had done some pretty bad things. She knew what she was doin. She always did. So we go over budget on the jail ever month but what are you goin to do about that? (159–60) Many a reader will cringe at Bell’s Sunday school teachings. Then we are somewhere in the multiverse, in a city called Dis, in one of the tall office buildings at an impeccably decorated office on the seventeenth floor. A representative of the petroleum cartel operating the drug trade puts a contract out on Chigurh. The hit man finds Llewelyn in a Mexican hospital and offers him a deal. When Llewelyn phones him, he gets Chigurh, who’s just (literally) blown the head off his would-be assassin. Says Chigurh to Llewelyn, “bring me the money and I’ll let [your wife] walk. Otherwise she’s accountable ... I wont tell you you can save yourself because you cant” (184). Shortly then we get Bell by proxy when Llewelyn is stopped by customs on the American side, bloody, drains in the exit wounds in his back, wearing an overcoat over a hospital gown and barefoot. When the customs official hears that he’s a veteran with three tours of duty, that fellowship close to love that vindicates all suspicion is conferred on him. We, rooting for Llewelyn, must share in the nobility of war. Everything speeds up: fast short sequences. Carla Jean and her mother, who’s dying of cancer, run off to El Paso to hide in a motel. Chigurh searching the mother’s house for some clue. He naps there. After showering, he leaves the curtain pulled open and the water spraying on the floor. Llewelyn, paying a cab driver five hundred dollars, and then five hundred more, retrieves the satchel of money and is driven to San Antonio. He buys a truck and picks up a redheaded teenage hitchhiker.

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When Carla Jean phones Bell to tell him where Llewelyn is, trusting him to help Llewelyn, a man in a headset gives orders to someone named Listo, who exits with a sub-machine gun. We see him fishtailing off in a Plymouth Barracuda. It’s the end of the road for Llewelyn Moss (and the redhead). Bell drives to Van Horn to make the identification. He says he’s come round to believing in pure evil. Chigurh retrieves the money, after which he has one piece of unfinished business – exacting the payment owed him when Llewelyn rejected his terms. He talks to Carla Jean before killing her. He can’t be swerved, he says, because her death constitutes justice. Offending him, like breaking the Interdiction, means death. He has no Son, but offers mercy by way of a flip of the coin. The coin toss goes against Carla Jean. “I had no say in the matter,” he says (259). After shooting her, Chigurh is struck by a speeding car. Three kids on dope smash into him, killing themselves. He slips away, a final exit, leaving the stage to Bell, who commands (more or less) the last thirty pages of the novel. The overall shape of his pronouncements constitutes a kind of “Intimations Ode” in its endorsement of hope. Even more apt, his talk to us is like Alyosha’s talk to the boys beside Ilusha’s stone when they hurrah him at the close of that novel. Bell, too, would be our spiritual father, and the confession he begins with underscores this. He tells us of the terrible, inexpiable guilt from which he suffers – his having survived the Second World War. He ought to have died with his buddies; instead he abandoned them and received the Bronze Star. Nohow could he get over it. At this point Bell’s uncle says, “I think I know where this is goin” – meaning, that Bell imagines his father would have acted differently (278): “He’d of set there till hell froze over and then stayed a while on the ice.” “Do you think that makes him a better man than you?” “Yessir. I do” (279). Now we’ve come to the nub of it – veneration for the spiritual father. Bell says that the good he sought to effect in his life he owes to such a father. Suttree, who has the wrong kind of father, is let off the hook, and the fatherless kid drifts with the breeze after his moral blow. And Billy, who had the right kind of father, is imbued with spiritual power unbeknownst to him. The Bell text is diametrically

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opposite the judge’s – to whom passionate convictions are only destructive. In his world there would be no moral ideas. Suddenly there is not a single one left – because the judge stands for the decomposition of the principle of the family. And Bell, who all along has served those in his jurisdiction as sheriff and father, stands for nothing if not family. Possibly the confession to his uncle illuminates for him what all along has been his simple creed: that one learns the most important moral lessons through the glowing memories of early childhood, and that these memories are the surest guide one has to ethical decisions; and that ordinary families, and the simple goodness of unremarkable people, alone can save a society. I put the best face I can on Bell’s text by focusing on the main point, while in fact his preaching about the signs of moral collapse, and that confiding Texas drawl, get tiresome. These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you’d of told em it was their own grandchildren? (295) I told a reporter here a while back – young girl, seemed nice enough ... She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? ... Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight. (303–4) I think I know where we’re headed. We’re bein bought with our own money. And it aint just the drugs. There is fortunes bein accumulated out there that they dont nobody even know about. What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has. (303) Llewelyn’s father adds to these choral remarks, suggesting to Bell that we would have won the war in Vietnam if we had sent our boys over there with more of God than rifles. Then there’s Bell with

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Loretta, his wife, on horses, in a sunset, like a large stars-and-stripes of approval to this pulpit at the end of the book. To say that Bell is but the game of the moment, but another voice in McCarthy’s fictional crowd – in short, that McCarthy’s no more invested in him than in any other of his characters – doesn’t help to relieve disappointment a tittle. The place we’re taken to by the novel is not energized. That’s it in a nutshell. One’s left feeling puckered. Is it that McCarthy’s beaten his personal devils to death and that No Country for Old Men is a kind of leavings? Does the author see old age as an exile? Is this a valedictory? Or the novel but a relaxation, a better grade of cold cuts? A dingy horde of humanoids, that’s what’s coming, and no Mighty Mouse to save the day. But, not to despair, a promise: Bell ends, the book ends, with what he calls “the promise.” Which is a version of that rainbow in the sky after the flood. God’s mercy without end, is it? Bell’s promise is nothing other than the eternal soul yea-saying life. It is a feeling of love for life and desire to consecrate and pay homage. It implies humility, and responsibility to the future. It implies being a father, a carrier of fire, for the generations to come. It is a promise that can be counted on, Bell says, because there is something deep within human nature God eternally renews. Flag flapping, billowy mane, horses and sunset, and (for those with eyes to see) the shadow of a magnitude.

mock angel singing Should we have expected it? That in The Road (2006), the creative tension between longing and squelching that longing is broken by a wholly one-sided affirmation of faith? Precisely put, that life without God isn’t worth living? The novel opens some years after a nuclear holocaust in nuclear winter. Nothing can germinate; everything is coated with ash; all life-forms with rare exception, dead. The book’s premise is that people alone survive, a tiny population divided into predators and victims, cannibals and those still holding on by scavenging. There’s just about nothing to eat but human flesh since stores and homes have been ransacked of non-perishable goods years before.

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The Road is yet another quest story in the McCarthy canon. A man and his young son attempt to reach the East Coast, travelling southeast across what had been the United States. At stake is their humanity, that which bears upon it at the centre – moral imagination, empathy, self-sacrifice. The novel is a Christian parable. Look, they will come through! Perhaps God’s experiment this time around is to see how many will pull through – the progeny of a new Adam, who knows? – before yet another Fall. “He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God” (10). It’s the prayer of an angry supplicant. How am I to go on? “Upright to what?” (13). His wife, who killed herself, had scorned him: We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film ... I dont care if you cry. It doesnt mean anything to me ... I should have done it a long time ago ... I’d take him with me if it werent for you. You know I would. It’s the right thing to do ... No, I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen ... As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. (47–9) We see the truck people, roving predators, and the boiled remains of what they do with those they catch. And the boy in dazed shock brought back by the man’s love. He cradles his son with love and hope. “Golden chalice,” he thinks, stroking the boy’s hair. “[G]ood to house a god. Please dont tell me how the story ends” (64). To the boy cowled in the blanket he says: “You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?” (65). The boy, looking up: “Are we still the good guys? ... And we always will be[?]” (65–6).

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The man further explains himself as in soliloquy, clarifying that everything is subordinate to his protecting his son, sheltering and nourishing him. A dog, which he would have killed if he could have, had followed them for two days. The boy saw his intention and begged for the dog’s life, and he had lied that he would not hurt the dog. Yet he’s also acutely aware of the consequences of living for survival: The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. (75) Plainly, he cannot save the boy if he does not preserve that in both of them which alone makes their lives worth saving. That’s the quest, ever so crucial where there are small steps between the placing of security above all concerns and ritualizing the rites of power. This we see in a set-piece processional like the one Spenser stages to warn his recusant knight: [M]archers appear four abreast ... An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist ... Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. (77–8) The man breaks into a padlocked basement foraging for food; discovers naked people huddling against the back wall, cowering behind their hands; on a mattress, a man still alive, hideously tortured. “Help us, they whispered. Please help us. Christ, he said. Oh

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Christ. He turned and grabbed the boy. Hurry, he said. Hurry” (93). He carries him across a field to a woods. “[The boy] looked like something out of a deathcamp. Starved, exhausted, sick with fear. He leaned and kissed him” (99). When at last the boy can be coaxed to speak, he asks his father to promise that they’d never eat anybody, even if starving, no matter what. The man senses a deeper disturbance. They had turned their backs on those people, and the boy couldn’t bear it happening again. By now the man-boy relationship is formulaic, a trope, with the son’s moral nature to claim total ascendancy – aided, that is, by miracles and guardian angels. The father is flawed humankind, his son ideal humanity. The first miracle occurs in extremis. They’re starving; the man is ill. He finds himself sobbing uncontrollably. Looking up into the gray light, “he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world” – the relentless circling of earth, “[t]he crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling” (110). It is at this point he finds / is given to find an underground bunker. “Come down. Oh my God. Come down” (116). Crate upon crate of canned goods, tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots, canned hams, hundreds of gallons of water in ten-gallon plastic jugs, plastic trash bags stuffed with blankets. Sweaters, socks, toothpaste and tooth brushes, batteries and flashlight, bottles of gas, a chemical toilet. He finds cartridges and rifle shells, but can’t find a gun. “After a while he just sat on the bunk eating a bar of chocolate. There was no gun and there wasnt going to be one” (121). In the morning before a breakfast of eggs and meat, the boy asks, shouldn’t they thank the people? “Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God” (123). They bathe in heated water, they dress in new sweaters and socks. So replenished, and after some more days, they take to the road again, using a grocery cart to push along their provisions. In all there are four featured miracles, two more like this first, and a fourth coming at the end of the story. The Road is a gospel, an

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augury; God has something up his sleeve. At the same time, their going on is likened to “[t]reading the dead world under like rats on a wheel” (230). You ask, what’s their long-term goal? They go on in order for the boy to be delivered to the world, to a pocket somewhere on the dead crust where others like him tread time, custodians to their last gasp. But the point is, McCarthy is never facetious, and finally is utterly in tune with his Christian parable. Goodness will attract guardian angels. The man will have reason to believe it. Look, they will come through! They overtake an old man who is terrified of them. “Maybe we could give him something to eat,” the boy says pleadingly. The man looks off down the road. “Damn, he whispered” (137). The old man gets to eat a can of fruit cocktail. He’s also invited (on the boy’s pleading) to share a warm supper with them, but with the proviso, the man negotiates this with the boy, that they are to leave in the morning without the old man. Even so, in the morning boy and man argue about what to give him. In time it becomes clear to the man that so long as he gratifies his son, they’ll be protectively watched. Yet, he’s dying, wheezing and coughing blood, and when he breaks down, he has a nightmare probably meant to imply the inexpugnable rootedness of evil in human nature. In the dream, the man is the boy’s age, watching men dig open a rocky hillside and bring to light a great tangle of snakes huddled there for common warmth. The men pour gasoline on them and burn them alive. In mute agony, the snakes twist horribly, blacken, and the men disband and go home to their suppers. There is and can be no cure for this evil because it feels salutary, and the author may mean to imply that Augustine understood it, and is a signal fire compared to the sparks ignited by a Camus. They push on, motion being a kind of medicine, a counterfeit of hope, but soon enough they are without provisions and starving again. This time they come upon a plantation house – columned portico, double stairs, high ceiling, imported chandelier, a grand piano. They find miraculously that it stands open to them, untouched. Canned vegetables, excellent; clothes, blankets, pillows in the upstairs rooms. He builds a roaring fire in the fireplace,

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declaring their presence as if the lit-up house were a signal to the world, in defiance of the world’s evil. “I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back” (177). Not the least suggestion of a wink, furthest thing from mordant gaiety – that they will have angels to protect them so long as he’s obedient to the son’s nature. The hectoring, cynical voice still exists, but grown ever smaller. We hear it during the windfall, miracle, rather, of a salvage that a third time restores them. Not luck, he thinks. “That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead” (193–4). In other words, pointless the teasing out of life where there’s no hope, or, rather, torture to be given these protractions. “Every day is a lie, he said” (200). At the same time we see him born anew as Robinson Crusoe tackling the salvage of a sixty-foot sailing rig. Abundance blown his way, and he given the many skills, and strength and agility, to swim out in frigid ocean and find his way aboard. To take apart the galley stove, removing one of the burners: disconnect the braided flexline, unfasten the brass fittings, uncouple the burner and make a portable mini-stove. To and fro for days, and then a last time swimming out to look around, when retrieving a flare gun. “Then coming back to the camp late in the day he saw bootprints in the sand ... Oh Christ, he said. Oh Christ” (213). The thief takes everything: the tarp, their blankets, their store of food, their shoes, and the grocery cart they use to convey their provisions. They overtake him, a scrawny, bearded, stinking man, begging for his life, and leave him shoeless and naked in the road. “Oh Papa, he sobbed.” “Stop it.” “I cant stop it” (217). His father protests; after all the thief took everything and left them to die. But the boy sits down on the road crying. When the man turns back to call after the thief, he’s hiding from them. Later, “I wasnt going to kill him, he said ... and after a while the boy said: But we did kill him” (219). The boy grows stronger, the man is at the end of his tether. “He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless” (230). But uplifted,

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rewarded, consoled. The boy is literally aglow – there is light all about him, the light moving when the boy moves, the boy “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” (230). So it is given that the man may die peacefully, believing that his little boy lost needn’t worry. Goodness will find him. And so it happens. The man dies, and a man appears carrying a shotgun and braid of cartridges, walking down the road looking for the boy. Bearded, scarred across the cheek where the bone had been stove in, one of his eyes wandering. He asks the boy to come with him. No mistaking that he’s one of the good guys and doesn’t eat people. Straightforward, genial, how should it be other in a celebration of the mystery and mercy of God? The boy goes with him. All this may be moving, and if it isn’t, it is lightened somewhat by the rescuer being a self-portrait of the author. Then an instantaneous transition to the boy’s reception by the man’s wife. “The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God” (241). And so the story ends. We don’t see anything more of this enclave of believers in which the boy is cherished. The short epilogue is a poem in spirit like the end of Paradise Lost: the world lost irreparably so beautiful, its Creator so majestic and ineffable, that promise seems humming in the air. McCarthy has published an aesthetically significant tenth novel at seventy-three, Beckett’s age when he composed his late masterwork, Ill Seen Ill Said. Which is likewise a composition in black and white, a scene of deathlike nature where it is always snowing, a world frozen in time as in a snow globe. The scene of The Road is apocalyptic, a large mural in stark gray on grays and black, the sky a patchwork of grays and black. A dead world of windblown ash, black water, black-limbed forests and distant suggestion of colourless ocean. Impression of towns and city and winding road up the mountains, and shrivelled corpses littering the streets like insects and propped on the bare springs of seats in long chains of cars. The novel has a terrible beauty. It has other lustres: reflections on what is unique about the human animal, on the chemistry of becoming less than human, on how the never to be again differs from the never was. The artistry, in other words, high-serious. Surprisingly,

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the performance of this art serves for a tale in which a young boy continuously exercises moral instruction on a man by not looking at him and not talking to him, by sobbing, by whimpered exclamations, “But Papa,” too much so to allow that much more exists to the relationship than this embarrassing inanity. There’s no doubt but that McCarthy created the novel he wished. The Road undoubtedly will be thought of as an exquisite Christian parable, a masterwork of the late years. But I feel slapstick by the end, and constrained by the naïve and childlike aspects of the narrative. Is it that I’m a literary junkie of a type, ill-disposed to be uplifted in a serious book, put upon by a cheap shot? I miss the complexity of Red Crosse’s relationship to Una, strikingly exhibited by the scenes of the narrative; or the implications of Raskolnikov growing more rather than less like Svidrigaïlov under Sonia’s influence; or the brutal truth behind the kid’s hapless questing right into the judge’s arms; or Suttree’s version of the Gospels; or the tale of how Billy Parham becomes an exemplar of the suffering Christ without ever suspecting it. All of McCarthy’s important heroes are custodians of the fire. They have no say; it’s entirely a matter of election. No is their ethical stand against respectability and the anodynes that go with it. The pain that comes, they endure; it testifies to the fire within. Where it burns most fiercely, their enduring is hopeless, and McCarthy is at his best.

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2 Dark Hope: The Novels of Don DeLillo

desolation row To get a fix on Don DeLillo’s novels, I look to Beckett’s vision in The Unnamable trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and Blood Meridian. In Beckett, life is envisaged as timeless, pointless, endless decay. The contrivances of human society make the world vicious. The issue is, for one born into such a world, and with such tendencies, how to maintain one’s humanity. In McCarthy’s best works, the issue of the existence of God is raised in order to throttle hope. In DeLillo, the end is programmed. It’s a programmed doom. Around the next corner, lo, the reptile, boldly. And it’s got you by the throat, and you’re again what you always were, too vile to live. Persist, go on: but terror, and the certainty of the verdict, are ever present. Richard Elster, Keith Neudecker, Eric Packer, Lauren Hartke (the protagonists of DeLillo’s four novels since Underworld), are virtual suicides. Then there’s Nick Shay (of Underworld), bulkily armoured, rocking on the edge of violence. With him, the loving gesture is always a grudging act of atonement. Until the end of his days, frustrated, because unable to step clear of himself. In general, this is the story up and down the roll call of DeLillo’s books. His characters so little know themselves; dread to know themselves, it must be. Oswald (in Libra), carried along by coincidence and nuzzled by special interests: he might have tried to explain

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himself as the Black Avenger, except he keeps changing allegiances. Lyle (in Players) doesn’t know his mind any more than Oswald. He makes himself an offering to terrorists, he thrusts himself forward; alarm bells deafening, shuffling, half in terror, a sheepish smile. Jim Axton (of The Names) is no less a floater than Lyle, a cipher being swept along, who might just murder in revenge, to put an end to the aimlessness, or for these same reasons end up in Jonestown. With Bucky in the scene with Opel (in Great Jones Street), the enactment is like Beckett’s in Play, a matter settled in the past in perpetual replay. She’s Bucky’s very special groupie: can simply show up at four a.m. and be welcomed in bed. Really, no need to explain why she had left him. She knows that Bucky knows that she’s on retainer with the entertainment company that owns him. From her own perspective she’s total bitch: slight, sensuous, garrulous, selfish; very smart; half out the door already with Spain on her mind, and sexually curious about somebody else; and at the same time feeling for, caring for Bucky, who is uninterested in her dilemma. His, it would seem, couldn’t be more desperate. His music has become incoherent. Of course she deeply sympathizes with his abandonment of the rock scene and his search for a fresh voice. Count on me, Bucky, for “whatever aid and comfort you feel you need. Hell, man, we’re old friends” (87). At the same moment mocking him: Hey man, “You can scream ugly lyrics and throw rattlesnakes at the audience” (86). Or, “just sit there in a jockstrap grunting” (88). Bucky murders her and with her, the urgency to find a fresh voice. Capitulation to despair, in other words. It’s the death of the soul of the artist, suicide. The scene with Opel, I say, is in perpetual replay, a hellish punishment, indicated (that is, settled in advance) by Bucky’s alertness and total passivity. It’s his suicide, by proxy, that he’s going to relive for the rest of his life. None of DeLillo’s characters have what you would call free will. His characters are, by and large, casualties of childhood trauma. Some obscurity, usually concerning Mother, lying somewhere below like a submerged wreck, like the planes of 9/11 in Falling Man: devastating. And creative: the guilt drives art, but also destruc-

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tive rage, which the art can’t adequately vent. For DeLillo’s fiction probes the questions, how do I know I exist? What drives us? In what is our sense of being most fully savoured? And the bedrock answer, given explicitly in The Names, is in a dimwit fury in which we hammer somebody into the concrete. Aptly, in The Names, DeLillo plays off Heart of Darkness, implying through the analogy the same motive for Europe’s civilizing mission and America’s business interests abroad. There are no romances among DeLillo’s fifteen novels; no vision of salvation, even in the three ebullient comic novels, End Zone, Ratner’s Star, and White Noise. Nobody is saved. The idea of moral agency in a creature hardwired to dominate and flourish, destroy and self-destruct, generates comedy in End Zone; the idea of such creatures being privy to shameful horrors about themselves generates darkly ironic books, and rejects the answers to moral dilemmas once upon a time treated as solvable: working Players into an altogether poisonous version of Lawrence’s St. Mawr, modelling the four main characters of Mao II on the four Karamazovs, developing scenes in Underworld that are recastings of passages from The Waste Land. All to indicate, with a smack of pathos, that the world today is irredeemable, if anyone is asking. Once upon a time, evidently, the world was flat, sweet, and simple-minded. DeLillo’s appreciative audience likes books rigorously controlled by the game afoot – by the grid of intellectual ideas that rule them. Falling Man exhibits the acme of rigorous accountability. It’s sculptural, mental, lacking plasticity, absorbing to contemplate. Thirty-nine of the forty chapters of White Noise are montages of comic episodes, and a parable, about consciously living with death, its curse and blessing and the consequences of living in denial of it. Maybe DeLillo’s Catholic upbringing is to be found in what seems the punishing exactitude he insists his art demands of him. It seems to me with several of the novels, I’m thinking specifically of Great Jones Street, the story remains concealed; only in retrospect, with a lot of glancing backwards, does it come forward. Great Jones Street is an allegory of the artist’s suicide. Bucky’s soul, in creative torment, compares to Milton’s Samson in Philistine cap-

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tivity. Only, in DeLillo’s recasting, he murders Dalila, cutting himself off from his special election, submits to prolonged, druginduced derangement, and is released, put in the charge of his father Manoa, the world in its paternal aspect. This, in DeLillo’s novel, is acted out in a tenement room near the Bowery, where Bucky takes refuge and sells out. He would fare better in our esteem if he went on to be the tormented has-been. Yes, lights will twinkle again for Bucky, but as an establishment performer in a gentrified quarter with other such artists. The creative urgency is gone with the help of 100 milligrams of Zoloft. DeLillo’s been prolific, publishing the first of his fifteen novels in his mid-thirties, and his most recent at seventy-four. I’m toying with the idea that he’s made a hair shirt of his art: that there’s connection between his lapsed Catholic upbringing and schooling, the punishing exactitude informing his work, and the repeated incidence in his fiction of childhood trauma, symbolized in Great Jones Street by the occupants in the apartments above and below Bucky. Below is a mother caring for and concealing a twenty-year-old son with frightening disabilities. The middle-aged hack, imaging Bucky’s future, lives above him. Named Fenig, he implies that Bucky’s problem, the thing in the past that Bucky would cancel with his art, is his having been sexually abused. (Tells our hero that he’s working in a whole new area: “[f]ilthy, obscene and brutal sex among little kids” (49); untapped, bound to sell.) Poor Bucky, singing of abandonment. He’d made tapes of himself playing guitar and making up words, songs that came oozing out of him over two to three days: childhood sounds, slurred words, repetitions, babble, ingrained onto strange little autistic ramblings, his voice scorched and raw against an old acoustic guitar. Songs of little boy lost who could not find the magic incantation. The thing is, the obscurity in the past is unappeasable. The Body Artist (2001) runs Lauren Hartke’s motives through a sieve to show us the cast of art. Because “[h]er mother died when she was nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her” (126). Meaning, that she has never stopped blaming herself. The deepest motive of her life is self-punishment – rigorous, aestheticized self-abuse. Which is why Lauren Hartke returns to the large,

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secluded, wooden house where she and her husband had stayed the first weeks of their marriage, before Rey drove off one Sunday to commit suicide in the Manhattan apartment of a former wife. Lauren returns to the house after the funeral to alter the past by hiding Rey’s car keys. She imagines she can do it, slipping through time by gradations of derangement, getting back there, grovelling. Lauren Hartke returns to the secluded house to abandon herself to the seductiveness of going to pieces. It’s necessary to go there, to pieces, in order to make art out of grief. She wants the debauch. The novel might be read as performance notes for a work-inprogress, which Lauren develops during a visit to the house. She finds a strange man-child in one of the rooms on the third floor at the far end of the hall, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear. Who is he? How long has he been living in the house? It seems he can’t answer her directly: “[i]t is not able” (45). Salute! A chinless cartoon head and stick body. Mr Tuttle is a whatsamajig of her creative madness, whom she uses to approach the shade of Rey. Comes a point when it’s time to sand her body. She stretches the task over days. Using a variety of implements on herself, vacating the mind, then returning to her desire circuitously. She works on her body using facial brushes, brushes on her elbows and kneecaps, scrubbing and rubbing away at herself as if to become a blankness. She wants to bring the bastard back, primarily to drive a nail into his penis, to hump him into bloody hamburger meat. (Though, when she performs at the Boston Center for the Arts, incidentally, it’ll be Rey pounding the nail into his own penis, bastard.) Milton consecrates himself to God; Shelley dedicates himself to art, to being Shelley; Woolf, too, is self-consecrated, Pater’s daughter, to the English literary tradition. The body artist’s muse, like Kafka’s, rewards shit eaters, shit revellers; how they go down and stay down for it, vile, out of their skins, bug-eyed. They are consecrated to self-abuse. Their art is a purchase of entitlement: to live another day. Falling Man (2007) is also about that cargo of wreckage hidden away in one’s memory, which suddenly becomes unsustainable,

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and foregrounds as hero a survivor of the north tower collapse, managing to keep himself from suicide with purchases of entitlement to go on for another day. DeLillo’s art with Falling Man might itself seem a purchase, or penance. It’s a formal composition, a structure of analogies likened by the author to paintings of Giorgio Morandi, a notable Italian painter of the last century. These Morandi still lifes are groupings of vessels and containers – jugs, jars, biscuit tins, vases and boxes – and something else in the brush strokes, and in the irregular edges of the vessels, suggestively menacing. Similarly, the novel is a grouping of victims (of a certain sort) trapped in their own personal 9/11s. The novel’s title pictures their desperation. Falling Man is a performance artist who first appears in the aftermath, standing on the ledge of a window or elevated structure, to jump head first, in a suit and tie, and wearing a harness attached to a rope emerging from his trouser leg. Keith and his wife, Lianne, provide what there is of a storyline. Will they, and under what terms will they, survive the deep disturbances set off by the attack? The other characters are there by analogy, for the sake of the composition. A weekly support group of Alzheimer’s patients, for example, all of whom are performance artists in spite of themselves. They watch and wait: the loss of clarity, distinctness, the world receding, the sense of falling, of growing fainter. They hover on the margin of the impending, without a safety harness. Nor can Keith be helped. Up from the dead, standing vacant-eyed in Lianne’s doorway, coated with ash and shimmering with slivered glass. Because he can’t get outside something before the coming of the planes, a primal moment of dislocation brought back by 9/11. Survivor guilt exacerbates a judgment against him that has been levied sometime before. He does not deserve to live. So he survives by continuously erasing himself in routine, assuming the phantom existence of a poker junkie: two meals, five hours sleep, no liquor, the walk through hotel lobbies under hand-painted Sistine ceilings, the shuffle-shuffle of the dealer, the tick of the binary pulse behind the eye. It’s hinted that he’d have with him, if it were permissible,

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that thoroughly American breed of dog that is all skull and jaws. The question is whether he’ll murder someone before he jumps from a window. Whereas the question about how he behaved in the collapsing building is moot. The narrator tells us at the end that Keith behaved honourably. He tried to save his friend; he forced his way into Rumsey’s office. But Rumsey had been struck by something heavy: sat with his head tucked to one side, unconscious, paralyzed. When Keith tries to lift him, he hemorrhages and dies. Keith doesn’t remember any of this and it doesn’t matter; it wouldn’t redeem him. Because the horrors of 9/11 have resurrected an earlier judgment against him, which is unappeasable and obscure. Unappeasable, obscure, condemnatory, ubiquitous: it sounds like Original Sin, the ineradicable stain, that old Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam. In DeLillo’s fiction, it’s the birthmark, kidhood violated, a cage gone in search of a bird. In Underworld (1997), sin with a small “s,” identified with childhood trauma, is potentially inseparable from Original Sin. For at one level the novel might be seen as DeLillo’s version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a disguised quest for faith. The novel crisscrosses a span of forty years, opening on a famous baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers, 3 October 1951, which the Giants win in the last inning on a walk-off home run blasted by Bobby Thomson. Russia’s testing of an atomic bomb that same day, intensifying the Cold War, is a twin event of the naïve uproar set off by Thomson. Nick is seventeen. Nick is eleven, growing up in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, with a devout Catholic mother, brainy younger brother, and petty crook for father, when his father mysteriously disappears. Nick is seventeen when he kills a man for reasons forever obscure to him. He’s away two-and-a-half years at reform school, part of the time at a Jesuit facility. For a time he remains under their sway. Mother and brother refer to him as the Jesuit. At thirty-four he gets married. At fifty-seven, in 1991, which is time-present in the novel, Nick is a high corporate officer in a Phoenix waste management firm. He’s a husband and father to two children, vaguely.

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Nick is never far from the centre of the quest motif, which is carried by echoes and resonances from the poem. Two-thirds of the way through the novel the quest is dropped. Eliot disappears or is far less heard. (Drip drop, like those rivers of central Asia, the Syr and Amu Darya, sinking into the steppe, no delta, scarcely any mud.) Up to that point, Nick is evoked continuously by characters representing his plight. Nick’s plight is just about insurmountable. By shooting George Manza, he proves to be the spitting image of his father: like his father, abandoning the family, forever irremediably typed, known, screwed – like Ralph Branca, number thirteen for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who was struck by fate likewise when pitching Thomson that home run ball. Identifying with Branca, Nick spends big money to own the ball. Compounded by years (from the time he was eleven) infinitely preferring and wishing his father murdered rather than the heartless bastard who walked out on the family. Eliot’s poem amplifies and adumbrates Nick’s condition, keeping him central. And it also is the sound of the implied narrator’s musings. That fixed moment in the past, Branca pitching to Thomson, Nick’s father abandoning the family, and Nick pulling the trigger, is represented by the Camcorder tape of the man who is caught at the moment he is shot in the head by the Texas highway killer. Each depiction of that moment, each depiction of the analogous moment in the Zapruder tape, and the emergence of the Texas highway killer as a character in the novel, are obvious devices for representing Nick. The narrative advances this way: by linkages, adumbrations of Nick amplified by Eliot. The link to the Bronx nuns and the graffitist Ismael Muñoz is at first tenuous. Centre stage of the action is the blind brick wall of a crumbling tenement on which Ismael paints pink or blue angels denoting the sex of murdered children. The story of the street urchin Esmeralda is a version of the myth of Philomel, the nightingale, which is used by Eliot in Part Two of The Waste Land. Raped and murdered “by the barbarous king / So rudely forced” (ll 99– 100). Her cry in her changed state as nightingale, “tereu” (l 206) pro-

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claiming her molester and murderer, King Tereus, goes unheard in Eliot. “And still she cried, and still the world pursues, / ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears” (ll 102–3). Unheard in Eliot because the world has grown that indifferent. Philomel becomes in Eliot the story of an abortion, symbol of insanity and horror of the modern century, as does DeLillo’s Esmeralda. Eliot’s voice in the novel creates an expectation of revelation in regard to Nick. Then comes the point at which the narrative texture changes. No longer a tight weave of adumbrations and Eliot allusions, we’re given, rather, a cross-section of twenty years of history (the decades of the 1950s and 1960s) set out in a grid work of twenty-two separate pieces. The narrative moves from one to the other, forward and back in time, more or less randomly. By and large it’s a history of violence and mendacity, public and private. This is the world in which Nick grows to manhood. He’s seventeen in 1951, the breadwinner for his mother and twelve-year-old brother, a tough kid liked in the streets and the pool room. He never gets into drugs, but is destined, no doubt, to become a somebody big on the streets when he shoots George Manza. The Epilogue remains, the trip forty years later to Kazakhstan and the curiously calming influence on him of the revelation there, of the impending new scale of evil being hatched by the wedding of waste management and the nuclear industry. Nick’s more at peace with himself, as a consequence, notwithstanding his serving as best man, and his continuing as his firm’s high salaried ambassador of good will. We see him tending his garden and taking the world as it is. DeLillo stands aside. He’s let go of his private quest. Mired in the patchwork of history and looking around from his station in the Bronx where his hero gets his start and is belted like Branca, he would contend that coming through like Nick comes through is romance enough, particularly in face of the larger evil. Scratch. The personal quest for faith has been killed by cynicism. In Eliot, the individual journey is still important. In “Guernica,” rebirth is promised. In DeLillo, the author’s journey has brought him to a grotesque and irredeemable impasse:

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The sun, “that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert” (51). The Bronx, like a tidal splatter of vacant lots, house garbage, derelict and demolished buildings, rats and human wreckage. Still, something resilient in the moving, cartoon bombed elevated trains, and on the blind brick wall of a crumbling tenement where a pink angel is smoking a reefer. Dumps, see them pock-marked to the horizon, the garbage always arriving, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, indignant birds diving and screaming. Here, too, in spirit, the towers of trash Sabato Rodia spent his life erecting in Watts. Hand mortared. Art for the scene of the future. In deep, recessed, fortified pockets near the testing grounds, the bomb-heads are at work, they who are exempt from the baby shit of compunction; the national pride, conceiving and designing weapons, and creating a new variety of hominids: a boy with spongy flesh where eyes ought to be, a woman with half a face, a child with eyes on the bridge of her nose and no mouth, boys and girls missing left arms, a two-headed fetus in a pickle jar, a head perched on a right shoulder in a pickle jar. (What’s to be done? Nothing to be done. A cheekiness, a cheeky clownishness and ducking low, though nothing is out of range to the sac bombers and Polaris subs.) Several people hold a sign: There Is No Sky.

Point Omega (2010), reads like a coda to DeLillo’s work since Underworld. Its hero, Richard Elster, is a US defence strategist for the war in Iraq, who is destroyed by his daughter’s suicide; that is, submitted to a judgment for which there is no pardon as a father, as an apologist for the war, and for something else he dares not remember. That something, shocked into memory by the catastrophe of Jessie’s suicide, is represented by a frame story to the novel, (appearing at its beginning and end). This is a treatment of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a movie about a crazed killer who is split in two, two personae – a boyishly sweet, somewhat doltish man, and the man’s mother, the actual knife-wielder, who has killed to protect her boy. When unthreatened, the sweet young man cohabits with

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the decaying corpse that was his mother. They converse. When needing protection, he becomes her, inhabits her, who continues to murder to protect her boy. The implication is that Elster has within him some version of the film hero’s reality, a derangement which contributes to, which is at bottom the cause of, America’s war in Iraq. Not oil, 9/11, unfinished business, but Sin (encoded as childhood trauma, involving mother) explains Elster’s frenetic intellectualism, his total collapse when Jessie disappears, and the implication of an inescapable chain of guilt, fear, guile, and rage, parent to child, government to its functionaries, behind the war. Elster’s exposure to a truth he can’t bear constitutes the story proper. He’s concealed himself in notoriety, the hipster philosopher, the guru at seventy-three with single braid and cruddy sweatshirt. What he proclaims is true as far as it goes. The war “reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need” (34) of the nation. Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, are “[l]ittle whispers” of what’s coming. Doomsday, total annihilation, “[t]ime to close it all down. This is what drives us now” (50). “We want to be stones in a field” again (53). In the evolution from matter, human consciousness has reached its apogee. “Point omega”: the spectre of death become inescapable and unendurable. DeLillo wouldn’t disagree, while implying (in the prophylactic of a novel) what is necessary is genuine religious faith in America. To his postmodernist critics, there is no question of spiritual regeneration under capitalism. There is no free will. Linda S. Kauffman, in “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man” (2008), helps give a fix on DeLillo’s work, especially since 9/11, by clarifying his feelings about the terrorist attack and its consequences. In the short story “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), DeLillo implies that America is like a disgruntled suitor in the Middle East, who vindictively masturbates on Islam’s bed. It’s in character for the great nation, a great power, greatly vindictive, operating a whole “gulag of secret prisons” (Kauffman 360). She points out that DeLillo was hardly surprised by “the speed with which politicians and media pundits transformed the tragedy into spectacle, which then became the official

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story” (353–4). “Media images colonize the unconscious, fixing meaning and history” (366). So, the “disconnect” (353): we see the terrorists as a contagion bent on wiping out humanity. As for how they see us: we don’t care. Kauffman paraphrases DeLillo: “Americans saw the twin towers as a shrine to technology – which we worship, own, and use to dominate” (357); and adds that his “post-9/11 texts portray the consequences of the world’s policeman operating outside the law” (363); while, quoting him, the demonstrations against capitalism are a “moderating influence ... trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future” (356). On the one side, a superpower, on the other, “a few men willing to die” (Falling Man 47). Kauffman sees DeLillo at his black typewriter, the machine tall as a grave marker, predicting apocalypse. Or, I wonder, might he darkly hope to destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories about who we are, to show our common humanity? Is he writing because he is driven by the fear of the void? His characters bear the burden of working out the answers.

tricycling towards the grave Both David Cowart (2002) and Todd McGowan (2004) link capitalism to a fantasy of rape, to how, in Americana (1971), DeLillo’s first novel, the electronic media-driven economy and culture are destroying America. Jean Baudrillard as quoted in McGowan conjectures that the destructive power of the image lies in its challenge to “the whole traditional world of causality.” Quoting Baudrillard, “the ‘active,’ critical mode ... the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the end and the means” is overpowered, “abandon[ed]” (62). To Neil Postman, one of the dangers of this saturation is “culture-death,” “choos[ing] enjoyment over societal obligations and bonds” (McGowan 65, 66). More insidious is the linkage between image saturation and pornography, fascism, and, most tragically, “narcissistic isolation” (66). Cowart and McGowan argue that David Bell is aware of his lack of subjectivity and discovers in his quest for identity that every woman he exploits is his mother; likewise, the land

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is being ravished by its native sons in the quenchless pangs of spiritual emptiness. To Cowart and McGowan, Americana is the story of how too much tv has turned America into a nation of lost and vindictive mama’s boys. Seen in the light of Thomas Pynchon’s early masterpiece The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Americana seems a kinky yet unmistakable offspring. In Pynchon’s vision of the American agon, the calamitous American scene is carried by one character’s heroic quest for religious salvation. The two books, published within six years of each other, engulf us in a desolation straight from the heart of America. Like David Bell, Oedipa is twenty-eight: called Oedipa because she’s married to her entitlements, which is why the land is poisoned; and like Oedipus she shows exceptional courage pursuing the truth. Coming from “another world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, switches closed” (83). Yet she discovers the world of the Tristero, “alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to find ever again” (83). “A whole underworld of suicides who failed ... going on to graveyard shifts all over the city ... [i]n the buses all night” (94, 98, 99). “God help this old tattooed man,” she thinks. The “vanishingly small instant in which change [Death] had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate” (105). Oedipa visits her psychiatrist, thinking “[s]he might well be in the cold and sweatless meathooks of a psychosis” (107). “‘I came,’ she said, ‘hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.’ ‘Cherish it!’ cried [Dr] Hilarius, fiercely. ‘What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be’” (113). Pynchon’s novel enacts the catharsis, the temporary liberation from egotism, the stream of emotion swelling up and subsiding against our inner protective wall. We are borne up to glimpse a passionate empathy, and, in rare instances, are changed. In DeLillo’s fifteen novels, we don’t get, certainly not richly, this poetry of a character in touch with her spiritual life. We get it in bits and pieces. Though that’s what DeLillo’s novels are about: the dead promise;

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the substitute life; the unforgiven, America and Americans persisting unconsoled. Cosmopolis (2003) is a recasting of Americana, as its protagonist, Eric Packer, is a retake of David Bell. That first book teases us with a mystery: what is the narrative building toward? What happens to David Bell? By Cosmopolis, more than thirty years later, the only mystery is how the disaster will manifest itself. DeLillo hadn’t as yet, in Americana, identified our common inheritance, an inevitable childhood trauma. At the opening of Americana, David is at a party, terribly drawn to a woman he knows named Sullivan. She’s thirty-seven, a sculptor. David’s twenty-eight, an up-and-coming television executive in a large agency called “the network.” There’s something Indian-looking about Sullivan; she’s lean and hard. In David’s psyche (sickness?), Sullivan resembles his mother. She has been given the principal part in the symbology of an interior drama, which also co-stars the older of his two sisters, Mary. David glows, feeling in top form after a chat with Sullivan about a pleasure trip they plan together to Navaho country, but turns instantly poisonous on discovering that his date has left the party with someone else. Momentarily alone in the kitchen, he removes an ice tray from the freezer. “I brought up phlegm from my throat and spat on each of the cubes, separately. Then I slid the tray back into the freezer and shut the refrigerator door” (10). David narrates. People, the world, exist to pay homage to “blueeyed David Bell”: a blond, fair-skinned but well-tanned young man in his prime; six feet two inches tall, “exactly”; weight “constant” between one eighty-five and one eighty-nine, a waistline of thirtytwo inches (11). He’s predatory and sadistic with his conquests, as well as an exhibitionist. He has no principles, no trusted friend, no loyalty to anyone. At work he’s supremely preoccupied with opportunities to manoeuvre, to be seen to be bigger than life, as big as Burt Lancaster standing over Deborah Kerr in the beach scene in From Here to Eternity. He tells us that he possesses a library of Hollywood films starring those towering masculine figures, each “a crescendo of male perfection” (13). He tells us (and then shows us)

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that people stop him on the street for his autograph. He’s that beautiful! Glittering ice crystal of masculine beauty: that’s Gerald Crich of Women in Love – mama’s boy, invincible Coriolanus, suicide. Lawrence’s is a great, deep novel, implicating the reader in a pathology (Lawrence would contend) that is our religious inheritance, and that worsened after the Pilgrims’ flight to America. By the analogy to Lawrence I underscore what DeLillo implies, that David, like Gerald, is our future. Because there’s no pathos in David’s display of himself; because, unlike Gerald, he doesn’t compel our pained attention, but is repulsive, you’ll wonder what binds you to him. He’s especially vile in the way he helps the boss of his unit launch a purge that clears the way for his trip with Sullivan. Early spring, David and Sullivan are launched on that trip we’ve been waiting for; David is thought to be on a business trip – to produce a documentary on the Navahos. In fact, the journey he’s on at first is inward, delving for memories presumably that might help to account for who he is. His mother is a sickly, embittered woman. His father is a classic Philistine. His sister Mary is four years older, his sister Jane, three. Here’s the clue in the dark. Mary elopes with a mobster hit-man named Arondella, who picks her up at a bus stop. What’s the point here of a musical rhyme, Arondella, David Bell-a? Arondella and Mary stand for David and his mother. Memories of his sister shortly spool the memory David is looking for, of a certain special summer day when he was just sixteen: a big evening party at the Bell house, forty or fifty people, a sort of debut for David. The riveting moment comes after the party. Waking in the middle of the night, he goes downstairs. The kitchen light is on. His mother’s in the pantry. He can barely see her, sitting on a stool facing the door. “‘It was only a matter of time,’ she said” (196). He flips on the pantry bulb, watching his mother’s shadow behind her when she stands. “I knew what was happening and I did not care to argue with the doctors of that knowledge. Let it be. Inside her was something splintered and bright” (196). His mother comes up to him and puts her hands on

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his shoulders. And he remembers, “[t]he sense of tightness I had felt in my room was beginning to yield to a promise of fantastic release. It was going to happen. Whatever would happen. The cage would open, the mad bird soar” (196). He hears his father coming down the stairs, and “[t]hat was all” (197). Let’s suppose this is it. Out of the sea foam David emerges, glittering, ice destructive, venomous, disguised as Adonis. The better to eat you, my dear. You think the discovery of that moment in the pantry will help him find the boy lost, the impalpable “I” of an identity? Tricked, if you do. Why then the search? The answer is the hot point of the novel. The trek west with Sullivan pauses and ends at a Midwestern town where David begins making a film about himself. The actors play his family members in interviews which David conducts while filming. Possibly he needs film to feel a personal response. Much more likely, his film project is a tactic for sneaking up on the pantry scene, to catch himself as if unprepared and hit the audience like dynamite, while he nuzzles into oedipal obscenity for all he’s worth. The scene is cast in the home of a family David’s gotten to know shooting baskets with their teenage son. Bud plays the part of young David and Sullivan of David’s mother. And David himself, quite, quite close to being out of control, does everything wrong, “lost somewhere, bent back in twenty-five watts of brown light” (318). David, the twenty-eight-year-old David, replaces Bud in the scene as it continues off-camera at a motel where they’ve gone so Sullivan can take a bath. There, we’re shown the whole business every which way, “enormously lewd,” and “[a]bomination” (333). The novel ends inconclusively (would seem to): nothing happens, nothing changes; nothing is for sure (it would seem) with David relating, and David being a liar. I find it helpful to develop my thoughts about David in relation to Beckett’s Rough for Theater II, an experimental piece of the late 1950s. The man with his back to us at the open window could be David teetering on the edge of suicide. Two characters enter. One of them carries a fat briefcase stuffed with files relevant to David’s situation. A and B, as they are called, know the business at hand quite thoroughly. No need to search files,

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peruse; yet they’re bound to perform a bit, reading snatches of this and that, smirking. B pretends a charity of patience, willing to weigh on the balance side of clemency the tiniest of crumbs, while plainly despising the poltroon at the window. We’re watching, in other words, David’s representation of his own throttled plea for mercy. Poltrooned, throttled? Precisely. We haven’t fully appreciated the nature of the crossroads he comes to in his travels, which has nothing, zero, to do with self-exploration and reformation. No, David is primed to commit a murder, an anonymous anybody, but specifically a crazy businessman named Clevenger with whom he hitches a ride. But David can’t kill. In the motel with Sullivan, he raises the voltage on the jolt necessary to keep him going by making love to his “mother.” Craftily, through a process of self-seduction, he sidles up to her, as if groping in the dark, patiently carrying us along. It’s all a show for which we’ve paid coinage, ha-ha, to see David doing that stuff in bed with his mother. That’s the apple bright in the poison tree. Bah! Dr Freud has nothing to do with it. And after Sullivan and company have gone back East, he gets jerked about back and forth on Texas roads by a malignant dwarf (that lunatic Clevenger): pip, deflated of purpose. David’s flight eastbound on a jet anticipates these two, A and B, exhorting that older version of David at the window to get on with it already and jump. That’s it. Chicken-livered. Little tear I know thee. Your sister Mary showed you what a sociopath needs to survive. Cosmopolis’s Eric Packer is a retake of David Bell, but with an annoying difference (in the strong, first retrospect). The irritation lies in the weight given to Eric’s psychology, to a trauma when he was a child of five. Instead of being a phenomenon, unique, a marker to our future, he’s disintegrating, to split off into his runt double. Rather his fall ought to happen (as it seems initially) in a single moment, like Lucifer’s, when Eric crests smack against the dome of his conscious reach, discovering that he’s subject to measurement, encompassed. The day before the day that is his last, he perversely wagers his financial company’s entire capital on a hunch that the yen will fall. It seems Luciferian, a declaration of war; but serious insomnia, and a powerful body smell, suggest that dying

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has become real to him. In this state of bafflement, his sibling runtassassin is born and splits off from him, and Eric detects and paves his way to him. We note the disguise: he’s forty-one to Eric’s twentyeight, a loser, hapless and disaffected, tucked away on the third floor of a derelict building on 47th Street between 11th Avenue and the River. Towards which Eric proceeds from his triplex at 47th and First, by stretch limousine cross-town with his chief of security and two bodyguards. He’s pure optimal appetite, excess, and monomania. Over the day, at least four discharges with four different women. With competitors in the financial game, he lusts for vengeance. As with the director of the international monetary fund, who had been assassinated moments before with the female interviewer tangled up in the wallow. Eric watches on the limo tv screens. Later on we come to see in this mash of sex and murder the trauma-induced fantasy that Eric has nurtured since he was five. One woman of the four with whom he has sex he meets at four different times during the course of the day, Elise Shifrin, his wife of twenty-two days. Later, the fact of these (and such coincidences) tend to confirm the feeling that Eric’s journey is a film in which he loses his sense of reality, fragments, and disappears, becoming his own assassin. It’s a film of a stretch limousine creeping cross-town along 47th Street from river to river over a transit of some eighteen hours. Eric leaves the limousine to have sex, eat, and murder. He stops at a barbershop in the old neighbourhood for a haircut, which has been his destination from the first. He’s always occupied, externalized, flitting, on the lookout to extract satisfaction. He makes conversation with Elise, in their third meeting, making the kind of talk he imagines will please her. He wants to please her so she’ll consent to have sex with him. But he couldn’t say what he wants beyond that. He tells her that he’s lost everything, his firm’s capital and his own personal fortune. She offers to help him, “Tell me what you need” (122). But aside from physically stinking of sex, which repels her, he can’t woo her any more than he can value the terms of her offer. Immediately on re-entering his limousine, he breaks into her account and squanders her entire birthright.

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Then he amazes Torval, his chief of security, and probably himself, by killing him. Followed by the man, he climbs a tall link fence into a schoolyard where two kids are playing basketball. He asks to see Torval’s weapon, has Torval speak the code words that activate the gun, and shoots him dead, tossing the gun and leaving the playground. Eric had lived in the neighbourhood just west of 10th Avenue until he was five, when his father died of cancer. The barbershop was safe, a place strong with his father’s living presence, before his mother betrayed them. But Eric discovers that’s not where he wants to be, safe, in a suspended state. He has another gun in his hand as he directs the final scenes: in a street near a derelict tenement, windows boarded, iron door padlocked. Now Eric stands outside a closed door on the third floor holding the gun, the muzzle as if a microphone. He speaks to his gun, suspense before he will kick open the door to his mother in bed with her Czech boyfriend. “How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?” (185–6). He enters shooting, movie style, and then calmly permits his assassin to enter the room from a portable bathroom and take a seat beside a longmuzzle army gun. Camera on Eric split conversing with the self that goes by the name of Benno Levin. Venomously, Eric shoots a hole in the palm of his left hand, Benno Levin’s left hand as well, and disappears. DeLillo is interested in child-men deep down occupied with, and ever on guard against, discovering some terrible secret about themselves. How do you protect yourself against the coming of the planes? The self made conscious of a death being due? That you are meant to be dead. Mother (and father) hated you. Eric exists as an impersonation, a man of genius with bold appetites and a fortune. In the ambiguity of whether or not he really exists, he is safe. Safe, in peril. Which is why, waking early, or sleepless, he knows who he is, he is Eric Packer feeding his ten-foot shark in the space in his triplex where his aquarium is housed. Most enviable Eric Packer, wagering his entire capital on a currency speculation, to quell doubt once and for all, just like that and with the passion of a gambler,

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head first into the vortex, bracing God. It’s a showdown. Eric’s story representing a homily of a break-away Catholic from the reality of God. For such a persona there can only be impersonation. And disintegration back to the crossroads, when the fearlessness, openness, and happiness of childhood ended. In David Cowart’s essay, “Anxieties of Obsolescence: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis” (2004), he discusses the novel as a representation of the power of capitalism, which through technology has become, quoting DeLillo, “our fate, our truth” (180). The representation is of a world rapidly obsolescing: atm machines, cash registers, walkietalkies, ear buds, the stethoscope, the stretch limousine, their culture having just about disappeared into yesterday’s vocabulary. The accelerating superannuation also subsumes Eric Packer, a tycoon who commands tens of billions, and who prides himself on his omniscience with futures. The joke is that he becomes conscious of his own obsolescence, like that of all the technology around him, even to witnessing on a tiny screen his own death and tagging at the morgue. “Freud is finished, Einstein’s next” (Cosmopolis 6), Eric reflects, thinking of the fate of his own gift, his genius at speculation. “The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void” (206). Cowart suggests that DeLillo’s point of view comes down to this. The protests against “global rapacity” (190), of Packer’s being “foully and berserkly rich” (Cosmopolis 193) are in unholy collaboration with “the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it” (99). At the same time, the demonstrations against capitalism (in page after page of Cosmopolis), staged street disruptions using or evoking rats, are altogether co-opted. The capitalist rats ingest the demonstrators and use the energy to open new markets. When Packer is assassinated, “his corpse resembles that of a street person: no socks, ripped pocket, no undershirt, half a haircut, foul body odor. A human rat” (Cowart 186). Ratner’s Star (1976) is a comedy about the flight from God, exhibiting the deep themes of Americana and Cosmopolis as farce. Anti-hero, gnome-like Rob Softly declares war on God, gathers his

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forces, and is routed, in petrified dismay, to conceal and bury himself in the birth canal. The novel has two distinct parts, satirizing science’s attempt to uncomplicate the world. The first part is an amusing freak show of scientific geniuses at a retreat called Field Experiment Number One. Our point of view is that of fourteenyear-old math whiz (and Nobel Prize winner in mathematics) Billy Twillig, who’s been invited with high hopes of his being able to decipher a radio transmission from outer space – 101 pulses, counting two pauses, dividing into three segments of 14, 28, and 57 – emanating from a point in our galaxy in proximity to Ratner’s star. The second part of the novel takes place in the vast, excavated space below the building, where a team of scientists has been assembled by Rob Softly, Billy’s mentor, to create a synthetic language based on mathematical logic, and a meta-language by which it may be transmitted, voiced into space. Downstairs we find staged the intention to live without God. Upstairs, the personal lives of the scientists are collapsing backwards through adolescence towards safety in the womb. Part two is Softly’s show, gnome-like Softly impersonating Lucifer, scheming to eliminate ambiguity from the world. Part one playfully, wackily, illustrates the consequence of his ascendancy. Because Softly can’t, or can’t bring himself to repress his own sexuality, it busts out as a continuous procession of slapstick adolescent humour. We are reminded of Eric Packer’s disintegration. Here, in the scheme of the novel, the evil gnome who would remove sex, and play, and confusion from language, is mocked by an uncontrollable libido, and even by the voice of God. On one of the broad lawns, Billy meets the Jesuit Armand Verbene kneeling at the base of a tree. “These are my ants, my red ants” (157), proceeding then to sketch for Billy the metaphysics he’s derived from his study of their secretions, i.e., material proof of the divine ideal. He breaks off from his lecture to instruct Billy on the necessity of sexual repression and cleanliness, even unto the marriage state. To avoid manipulation as much as possible, ejaculate into a sterile container. “Take it at once to your spouse and assist in the immediate and direct uterine ingestation” (159). Do it without touching. The ants do, says Verbene.

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But in Billy’s room there is a woman in his bathtub: blond, blue eyes, hair upswept, up to her neck in bubbles. She asks him to leave the room so that she can get out of the tub, adding that she wouldn’t have cared one way or the other before the accident. “But in my present condition I don’t wish to be seen naked.” Clinical blue eyes observing him. “I have no lap” (164). On, says the muse of this parade. DeLillo is inexhaustible. Influence can be seen from Laputa, Rasselas, Candide, Alice in Wonderland, especially, and perhaps even Joe Orton’s Head to Toe (1971), about the adventures of a human parasite on a dying giant one hundred miles tall. To set up the end of the book, important matter is presented seriously. Heinrich Endor (one of the great living scientists) has fled the retreat to live in a large, excavated hole (15’ by 12’ by 8’). There’s also a small hole in the larger hole that Endor has dug out and shelters in. Later we’re given to surmise that he’s there, not because he’s failed to crack the code, but because he has, and would be a voice in the wilderness, a warning against the joke of intellectual presumption. Endor summons Billy, who is deaf to his fatherly advice, being Softly’s protégé. Also important to the novel’s punch at the end is the theory and prediction Billy gets first-hand from Orang Mohole. Mohole conjectures that throughout the universe there are countless moholes, areas of concentrated matter. Not visible, yet accounting for many times the gravity of all detectable matter. Moreover, they seem to shift, affecting different parts of the universe for varying amounts of time. If his theory is valid, he tells Billy, “we’ll one day witness events that do not conform to the predispositions of science. We may be confronted, pay attention, with a totally unforeseen set of circumstances” (182–3) that will turn current science on its head. Billy is rushed off to participate in a torchlight parade of Nobel Prize winners in honour of Ratner of Ratner’s star. Pigeons are released. It’s a celebration of achievement. Ratner presides in a biomembrane connected to a ten-foot-long tank, attended by a doctor, a nurse, and a rabbi (stretching the point a little), though Pitkin is essentially just that to a Brooklyn Jew come back to his Eastern

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Parkway roots, attending shul, eating kosher, if he could count what he eats as food. Another privileged interview for Billy, presenter of roses to a brain in a jar, who straddles the tank in order to crouch over the bio-membrane and look down at Ratner, who is looking up at him. Mark Osteen (2000) explains how the narrative of part one represents sequentially the work and lives of mathematicians such as Pythagoras, René Descartes, Leonhard Euler, and Georg Cantor, and how, by comic pairings from the Alice books, the presiding mathematician is twinned to a jesting mimicry of him and his exploits. Through these “cartoonish cameos” (84), he says, DeLillo “exposes science as a form of magic designed to quell our terror of mortality” (63). In the episode with Ratner, mathematician and mystic, Billy encounters “an avatar of Pythagoras” (79) and is encouraged to discover “that opposites converge, and ‘all things are present in all things’” (79). The lesson for Billy is to become not a brain in a jar, but Ratner’s star: to realize and counter the limitations and sterility of mathematics with Pythagorean humility before the endless uncertainty of the universe. Such wisdom (embodied in such foolishness) ends abruptly when Rob Softly steps into Billy’s room, dazzling his protégé. Says Softly, “I’ve got news for you, mister. The goddamn fun is over” (275). Logicon is the joint labour of a small select team of six (plus a seventh, Softly’s concubine) in secret, Spartan quarters below the cycloid structure housing Field Experiment Number One. In this hollow, or antrum, cubicles have been erected for work and sleep. Billy, the new recruit, is sullen and antagonistic. The idea of working on a synthetic language sickens him. Others in the group are Billy’s secret allies. Softly walks in a mechanical tick-tock fashion. Imprecision galls him. Language may be his bitterest enemy. He has a bed in his cubicle and a woman. “How lucky for me to be so crudely unattractive. What tinctures of wetness it loosens from your innermost loam.” “God how horrible” (312). His bed is adorned with huge silk pillows. A freak of nature, a magnet to women, formidable in potency; he hates his lover’s cries of pleasure, he hates the sight and feel of his

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own semen. The Logicon project represents a last-ditch effort to hold tight against his coming apart. Softly’s disintegration and the moral of the tale commence through a series of blasts from members of his team. Maurice Wu: an advanced culture had existed on earth before the earliest indications of the primitive. Walter Mainwaring: the Ratner star signal is actually coming from planet earth. Billy (discovering that Endor’s clock stopped at twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds after two): the message is a warning. They’re giving us the time. Mainwaring: the entire solar system is in a mohole. Softly, thunderstruck, imagining himself in a universe of anomalies, uncertainty, ridicule. If true, there’d be no point to Logicon. There’d be no point to him. The team searches for news on a shortwave radio. “This note from the science desk. An unscheduled total eclipse of the sun will probably take place later today” (419). The cosmic anomaly provokes in Softly a sense of abomination so pronounced he makes a run for it. Then the author speaks, the voice of omniscience, watching the effect of the eclipse as the shadow rushes across the subcontinent of India. The voice is admonishing. We understand it to be addressed to Softly. It imitates the voice of the thunder at the end of The Waste Land, judging Softly guilty of preferring abstraction, “a painless ‘nonexistence’” (432), to the world of suffering and uncertainty, the world of “our rapt entanglement in all around us” (432). Omniscient laughter now would be appropriate. Softly’s war has been to supplant God, to not need him. But terror of the ineffable, unpredictable, fills him “once again [with] some of the richness of inborn limits” (432). Intentionally – or is it intentional? – this sounds like the pensum taken to heart by Adam in Paradise Lost, “be lowly wise” (VIII.173). Softly, however, while waiting for a taxi to leave the retreat, senses the shadow of the eclipse speeding toward him. In panic, “feeling as though his body were covered with pond scum” (436), he begins snorting the bottled deposit of his most extreme deliriant. At Endor’s hole, he tunnels in, making animal sounds as he moves forward, fleeing up the birth canal. Outside, “madly pedaling” (438), Billy on a white tricycle making for the same grave.

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floaters DeLillo is a chronicler of the end – the end of moral consciousness, of moral identity, of the “I” persona – and of the rise of “floaters” (people without histories), cults, and terrorism. Between Players (1977) and Mao II (1991), he tells the story of civilization moving further into mechanical non-being. In Players, one of the two couples moves from lower Manhattan to Maine, to “a house in the woods at the edge of a bay” (113). Sufficient to say, nervous, funny, shiftless Jack, short, sweet, constantly talking, puts bloom in the life of the older, aging, distinguishedlooking Ethan. The other married couple are close friends of these two, especially Pammy, who had worked in an office with Ethan, and who regards the two men as her closest friends. Lyle and Pammy live in lower Manhattan where Lyle is a trader on the floor of the stock exchange. They are young, attractive, energetically irresponsible: put simply, treacherous. The novel, throughout the second half, has Pammy on a visit to Maine literally destroying her friends’ relationship; and Lyle, in Manhattan, playing double agent with commitments to terrorists and contact with government agents, and zero, zip, for personal convictions. He doesn’t know or care whether in the end he’ll help or hinder the bombing of the stock exchange. His affair with Rosemary Moore – his relentlessness in pursuing a secretary linked to the terrorists, a pasty, heavy woman who, when they have sex, pads to him, passive, the meal laid out – provides a critical insight into Lyle at the close of the novel. Players offers a speculation on the nature of (the sickness of) our contemporary society, which is distinctly Lawrencian, particularly of St. Mawr (1925), where the object of the privileged is to sail through life, skimming the surface, keeping busy, having lots of fun; as much as possible, avoiding moral ambiguity, i.e., emotional pain; insensible, as much as possible, to life’s catastrophe, while secretly exulting in it, in pulling others down. In Lawrence’s vision, everyone secretly, guilefully, is a Judas. Because that which goes for good in the pieties of the culture is evil. Pammy, bouncier than ever with her best friends on holiday in Maine, decides to have sex with Jack. She has this yen; “Follow your

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instincts, be yourself” (143): Ethan’s away in town; they’re together to have fun: she lies sunbathing next to Jack in a sheltered corner of the meadow. “The child in Jack was what she would seek, the starry innocent, drifting, rootless, given to visions. It was to be a sympathetic event. She touched his belly with the back of her hand” (165– 6). Jack is not eager. “His face was reddish and wet and he appeared to be in some middle state, he appeared to be wondering, he appeared to have forgotten something” (167). She lifts his leg, she settles under him, she takes hold and tries to settle in, she straddles his chest, she digs in. At one point, Jack watches cross-legged while she rubs her shirt between her thighs repeatedly. In the end, “slaked, in a fit of hiccups” (168). “Jack, it’s all right” (170), Pam says, and says repeatedly, reassuring him that Ethan doesn’t know. Late that night, Pam waylays Jack as he passes her door: “Inside.” “He’ll hear.” “Is everything all right?” “Why wouldn’t it be?” “Jack, inside.” “He’ll hear, I said.” “I want you naked.” “Forget, no, we can’t.” “He won’t know, Jack.” “Where will I be?” “Jack, let’s fuck?” (174) That’s the story in Maine. She pulls him down. She dredges up mud, spitefulness, shifting allegiances, persistent, because “[i]t would fix itself, easily, in weeks. They were friends. She would have them to look forward to again” (177–8). Then there’s Jack’s suicide: it fits structurally, tying together the two narratives. And there’s Pammy’s love for tap-dancing. She’s a little girl, sustained by an innocent pleasure. In her mind, tap-dancing will have been the best times of her life, clean fun.

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Lyle’s parallel story probes for something like the birth trauma, a pathology that might explain our duplicitousness. To Lyle, the problem of life is time management, or how to keep busy and safe. Sandy-haired, tall and trim, he regards the tidal flow of down-andouts around the stock exchange as infiltrators. The exchange, by contrast, is structured on solid coordinates, is balanced, regulated, morally consoling, safe. Then one of the traders is shot and killed on the exchange floor, and Lyle, as if the two circumstances are connected, finds himself obsessing about Rosemary Moore. Uncannily, as in the logic of a dream, Rosemary had had an affair with the murdered stock trader and recruited him. Pammy, in the meantime, takes evening classes in tap-dancing. Lyle is a snake asking to be crushed. The terrorists want Lyle to provide a guest pass to the floor of the exchange for a man with a bomb. It’s like a dance step he somehow knows. Has he been netted, or did he step forward? He couldn’t say how he’s gotten to the point he’s at, or whether, for his part, there is a point to what he is doing. Except that he finds it stimulating. It’s covert, isn’t that the key? We escape the safe bubble, like mist through the cracks. Lyle, by sleight of mind, might be sitting on his bed watching television. In fact, he watches a great deal of television. It’s when he’s caught in between the distractions of living that he’s susceptible to immense depression. Unconsciously he’d have it all pulled down, isn’t that it? Isn’t that why our government is like our own dreams, paranoid, conspiratorial, reflecting our covert desires and collective insanity? To steer the whole show onto the rocks. To drop off into the bottomless pit. DeLillo’s novel strives to make this connection. Running Dog (1978) is about anti-life – the training for it, and its manifestations. Glen Selvy, its hero, embodies the new generation of our Puritan heritage: he is further along in the process of anti-life than Gerald Crich. DeLillo’s thesis is Lawrencian: worked out in Women in Love and developed in essays Lawrence wrote during the composition of the novel and published as Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). Key words in Lawrence’s analysis of the American psyche: grasp, control, finger, violate; at the same time, doing the same to oneself, “wielding the sword of the spirit backwards” (176). Pornography is, willy-nilly, unavoidable. Sex is all in the head.

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DeLillo, possibly inspired by these ideas, turns his plot, a bidding war for a very special porn product, into a Satyricon – a farce about the obsession with sadism instilled into the consciousness of our times. Chief among the bidders for the porn product are a US senator and a former special forces commander in Vietnam, Earl Mudger, who pioneered all aspects of US covert activity abroad, tentacles everywhere, violence inseparable from sound business policy, diplomacy secretly advanced by highly trained commandoes. Glen Selvy belongs to an elite secret cadre of overseas operators taking orders from Mudger. Selected by computer for assignment in Washington, dc, given a crash course in art history, with a specialty in erotica, Glen positions himself to attract the senator, and becomes a member of his staff. Selvy is a cultural phenomenon, a marker for toxicity, like elevated urea-nitrogen in the blood. All his special training amounts to armour against knowing himself – so as not to be taken unawares. Nothing therefore to fear. Lawrence thought what might be called the Selvy phenomenon a key to understanding the destructiveness of Western civilization: the mechanical substituted for the organic. Selvy lives as though he’s behind enemy lines. In all things, a certain protocol, a fine edge to be maintained. No one knows his business. With a woman, it’s performance, manipulation. Being closeshaved, never showing his whiskey, are matters of morale. He’s tomorrow’s “running dog,” trained, conditioned to act with perfect economy, as ordered. Almost pure mechanism, with built-in timer to self-destruct. The timer is ready to go off when Selvy discovers that he is to be killed and takes defensive action. Trained in guns, geopolitics, counterinsurgency, electronics, codebreaking, terrorism. Trained in self-control, self-suppression, glacial remove. Home, the nearest thing to home: the Marathon Mines in southwest Texas, an abandoned, secret commando training base. He lures his assassins to its skeletal remains, colluding in his death. We can spell out his unspoken prayer for a different kind of life, given penultimately as an interlude with a young woman Selvy rescues from 42nd Street and Times Square. A girl named Nadine,

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right out of the tropics of porn, to which she’s resistant, somehow. A funny, sweet, wizened innocent, with whom he travels for some weeks: an idyll slipped in, outside the rigours of accountability. The passage is like a poem of the road not taken. But resonant, more keyed to the pathos I feel for Selvy, is Anna Akhmatova’s poem, “The Sentence.” The DeLillo passage, like the poem, is an unspoken prayer to lift the sentence, to let the condemned try to learn to live again. “Summer’s ardent rustling / Is like a festival outside my window” (from Akhmatova’s poem), but the injury is too great. One hears Selvy’s prayer in his simultaneous, multi-layered intimations of happiness. He’s far more relaxed – taking in the scene outside the windshield, almost tender with Nadine. One almost can imagine him sweet-talking her. At the same time he’s down there at the steel-grated end of a sewer pipe. Down there he’s always coming up against the end. He’s at the wheel smelling her Juicy-Fruity breath, and he’s down there seeing life with no means of getting through. The thought of the two men who are to kill him is incidental. Where he is is all that matters – being in the here and now, in motion and futureless at the same time. It’s sad to be in touch with him – in touch, that is, with his pain. So much pain, when he is as near as he can remember to being happy. My guess is that Selvy is as near as you get to the deep-down motive of DeLillo’s art: to touch such pain as Selvy’s. At the heart of The Names (1982) is the question: In what sense does James Axton recognize himself in a sect of murderers? The novel’s structure is a set-up for a revelation and transformation in its hero. Axton and his friends are all risk analysts doing business in Athens. Axton protects the investments of insurance companies by collecting information about the stability of Middle Eastern countries. He assesses the cost-effectiveness of selling ransom policies to multinational corporations. His boss sells off portions of the insurance contracts, spreading the risk and maximizing profits for the parent company. The critic Mark Osteen calls the business “[trafficking] in fear and the value of human lives,” their profits, blood money, “ill-gotten gains” (120), which causes “internal dislocation” (quoting Robert Young 125), a gnawing guilt in Axton that he can-

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not rationalize away and that has him obsessing on the cult of murderers. There’s a devilish moment when Axton is given advice by a friend intended to excite his interest in the sect of murderers: “I wouldn’t look for meaning, James.” “They found a man whose initials matched the first letter of each word in a particular place-name. They either led him to this place or waited for him to wander there on his own. Then they killed him.” (168–9) Owen tells Axton that the murderers, three men and a woman, were now in the Peloponnese. Months later, James is in the southern Peloponnese, trying to connect with the murderers, when he spots a ten-foot boulder with two words painted across its width, Ta Onomita (Greek for, “the Names”). In the village, where he’s expected, he’s invited by one of the sect members for a tête-à-tête. The scene, having that glare and threatening staginess of nightmare, is Dostoyevskian. Ivan’s meetings with Smerdyakov could be the model. At the meeting, Andahl bears down on him. “Something in our method finds a home in your unconscious mind” (208). He goes directly to the point, to the experience of killing: the murder as “[a] frenzy of knowing, of terrible confirmation” (211). Adding, “[i]t confirms everything. It tells us how deep we are in” (210). Kneeling over their victim, “smashing, beating in her head,” “goug[ing] with the cleft end, pulling out brains” (211), ratifies a personal identity for sect members. I kill, therefore I am. The satisfaction is amplified because collegial, tribal. The novel puzzles over this Kurtz-like moment of disclosure: whether it is the unadorned truth about our species. The break-up of James’s marriage is owed to it, to his scorn of Kathryn’s idealism and her disappointment in his moral decay. James imagines himself to be at home with the ugly truth about human nature. Which is turned on its head, this issue of truth versus naïveté, at a restaurant, where James behaves with surprising brutality. We see an aspect of him we hadn’t suspected, a “character” in his make-up

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one might snidely name, “He’s-At-Home.” He’s-At-Home in ascendancy, the usual gang of virtue at the table, and a new face, wife of a newcomer to the circle, whose husband is out of town. She’s a shy little bird. James determines on the spot to work up a salacious interest. She’s spellbound. She actually weeps at her helplessness to break away. Outside the restaurant she makes a crippled little run for it. He forces her all the way. In his mind, the rape is a covert demonstration to Kathryn about what the world is really like. But, evidently, James is not “at home” with himself. After his discovery of the sect and his meeting with Andahl in the Peloponnese, James wants a countertruth. He needs a refutation. His wife and son have left him. Nothing adds up. Cultish behaviour is the only thing that offers him an identity. Osteen conjectures, on the cult’s centrality, that it “dramatizes the condition of the sacred in a godless world” (129), one in which “only ultimate acts of destruction can affirm the void that opens in God’s absence” (quoting Stephen H. Webb 129). Axton is seeking a lost intimacy and oblivion. Mao II (1991) begins with a spectacle. Sun Myung Moon, gorgeously attired in a robe of silk and stylized crown of irises, stands at a raised pulpit in the infield at Yankee Stadium. Marriage is the occasion: sixty-five hundred couples consecrated by a spray of water as they walk by him. “This is a man of chunky build who saw Jesus on a mountainside. He spent nine years praying and wept so long and hard his tears formed puddles” (6). The narrator weaves this mockery into a garland of the myth by which Moon’s acolytes knew and adored him: in a North Korean concentration camp he gave half his food to other prisoners. He was never too exhausted to clean himself. An inner light announced him wherever he went. Then a burst of pure antagonism: “The blessed couples eat kiddie food and use baby names because they feel so small in his presence” (6). How does he get inside them? “The terrible thing is they follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought. See how happy they look” (7). Switch then to Karen’s thoughts. She’s one of the blessed brides, estranged from her parents, who are in the stadium, and a stranger

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to the groom, who has been picked for her by Master in a vision. “They want to snatch us back to the land of lawns. That we are willing to live on the road, sleep on the floor, crowd into vans and drive all night, fund-raising, serving Master” (9). Those in Karen’s van sell flowers, chanting, “We’re the greatest, there’s no doubt; heavenly father, we’ll sell out” (13): held to the four-hundred-dollars-a-day standard, scrutinized for every detail of hygiene and dress, dedicated for life. “They knew there was only one way to leave the van ... Follow the wrist-slashing fad. Or walk out a high-rise window” (14). Moon’s followers trade independence for the security of childhood. The trade-off is the same for the followers of the terrorist Abu Rashid: total acceptance for total submission to authority. At the novelist Bill Gray’s retreat the main characters are assembled: Gray, sixty-three, famous for two earlier books, who hasn’t published for twenty years; his secretary (eight years now), Scott; Scott’s girlfriend, Karen, the Moonie of four years before (Karen’s marriage to her “eternal husband” Kim is on hold, as he has been sent abroad indefinitely for missionary work); and Brita, who travels around the world photographing writers. Bill Gray has not been seen or photographed for well over a decade. He’s been hiding, as if novelists are dangerous to the state. Prior to the photo-session, Scott shows Brita around the house, specifically storage rooms wherein can be found every word Bill wrote in the progress of his two published novels, notes, drafts, proofs, galleys. Ditto for every published word about Bill. Ditto for the voluminous correspondence. Bill’s two books are there in every domestic and foreign edition. So, too, the work-in-progress; Scott points out two hundred thick binders representing its stages: no hint of ironic inflection anywhere in his comments. Is there mendacity in this betrayal? The exhibition is humiliating to Bill. Yet Scott is proud of his stewardship. He doesn’t neglect to point out the six boxes containing the final version of Bill’s new novel. Bill talks to Brita while being photographed. He tells her that he’s sitting on a book that’s dead, the work of two decades; that he goes on piddling, revising, because that’s what his organism does. He terribly misses, he says, the way he used to feel about baseball, when he’d do play-by-play and knew every name and statistic. “I’ve

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been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since ... Everything is seamless and transparent. And it’s completely spontaneous” (46). He’s alluding to the excrescence stowed all about him. He’s saying, in essence, after Keats, that if it doesn’t come as easy as leaves on a tree, don’t bother. Brita snaps pictures and makes soothing remarks, thinking, “[k]eep a distance. He is on some rocking edge” (66). This too he tells her, that even if his writing was stronger than ever, the subversiveness of his new novel would appear sentimental by comparison to the jolt of any evening news report. Over dinner, Scott dilates on Bill’s frustration: “The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence ... But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe ... We don’t need the novel. Quoting Bill” (72). Scott dominates the conversation, playing his dirty little game. It goes like this: B.G. is in a self-hating mood. S. insults B.G. better than B.G. insults himself, claiming that it is what B.G. wants. It’s not what B.G. wants. B.G. wants to make love to Brita. S. effloresces on how bad the new novel is and why it mustn’t be published. S. says he’s only saying what B.G. deep-down wants him to say. B.G. slaps the butter dish from the table, nicely stroked, with the lid hitting S. in the face. B.G. exits. By a series of plot moves, Bill manages to slip away from Scott and disappear to Greece, in the company of George Haddad, a Mao sympathizer and academic with personal connections to a Beirut terrorist group that has taken a hostage. Bill’s plan is to become the hostage he’s begun writing about, by offering himself (to the group’s leader, Abu Rashid), in a swap. He’s got a tangle of motives. In part to test what he surmises, that if hooded and chained to a pipe in a cellar room, he’d soon enough be betrayed by what he had taken for granted, his own sense of identity. Or, perhaps not. He might go down the batting order of the 1938 Cleveland Indians. “The names of those ballplayers were his night prayer, his reverent petition to God, with wording that remained eternally the same” (136). Baseball would put him in touch with a lost innocence –

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something evanescent, a core to his identity, something bedrock that one could call “I.” He wants to find out whether personal identity exists. The rule of the world would be at stake: freedom or tyranny. He says to George Haddad: “Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see” (157). After him come the terrorists. This statement, which he had made a hundred times before, irritates and aggrieves him, as if somebody has mistakenly accused him of being glad that the novel is dead. And when George agrees, calling the terrorists the last solitary outlaws, Bill yells: “These groups are backed by repressive governments. They’re perfect little totalitarian states” (158). Shouting, “Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it’s mine.” He shook out a match and held it. “Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout ... The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.” (159) Bill is hit by a car as he steps into the street, sustaining an internal injury. He waves away help. He’s writing about a hostage. He feels committed. From his left eye to his jaw is a scabby blood bubble. George urges him to see a doctor and to go home. Bill checks out of his Athens hotel, hobbling, in blood-stained pants, like the Beckett character temporarily back from the grave, on assignment again in the world, desperate for the calmative of a story to write. It’s what gets him to Cyprus, where he waits for the ferry to resume service to Lebanon. He has done some pages he likes about a hostage. He decides to see a doctor, but phones the shipping office on an impulse. The ferry is running again on schedule. He has no

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contacts in Beirut, no plan about how to get to Abu Rashid, nor would it matter. On the ferry one of the cleaning crew discovers him dead in his bunk. The old man says a prayer, taking his passport and other forms of identification to sell in Beirut. It dawns on me that (with some stretch of credulity) DeLillo’s four main characters have prototypes in the four brothers of Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov – possibly as markers for his trying on the old moralist’s perspective. The deep issue is the struggle of justice versus compassion, boiled down in the crucible of Karamazov to terrorism versus faith. Bill resembles Ivan, who is likewise a writer and liberal interested in revolutionary politics. Dostoyevsky depicts him with exaggerated romanticism. He’s out to demolish Ivan for his inflated self-regard and misdirected, dangerous, and self-serving idealism, but primarily for his lack of faith: his skepticism, his waffling in crisis. After all, there’s nothing at bottom to his sense of existence but gas without a forming core. Bill tries to anchor himself with baseball. Karen resembles Alyosha. She’s in Manhattan on the lookout for Bill, staying at Brita’s apartment and spending all her time with the homeless – in among their shelters, befriending people, washing bruised fruit to leave within the huts, falling for one of them (a teenager who rebuffs her), and preaching. Bill had spoken of her as something out of the future, as if in the vanguard of a different order of being. She lives in a timeless present of acute physical awareness, especially of suffering. We feel her astonishment watching through her eyes the funeral broadcast of the Ayatollah Khomeini: the overpowering resistance to the burial of hope. The people are beating themselves, bloodying their heads and tearing their hair as they force themselves into the burial site. Khomeini’s body’s in a flimsy box, a litter with no sides. They knock it to the ground. They carry it around the compound. People are passing out from heat and grief. Others are diving into the grave. Six hours later the mass of people extends to the horizon. They scale the barriers and again overrun the gravesite. Their bodies don’t matter to them. Karen wonders why, after seeing these pictures, the world didn’t change. In the morning she preaches to the homeless awake in the

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park. “She had Master’s total voice ready in her head” (194). It’s impossible not to recall the Khomeini of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, that final picture of him, triumphant and engloried, the whole nation marching in step, proudly, into his gigantic maw. In Mao II, religious faith fares no better than liberal pluralism, especially since Karen’s back in with Scott at the end. Scott is at the house, the old refuge, occupied with cleaning and restructuring. He thinks Bill is staging his own death and resurgence, that in time Bill will contact him. In the meantime, one could say, Scott is accruing entitlement: caretaking Bill’s reputation by teasing the public about a novel that will never be published, building Bill’s aura and force. He’s the type that prefers being body servant – just as long as the boss is renowned. At the same time, Scott thrives as a succubus, made so by any sign of weakness. A writer’s block, for example, a twenty-year dry spell. Bill’s been vamped by Scott. How else explain Bill’s permitting Scott’s industry with all that crap he had kept boxed? “Had kept” is the salient. Sharing Karen with him as proxy is Scott’s way of rubbing it in that he’s been screwing Bill royally. And Bill takes it: the storage that’s been made of his life, the mimicry, the bullying, and the leavings. But Bill runs away. It’s a miracle he’s able to get away. Nobody could have a more intimate enemy. It’s what Dostoyevsky does to Ivan with Smerdyakov. Brita, like Dmitri Karamazov, is graced with instinctive reverence. So that the novel comes up short of being completely bleak. For the ending is Brita’s, Brita among the Maoists. There she is in the final section, in Beirut, on assignment for a German magazine to photograph a local terrorist, Abu Rashid. About a year has passed. She’s given up photographing writers. Rashid’s interpreter is George Haddad. The coincidences cannot be unintentional; perhaps DeLillo wants us to imagine Bill’s gravestone under the table at which the two men eat. Brita takes pictures. The scene is reminiscent of the short play “Catastrophe” (1982) Beckett wrote for Václav Havel when the Czech was under house arrest. In it, the attempt by Communists to humiliate a proponent of democracy is repulsed.

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George Haddad says, “[t]here is a longing for Mao that will sweep the world” (236). A boy wearing a hood comes into the room. He has Rashid’s picture pinned to his shirt. Brita asks, why hooded? George Haddad says, “The boys who work near Abu Rashid have no face or speech. Their features are identical. They are his features” (234). Brita defiantly yanks the hood off the boy. She’s staying at the abandoned apartment of a friend. At four a.m. she comes out onto the balcony, drawn by the sense of something massive nearby. A tank with a mounted cannon passes below. People are walking behind it, well-dressed civilians talking and laughing. And here is the stunning thing that takes her a moment to understand, that this is a wedding party going by. The bride and groom carry champagne glasses and some of the girls hold sparklers ... A guest in a pastel tuxedo smokes a long cigar and does a dance around a shell hole. (240) Brita, grasping the rail, wants to dance or laugh or jump off the balcony ... The bridegroom raises his glass to the half-dressed foreigner on the topfloor balcony and then they pass into the night, followed by a jeep with a recoilless rifle mounted at the rear. (240) Hope in a sane world abides.

a-tisket-a-casket: the politics of death Players is a comic-grotesque detail on a broad canvas, a smarmyyellow smudge, the full impact of the irredeemable coming later with Underworld. In the build-up to it with Running Dog, debasement is the theme, the comic ugliness, the death of the human, as the mechanical replaces the organic. In The Names, and the small step from it to Mao II, monsters dominate the scene, eating people alive: masses of victims transforming into monsters, devouring and

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being devoured. In the private sphere, it’s the nightmare of being found out. How close, I wonder, did DeLillo come to writing a vampire novel, a black comedy of the future his books point to: about God’s terrified creation opting to feel nothing rather than pain, to live in the “off” mode, choosing the state of death-in-life because the alternative hurts too much, burying hope, suffocating themselves under hoods, pissing on their own headstones. What next (after Underworld, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega)? Where does this self-punishment lead? Is there something else to give witness to, beyond the dead ends and suicides? In this world, is hope possible? Early on in End Zone (1972), Mrs Tom, president of Logos College in West Texas (where our disturbed hero comes to rest, to play football), speaks of the school’s founder, her husband: “He had an idea and he followed it through to the end. He believed in reason. He was a man of reason. He cherished the very word. Unfortunately he was mute” ... “All he could do was grunt. He made disgusting sounds. Spit used to collect at both corners of his mouth. It wasn’t a real pretty sight” (7). It’s a joke. It’s a parable about the human condition. It’s the novel’s metaphysics. End Zone is a construct of parables on this impossible duality – impossible because our hard wiring is always seen winning. Might as well play football, destroy anything that moves. Gary Harkness, prior to Logos, has been trying to fit in, grow up. In fact, he’s found a perfect activity for his destructive feelings. He’s gifted at football. Which has made the problem of living no less depressing. He’s just like Beckett’s heroes in the Nouvelles: bums, all of them, disabled by reality and deranged by the pressures to conform. Though in Gary Harkness’s case, it’s the all-American future just ahead that has him on the path to dereliction. Each time he’d leave his room in the parental home for his place in the world, it was on a football scholarship, and each time (prior to Logos) something would happen. At the University of Miami, a class was to blame. This was a course entitled, “modes of disaster technology” (20). Gary enjoyed reading about the deaths of millions of people.

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He experienced “[a] thrill almost sensual” (21), imagining megatonnage, hostage cities, the rationale for aggression. Out of fear of his own violent nature, he quit the team and went home. At Michigan State he was one of three tacklers hitting an opposing player who died. He went home that night and kept to his room for seven weeks. Then he got a phone call from Emmett Creed, the football coach at Logos. Creed’s “word,” his antidote to confusion: kick loose of the earth and project yourself like a missile at your target. It took Creed to the absolute top as player and coach, till he wrecked his career with a punch that broke the jaw of one of his players. Mrs Tom rescued him from an enforced oblivion. Creed’s back on a mission. Gary has a very special mentor. For plot, there is Gary Harkness’s account of his fortunes at Logos during the football season. End Zone consists of a rapidly paced series of comic scenes, each paying tribute to the novel’s metaphysics; each, inherently, a commentary on it, a parable, the essence of which might be put this way: if survival depends on finding harmony with one’s destructive self, where is the line between good and evil? The players on the team arrive weeks before classes begin, and live together in their own dorm, Staley Hall. Presto they find themselves playing that silly children’s game, “Bang, you’re dead” (31). It catches on, it’s something to do. Gary comes to find it “compellingly intricate. It possessed gradations, dark joys” (32). He kills selectively; when shot, he dies elaborately, with sincerity. Scrimmages at football practice invariably reach a point when the players want to inflict harm. Gary thinks of it as “the ugly hour” (38), and looks forward to it. Soon enough he’s in the same anxious trouble, reading everything in the library on nuclear war, and walking out into the desert a mile from the campus seeking something stabilizing, reassuring, in that emptiness and wind. Being out there is probably an imitation of quarantine in the Biblical sense, when pilgrims spent weeks in the desert hopeful of expelling their demons. His roommate, tackle Anatole Bloomberg, is, as he tells Gary, attempting to “unjew” (46) himself – to divest himself of “[t]hat

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enormous nagging historical guilt ... of being innocent victims” (47), as well as other sickly inheritances of the afflicted. I’m thinking of Isaak Babel (as DeLillo probably did), for football is Bloomberg’s Red Cavalry battalion. He’s trying to put himself more harmoniously in touch with his destructive self, his hard wiring. (For one thing, he’d stop wetting his bed.) Gary’s girlfriend, Myna, is overweight with blotchy skin. “All I have to do is lose fifty pounds and go to a skin doctor” (67). But she doesn’t want to have to live up to the responsibility of being beautiful and desirable, she says, because that’s not her. Because the person she feels comfortable being would be locked up in her. “So many people have someone else stuck inside them ... Inside me there’s a sloppy emotional overweight girl. I’m the same, Gary, inside and out” (67). Gary, Anatole, and Myna call into question the meaning of being true to oneself, of being responsible, of growing up, of being human. Being human, in the old sense of the word, means upholding such absolutes as the sanctity of life. But there’s Major Staley, who teaches nuclear war, persuasively arguing that compromises with the devil may be the nearest we can get to being human. He says to his prize student, Gary: We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There’s a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It’s so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way ... We’re talking about a one-megaton device. All right, you’re standing nine miles from ground zero. If it’s a clear day, you get second-degree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. (80) It’s inevitable, it’s genetically programmed. The date of doomsday is encoded. The cells’s positioning, movement and activation, have been noted. Which brings the Major to a consideration of “humane war.” He says, “There’d be all sorts of controls. You’d practically have a referee and a timekeeper. Then it would be over and you’d make your damage assessment” (82). In other words, compromising, tem-

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porizing with one’s destructive urges, equates with being responsible, civilized, in control. Conrad ironically answered Cunninghame Graham, who had written to the author greatly exaggerating the protest against imperialism in Heart of Darkness, that he personally found no sense in bothering about such things. When the sun dies, which it will in time, all this will be a cinder anyway. Conrad was only half-joking. White Noise (1985) is a comic novel about an attractive American family. Jack’s wife, Babette, is a spacy woman, big and messy, with surprising depth. Jack adores her. He’s the narrator-protagonist, the hero of the novel, and immensely likeable. A heady freedom characterizes relations between members of this extended family. The fourteen-year-old Heinrich and nine-year-old Steffie are Jack’s kids with other wives. The ten-year-old girl, Denise, and the toddler, Wilder, are Babette’s with other husbands. It’s a sunny, funny family show that might be billed the Gladney Comedy Hour. At the same time, and paramount in importance, the novel satirizes, in neat little formal compositions, the way people shield themselves from the fear of dying. “White noise” is perfect for conveying shield (block out, distract). Put the emphasis on strategies for dealing with fear, desperate manoeuvres – then Dying Game is the more apt title. Jack discovers that Babette is playing a desperate game with death. The book has forty chapters, which can be read in almost any order until the plot emerges, almost two-thirds of the way through. In chapter 21, Jack describes the evacuation of his college town when a derailment releases a toxic cloud. All the other chapters play wittily, free from the business of plot, with the theme of our fear of dying. The comedy show aspect of the novel never darkens until late. The formal design of chapter 6, that is, the implicit idea underlying the collage effect of its scenes, is that life without the fear of death is death. Heinrich’s hairline is beginning to recede. He’s fourteen, a smart kid, full of doubts about verities. Jack’s giving him a lift to school; it’s raining. Heinrich won’t concede that it’s raining: at which moment in time? Perceived from where? Comes the fleeting thought that his son plays chess with a convicted killer at the

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penitentiary. Jack’s tenderness for Heinrich flares up, like animal desperation, to take him under his coat and crush him against his chest. It’s a moment that recalls the sobbing cry of the bird in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” singing for its lost mate. Vulnerability, death, are oxygen for the sensation of being alive. It’s summer at the College-on-the-Hill, a languorous day, students lounging on the grass. Jack’s on campus for his class in advanced Nazism, showing a film (footage he edited) to suggest the continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny: crowd scenes, halls hung with banners, flag-bearers, aircraft searchlights, chants and songs – the appeal of a monolithic colossus, invulnerable; the nation become a bludgeon if defied, a single will. Deathless and immortal, it would suck the oxygen out of life. The implicit theme of chapter 17 is safety, invulnerability. Jack and family are in the car driving somewhere. There’s lots of exaggerated misinformation in the conversation between the kids. Jack reflects, “There must be something in family life that generates factual error” (81). Why? Because all anthropological speculation (whether Jack’s or that of one of his colleagues) is deduced to support the underlying premise that the social fabric exists to shield us from death. Thus, Jack surmises, facts threaten our “sealing off the world” (82). Safe in the bosom of the family, thinks Jack (who also, ironically, finds safety in the bosom of Hitler). In academic circles, everybody knows Jack Gladney as the founder of Hitler Studies, a big man in dark glasses and formal academic gown. Jack hides his vulnerability in the persona of the German colossus, ever hopeful that the overwhelming horror will leave no room for his own death. Then Jack meets a colleague in the hardware store. “I’ve never seen you off campus, Jack. You look different without your glasses and gown ... Promise you won’t take offense ... You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy” (82–3). Thereupon, in the final scene of the chapter, Jack goes on a buying spree at the mall. The kids get into the spirit of it; the girls take the lead. “They were my guides to endless well-being,” he says, rising on a surge of power as they move from store to store, “rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but

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whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy” (83). He shops recklessly, with sweeping gestures, feeling expansive, feeling himself grow in value and self-regard. There’s music, the swirl and roar of voices, massive galleries. He feels impregnable. In chapter 12, the collage illustrates a question: is it one’s sense of frailty that’s shocking, or the swiftness with which one armours oneself? In 14, it’s our need to be wrested out of coma, which is why people can’t get enough of disasters on the grand scale of earthquakes and tidal floods, so long as they’re somewhere else. The chapter funnels out into a silly and parodic display of people’s kinkiness. Jack reporting overheard conversation in the campus lunchroom: did you ever, and under what circumstances did you – crap in a toilet bowl that has no seat? Piss in a sink away from home? Pay homage to James Dean on the day he died? Even, brush your teeth with a naked finger, can make for an unshielded moment to catch yourself on the outside walking the ledge. An accident at the railroad yard, releasing a toxic chemical cloud, forces Jack (and Babette, as it turns out) to hold bravely to their composure. Fear threatens to get away from him. “This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born” (114). To his fourteen-year-old, he says, “I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes” (115). On the way to the assigned shelter, Jack pumps his own gas, and subsequently learns that the few minutes standing exposed resulted in high concentrations of Nyodene D. in his blood. “I wanted my academic gown and dark glasses” (137), he ruefully jokes. In the second half of the novel a plot emerges. Babette secretly has been taking an untested, unauthorized drug called Dylar. She tells Jack (reluctantly, after being found out) that she’s afraid to die. She thinks about it all the time, a constant, steady fear. Dylar, she explains, is in its experimental stage as a cure for the fear of death. Not a tranquilizer, not a therapy, but a chemical agent that stimulates the brain to release its own inhibitors. She tells Jack that she would have done just about anything to become a guinea pig. And then she confesses to having had an affair with the project manager, whom she calls “Mr. Gray.”

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Jack feels dazed, torn, buffeted by jealousy and envy of Babette’s having access to the drug. A further confession, that “the drug’s not working,” goes right by him. It appears that he, too, would do just about anything to be a guinea pig. He tells Babette that he’s been contaminated by the cloud of Nyodene D. Her response is primitive, guttural, encompassing. There is no question that they are devoted to each other. Yet these complications do not appreciably darken the narrative. The book’s humour doesn’t permit it. See Babette teaching a class in deportment, reading tabloids to the blind, running up and down the stadium steps for exercise: a big woman in a sweatsuit, a little flighty. There’s a wonderful, enfranchising exuberance about the comedy, owed to a sense of freedom the kids enjoy. The banter is charming. Jack is a large, long-eared, oval-faced, fat guy, with flippers for feet. He looks like a rabbit. No, after the airborne event, and Babette’s confession, the tone and touch are pretty much the same: warm, sunny, funny humour, with comic shticks, and punctuated with anthropological surmises posited as truths, while in reality a form of play, sort of like ring toss, with the ring the perceived behaviour, and the post its rootedness in fear of death. But by the last quarter of the book, the plot has emerged and is intent on sweeping one away. Like Babette in the supermarket, “[d]on’t leave me alone” (209). Jack then firmly, “Babette is not a neurotic person. She is strong, healthy, outgoing, affirmative” (20910). But then it’s Jack’s turn, waking in the middle of the night and feeling “[s]mall, weak, deathbound, alone” (213). Damn it, he wants to try the pills, to at least see if he’s eligible, to give them a shot. “I want access to Mr. Gray. I want the real name of Gray Research” (213). Babette refuses. A colleague, from whom he had sought help, acquaints him with a journal article: “unsupervised human experimentation” (286). So Jack learns that Willie Mink’s the man he’s after and that, though he’s been kicked out of the project, he is living at the same dumpy motel in Iron City. Chapter 38 ends with Jack in a neighbour’s car, on a rainy evening after ten, skipping the automatic tolls, jumping lights. He plans to shoot Mink in the gut for sleeping with Babette, and leave with his supply of pills.

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Entering the motel room, Jack becomes Humbert Humbert to Mink’s Clare Quilty. They’re both in a heightened state. Mink, in an easy chair watching the tube with the sound off, eats Dylar like candy. His mind at intervals spasms, spitting out chunks of irrelevant information. Jack’s consciousness is enclosed in a long, narrow tube. He keeps repeating an outline of moves he’s in the process of making, his “plan.” When he discovers that Mink reacts to words as if they are the thing they describe, that “Hail of bullets” (297) has Mink hitting the floor and crawling toward the bathroom in terror; Jack tries killing him with words. When Mink has himself squeezed behind the toilet bowl, Jack shoots him twice, puts the gun in the dying man’s hand, and is shot by Mink in the wrist. Well, that instant, he, so to say, steps back into himself, the Jack of the Gladney Comedy Hour, and goes about rescuing Mink, whose brain is sufficiently messed up to believe he shot himself. Fortuitously, it is to a German clinic run by nuns where they are treated with fairy-tale immediacy. DeLillo, whether he’s felt he can’t go on or not, has gone on for 39 chapters. And what sort of resolution can there be for Jack and Babette that feels good, and is real, metaphysically satisfying, in a comic novel that has played every which way with the fear of death? We get a miracle. We’re given a last formal composition intimating a percipient cast of mind verging on reverence for the mystery. Wilder, the toddler, inexplicably rides his tricycle to an expressway, and pedals across it, all six lanes. Jack and Babette feel profoundly lucky. Maybe they also feel religious awe. The text (in the closing sunset scene) seems to suggest Jack’s acquiescence, easement, in thinking of the event as decreed. Richard Powers says that he was particularly struck by the “warmth” (xi) of the novel on rereading it. He perceives the novel’s warmth as “earnestness hiding inside a style that [he] years ago mistook for pure postmodern irony ... that sound of human speech hungering for a time before irony” (x), “pages ... littered with ... spiritual impulses” (xii). DeLillo’s insistence on finding the human story rescues the novel from schematization. In 1988 Libra, DeLillo’s novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, was published. Peter Knight says that in

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Libra, DeLillo “makes visible a process that is happening to all Americans” (32), and that therein lies the real significance of Oswald’s assassination of Kennedy – in how “that long roll-call of celebrity assassinations ... and high school shootings” (33) such as Columbine derive from it. Some theorists claim (Knight mentions Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Anthony Giddens) that the postmodern condition, that is, “the voracious logic of the market” (35) exhibited by the increasingly commodified repetition of the photos of the shootings (Oswald of Kennedy, Ruby of Oswald), with its legacy of paranoia and linkages to the Cold War’s proliferation of weapons and production of waste, has spread into every last enclave of the globe. According to Knight, Libra represents a primal chapter in the story of how America became postmodern – “of the thorough colonization by consumer capitalism of an individual’s last space of privacy” (38) in the larger story of American capitalism’s global domination. I think, in trying to figure out my restlessness with the novel, that at some point in its writing DeLillo discovered his inherent flippancy towards the material. As if he were tapping into a Grimm’s tale meant entirely for children that he was recasting for adults. That his characters, though the very ones displayed in the historical record, defied placement in his scheme, and belonged to some other narrative. That his novel was inert, as if the sap had run out and the structure remained. The dislocation, the divided sensibilities, surprising him, I surmise. As if he had brought up from the world of magic the fairy tale of Jack and the beanstalk, and sought to retell it realistically as a black fairy tale of youth stupefied by poverty and the glitziana promises of a wealthy society. One senses the source of the novel to be somewhere beyond its focus. Which may be the deep-down reason why DeLillo entitles his novel with an astrological sign. A level is missing in Libra, the plain enacting of our metaphysical danger. DeLillo probably felt its inclusion ruled out by a predisposition imposed by history. Too bad: dry, sterile thunder without rain. To bring his novels to life, DeLillo needs a submerged story of wayward faith. Libra might have been a great book, if Oswald had also the soul of Everyman.

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3 Robert Stone and the Problem of Vietnam

america’s claws The field of Stone criticism is yet to be established. Scholars interested in him haven’t taken to citing one another – that is, with the exception of literary historians studying Vietnam War narratives. Philip D. Beidler in two books (1982 and 1991), Philip H. Melling (1990), Thomas Myers (1988), and John Hellmann (1986), place Stone among the most important writers on the war and its aftermath. Dog Soldiers (along with A Hall of Mirrors and A Flag for Sunrise) entitles Stone to a surprising pre-eminence. He was never in combat; he was in Saigon as a journalist for all of two months in 1971. Myers sketches the tradition of American novelists who precede Stone, including James Fenimore Cooper’s “recognition of omnivorous Western settlement and racial dominance” (14), Herman Melville and John William De Forest’s warning against “the increasing militarism within American society” (15), Hemingway’s transparency about glory, war and the honoured dead – “the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago” (quoted in Myers, 18) – and Michael Herr’s profane jive for the subculture of teenagers who dreaded and fought the war. Herr comes close to evoking Stone when describing Vietnam as “a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia” and when ridiculing US propaganda as “some overripe bullshit about ... Hearts and Minds, Peoples of the Republic, tumbling

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dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah” (40, 19). When the French were pushed out of Vietnam in 1954, America was paying 80 per cent of the French bill. There followed an interval of US covert operations, and 1961 saw the gradual build-up and the beginning of endless South Vietnamese juntas. America’s full combat role began in 1965. From 1968 to 1973, the period of the post-Tet offensive and home-front disillusionment, over fifty-five thousand Americans and two to four million Vietnamese were killed and America’s mission was lost. In Fire in the Lake (1972), Frances FitzGerald lays bare the atrocious moral crime committed by the United States against Vietnam. Stone’s characters are victims of this history. President Johnson’s advisers and the leadership in Washington believed in American power and virtue when, in February/March 1965, America began bombing North Vietnam and landed the first American troops. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner, chief foreign policy adviser McGeorge Bundy, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and General William C. Westmoreland were hell-bent on destroying the revolutionary movement in Vietnam. Within a year the cost of the war would level out at two billion dollars a month. The mission was to hold the line at the 17th parallel against the Communists. The only raison d’être was to fight the Communists. By 1967 there were five hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam. After the US had set up, one after another, weak military dictatorships; after American troops killed countless thousands of Vietnamese, burned their villages, destroyed their crops, lost the countryside to the enemy, and dismantled the South Vietnamese economy; and while the ambassadors did nothing in the name of freedom and democracy as the Saigon officials arrested and murdered whomsoever they liked without fear of reprisal, the American leadership still could not conceive that the enterprise might fail or be morally wrong. Even after Congress had learned that in March 1968, when on a routine “search-and-destroy” mission, a company of Americans had walked into the village of My Lai and without

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provocation had gunned down between four and six hundred men, women, and children, the bombing intensified. The flood of several million refugees into the cities aided recruitment by the South. At one point FitzGerald remarks, “This faith, this shrewd innocence, they guarded with a ferocity” (233). She might well be quoting Stone. A key to what happened in Vietnam, to how thoroughly the country was destroyed and colonized, is encapsulated by the question, what lay behind the flood of goods America poured into the South? FitzGerald notes the thousands of gallons of cooking oil, tons of pharmaceuticals, light bulbs, garbage trucks, enough concrete to pave a province, enough corrugated tin to roof it, enough barbed wire to circle it seventeen times, dentists’ drills, soybean seedlings, sewing kits, mortars, machine tools, toothbrushes, plumbing supplies, land mines, television sets, plastic limbs, chicken feed, mosquito repellent, air conditioners, Bourbon, paper clips, prefabricated houses, rubber bands, athlete’s foot powder, watches, refrigerators, radios, motorcycles; millions of tons of rice to offset the losses from bombing and defoliation (346, 347, 349). Whatever the motive, corruption was the result of this continuous flow of goods: unlimited, all-pervasive corruption. The governments installed by the Americans felt no responsibility for the war, reasoning that the Americans had no right to expect anything from them. On the contrary, the Americans owed them something for the use of their soil to fight a war that was really directed against China and the Soviet Union. Says FitzGerald, “The Saigon government had turned over on its back to feed upon the Americans” (359). FitzGerald’s book patiently records the magnitude of the disaster of the American war for the Vietnamese people. When in the early morning of 31 January 1968 nlf troops attacked every important American base, every town and city in South Vietnam, public opinion in America began to turn against the war. The attack was incomprehensible. American forces seemed so firmly in control. The military’s reaction was to bomb with blind fury, destroying large sections of South Vietnamese cities. America’s bombing policy had always been a strategy of causing terror, but after Tet, initially, it was

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bombing out of terror; and then, under Nixon, the bombing continued for five more years. Stone’s novels are obsessed with the survivor-victims of America’s mission abroad. Beidler (1991) calls Stone our contemporary “laureate of failure” (239), quoting James Dickey to link Stone to E.A. Robinson’s disintegrating drunks, perceptively seeing the novels as dramatic vehicles for the destruction of Stone’s heroes. Geoff Hamilton (2009) uses Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957) to take the measure of Rheinhardt in Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967). Hamilton argues that Rheinhardt is a sociopath whose antisocial individualism is dead opposite Mailer’s hipsterism. Rheinhardt cultivates cold; he deadens his emotions to reduce vulnerability. He will say anything, and would be attached to nothing: “[B]uy a dog,” he tells Geraldine, when she speaks to him of love (225). In fact, however, he turns a rally into a rioting, racist mob out of a feeling of manic shamelessness, in emulation of American hypocrisy. Why does he do it? It gives him a kind of dumb esprit, like a man going around in his girlfriend’s underwear. Like someone else who, in combat, loves to kill. Jazzing up the news is his way of being on patrol, “search-and-destroy.” Hate-mongering and booze keep him mellow. His right-wing provocations are his way of reliving the war. Napalm with a heart. Far from being indifferent, he’s recalling the good old days, before the nothing but bad news started filtering in from Hue, from Danang, from Qui Nhon, from Khe Sanh, from Ban Me Thuot, from Watts, when the war and the world still made sense. Rheinhardt? He’s the grunt the doctor triaged to relive his destruction when sent home. James R. Giles’s essay on Dog Soldiers (2006) politicizes Stone on Vietnam even further. “The assault of American imperialism on Vietnamese space” (146) – American capitalism, the export of consumerism, and “the destructive nature of an immature cult of masculinity” (151) – constitutes Stone’s fictional investigation. Giles sees Vietnam vet heroes John Converse and Ray Hicks as “[representing] two sides of Stone’s cumulative Kurtz” (148) – sees Stone, that is, by invoking Heart of Darkness, judging and condemning America’s war through the historical

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analogy to Belgium’s actions in the Congo. Giles must mean that once South Vietnam was truly sovereign, the US would dominate the region by imposing its culture and economics, and that by holding Communism at the 17th parallel, the markets of southeast Asia would be free for the spread of capitalism. To invoke Kurtz is to comment specifically on the trauma of war. Out there, lacking restraint, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, one discovers the headiness of savagery. Kurtz’s psychology might well explain atrocities like My Lai. The broader implication is that US leaders should be indicted for war crimes against the Vietnamese people for the murder of hundreds of thousands. What do writers on the war expect or hope might come from their books? (I think of Caputo, FitzGerald, Herr, O’Brien, and Stone.) The simple recognition of the need for limits to the power of a nation to inflict its will on other nations? Adherence to rules of engagement? Acknowledgment that it was wrong for infantrymen to burn down a village with grenades of white phosphorus, but right for B-52 pilots to drop payloads of thirty tons of conventional bombs? One might just as well speak of these matters to a plant species taking over a meadow. Writers on the war have many motives: enough to say that we’re the wedding guest nabbed by an anguished, skinny hand. Stone says of Michael Herr’s Dispatches: “[i]f insight is what saves us from ourselves, if perception is our prayer, let this book stand” (xiii). And though Herr (Stone, and the others) cannot hope to save the next generation of kids from becoming crucifiers, their books reiterate standards by which we recognize what is best in ourselves. What, on the other hand, motivates the critics, but especially the postmodernist critics? A writer like Stone imagines and counts on a fraternity of feeling in response to his books – a readership that understands the pervading thoughts that impel him and that drinks from his “flagon of life” (Melville in a letter to Hawthorne, Hoare 186). Postmodern critics appear to be primarily concerned with ideology. In Jeoffrey S. Bull’s essay (2003), Vietnam vet Frank Holliwell of A Flag for Sunrise takes refuge in alcohol and cynicism. It’s Stone’s

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balance sheet. The novel “allows Stone to play out ‘ultimate questions’ arising from the American sense of self-doubt and thereby to establish and explore the longing and self-loathing within its politics” (160). One thing is sure, regeneration is clearly not an option for any of Stone’s heroes. Philip H. Melling suggests with a parable, which he extracts from his reading of The Scarlet Letter, Stone’s motives for writing novels such as Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise: Hester’s resistance to the established culture of Salem – her camouflage as a sister of mercy – becomes apparent only in the forest ... When Hester loosens her hair for Dimmesdale she becomes a Viet Cong, a guerilla, a razor-blade girl who plots to overthrow the moral community by ruining, through sex, its elected leadership. Hester wishes to defrock and emasculate Dimmesdale. She resists the imposition of Puritan confinement and spiritual quarantine and enters the devil’s space, inviting her lover to enter and penetrate the space within her. (175) In this interpretation, Dimmesdale embodies not the Puritan ideal, but the impulse and energies of its voice, that is, its exportation on behalf of a cultural and economic mission – a mission aggressively romanticized at the onset of the Vietnam War according to which the US lacks any desire for economic advantage. Our interests are freedom, democracy, and the fulfillment of a moral duty. Melling writes, “Dog Soldiers is set in a private landscape where the dream of mission has deteriorated into the cynical opportunism of the heroin trade” (178). The settings of the novel represent “the corruption within: the degenerate consumerism that governs the settlements that America has made in remote places” (180). The places are the same everywhere that has been plunged into a consumer goods invasion through mass advertising, “picture tube imperialism” (quoting Alan Wells, 183), flooding the market with cultural images promoting the interests of the United States. In Stone, those who rule in its name tolerate the use of torture and terror. Those who put them in power use drugs as an acceptable mecha-

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nism for funding and defending American national security interests. Holliwell’s awareness of what happens to any place in the preindustrial world in which America has declared an interest makes an alcoholic of him. We’re not permitted to sympathize. Though it’s a potent, paralyzing mixture of nostalgia and dread, Stone condemns him. Stone, the author, is no doubt Chillingworth in Melling’s parable: and the reader either has the moral strength to resist the excesses of capitalism and oppose the war, or, like Holliwell, is their victim. At one level, then, possibly most crucially, Stone’s novels recount his frustrated efforts to find redemption for America’s war in Vietnam. In this sense, in trying to work out, novelistically, salvation for a hero who is beyond redemption, Stone tries and fails to tell a story of triumphant spirituality in all his books. Stone wrote A Flag for Sunrise (1981) in the hope of showing something astonishing, ungraspable, brought forth out of the sheer luck of confluence. A scene of extraordinary violence opens the novel. Campos, lieutenant of the Guardia Nacional, enters the mission. We’re on the Caribbean coast of Tecan, a country with two coasts like Panama but with a central mountainous corridor in addition. The mission building itself is a discard of the United Fruit Company. Campos abducts the priest, Father Egan (who daily drinks himself into insensibility because the Camposes of the world are countless), and drives him to his house. The body of a girl is in Campos’s freezer. He demands absolution and gets it. He drives Egan back to the mission where he dumps the body, warning Egan to keep his mouth shut. The poor Father, in “the dark of his soul’s night” (4) and thus having only the voice of humanist witness, secretly disposes of the girl’s body. Sister Justin, née May Feeney, assists Father Egan at the mission. She hints at a world of sunlight just above the barrier of form. Author Stone is powerfully in love with her. His novel’s hero loves her also. Stone names him Frank Holliwell, like Frank Merriwell, a boy hero’s name. Which is meant as a dig. Holliwell is a committed alcoholic whose nervous system is further corroded by cynicism. Forty, incidentally married, a professor of anthropology, he’s a Vietnam vet with service in intelligence (cia).

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Holliwell flies into Compostela, the neighbouring country, to deliver a paper at a conference and possibly to check out the Catholic mission in Tecan as a favour for a cia friend – to find out if the priest and nun there are engaged in subversive activities. The other hero, Pablo Tabor, with dreams of becoming a Soldier of Fortune, has thrown over a wife, an eight-year-old son, and a steady job in the Coast Guard. Stone uses him as a vulgar double of Holliwell. Pablo knows what he wants: to be a prince in a hot country, palatial gardens and native women. He’s the fifth of a fourman crew on the Cloud, a contrabander disguised as a shrimper loaded to the gills with weapons. Stone conducts this little cast of characters, by and by, to the mission in Tecan and smack into an uprising. Copper has been found and the idiotic greedy generals owning the country antagonize every anti-government faction. It’s political science 101: US puts the government in. It trains the Guardia. US ambassador thinks pres and his family American-type people. Have to back them or the Russians will have a missile base in our backyard. We’ll turn the country into its own mass grave, if necessary. “You’ll have a jolly good time, Holliwell” (191). He’s at a luxury hotel just miles up the beach from the mission. He is extended cordiality by Ralph Heath, seasoned agent of business interests dependent on Tecan stability. He’s our friendly concierge, greeting Holliwell as one of us (an intelligence report having preceded Holliwell’s arrival). Good to know someone like Heath, reassuring, clubby. America’s presence is a given, like the latitude. Boozy, in his sixties, big mistake to get on the wrong side of Mr Heath. Caution, Holliwell: you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Author Stone can’t compete with Conrad’s operatic cartoonery of revolutionary types in Nostromo. Nobody can. Furthermore, Stone must restrain himself because of Sister Justin’s enthusiasm for the uprising, and in order not to fuel Holliwell’s cynicism. Top four in Tecan’s revolutionary council: number one, a peasant who intends to kill everyone who lives off the working poor: the rich, the

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priests, the bourgeoisie, the soldiery. Number two, an intellectual, a man of learning and wit, the best of company, brave in the face of torture and a lifetime of sacrifice, become a North American spy. Three, a local capitalist who prefers siding with the revolution rather than endure being cheated. Number four, the leader, darkskinned and massive, bull-necked and broad-faced, deeply scarred on the bridge of his nose, a true idealist. Considering the power of his northern enemy, the men he has to work with, the lessons of history and its example of broken champions littering the continents, it’s a miracle how long it takes before the revolution betrays everything it believes. Sister Justin in a torment of expectation: for days her dispensary has been ready to receive wounded insurrectionists. “Damn you, she thought, you asshole tourist” (233). The snorkeller, who has “stepped on a goddamn sea urchin” (233), is Holliwell. She pours an ammonia solution over his knee, and rubbing it in: “‘You can also piss on it.’ ‘It’s not so easy to piss on your knee sitting down,’ the man said” (234). Justin, pacing: having to believe in their coming, having to wait through another night. Holliwell at the Paradise hotel, steadily drinking and lusting after Sister Justin. Holliwell in love: “[h]e wanted her white goodness, wanted a skin of it. He wanted to wash in it, to drink and drink and drink of it, salving the hangover thirst of his life” (299). Guardia Lieutenant Campos wants to make her tremble, break her down inchmeal, kill her inchmeal, beat the life out of her, wash himself in all the shameful juices of her living. Both get their satisfaction. “‘Come and tell us how things are,’ Mr Heath said. ‘Nun-wise,’” facetiously warning Holliwell (356). Yes, our stand-in, he most like us, on the beach near the mission soliloquizing. He wants clarity and it’s not to be had, seeing her standing by the beach road. Then she’s beside him trembling in the morning sun. Holliwell takes a deep breath, the breath of struggle. He closes and opens his eyes, feeling the dizziness of sleeplessness and booze. She tells him that her earthly desires are for him and that she doesn’t know how to handle it. He draws up the ends of the soft net she steps into, telling her that he’s in love with her. “Over and through it all was the beating of her heart” (379).

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Holliwell returns to the Paradise where he drinks himself into a stupor. He’s roused after dark by Heath and two of the Guardia, who will shoot him if he doesn’t incriminate Sister Justin for subversive activities. They demand signed testimony. Holliwell submits (as it turns out) to her torture and death at the hands of Campos. Heath applies a salve: “It’s a war, Holliwell. Goes on all over the world. And, I suppose, in the long run the other side will win it. When they do, like all winners, they’ll find that things aren’t the way they’d planned and it didn’t turn out quite right. Then in a thousand years it’ll all be ancient history if there’s anyone to read it” (402). There are so many wonderful, imaginative scenes pitting faith against revolution in Karamazov, which is a prototype for these wayward Catholic novelists. There’s nothing in Western literature like the drubbing Ivan gets. Yet the reader likes Ivan, notwithstanding. It must be his boyishness and bad luck at love that helps to acquit him. Ditto for Frank Holliwell: it must be his boyish good nature that wins us over; he really isn’t a spy, he really doesn’t betray, he’s not quite a dipsomaniac, he’s echoed and cheapened by Pablo. Fact is, he’s a knave, our secular humanist. Revolting how he must square everything with his conscience, which squirms a little while it evasively ratifies, serving him like a pimp. Pimp and murderer: what he does to Pablo, well, it’s a stretch to call it self-defence. Holliwell, looking into Pablo’s face before killing him, sees himself: “It was like looking into some visceral nastiness, something foul. And somehow familiar” (420). As for the whole Tecan adventure, Frank will look back on it as an occasion for slumming. Sister Justin will be a dirty joke. But her martyrdom makes the mission holy. Father Egan is electrified and takes up preaching to transient hippies who camp nearby in what had been an old burial ground. Father Egan tells them that there’s no meaning, justice, or mercy in a world without God. Without faith in God it’s an evil world and “god” may as well be another word for Satan. It would be terrible to get the process whole, to see things as they are, undiluted. No breakdown, no story material to go with it. The trouble is, you can look as sharp as you like; you can pray first for something, for the slightest hint of something more. Not forth-

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coming. You can look into the dead face of the world, try to catch it unaware. No good. I mean, you look outward to the stars, to the farthest nebulae. Not a sign. Looking in, what have you got? Sour guts and a little concupiscence. Children, if you can’t find it, you have to believe in it. If you can’t believe in it, you have to hope you will. If you can’t hope, then all you can do is love the idea of it. Love it at a distance if that’s the best you can do, children. Love it like a secret lover. It’s the only meaning in all of things. There aren’t any others. (The language appropriated is on pages 318–19, 371). One other of Stone’s novels is likewise bright with a hint of God. Called Children of Light (1986) because it’s about the sons and daughters of the movie industry, and also to underscore the irony of the title for the star-spangled of Hollywood. The allusion to Robert Lowell’s poem “Children of Light” redirects the irony to the violent story of American expansion. “Children of Light” because the novel’s hero and heroine, ex-lovers, are set apart, Lee Verger, called Lu Anne by her friends, especially. Off psychiatric medication she perceives the scene undiluted. Possibly owing to a deficiency in her constitution, she can’t look on at what she sees and not run mad. “Children of Light” because reality is their problem. They see it too plainly. They’re not meant for this world. Gordon Walker is at low ebb. His wife’s left him, his children are grown, he’s not looking for work as actor or script writer. He’s got a serious cocaine habit with no urgent motive to get straight. Alone in a hotel room in West Hollywood thinking continuously about Lu Anne, who is being filmed at that very time in a script that he had written for her. He knows that she’s married to a doctor and has children, and that just now they’d be shooting the final scene when Edna Pontellier walks out into the sea and drowns herself. Our hero Gordon has mental agility in a state of numbness. He seems a military veteran, though we’re never told that the source of his infection is Vietnam. A man in his forties who drinks and who travels with a stash of cocaine and a box of Quaaludes. We’re told nothing of his personal history before he arrives in California in his early twenties and little to nothing subsequently. His past, it seems, has been forced out of his mind and confined to an “interior white space” (70).

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On his journey to the movie set, Gordon visits two friends to replenish his drugs. Sam Quinn (San Quentin?) for all the world seems an old buddy of the locked-away war. Thence to Dr Siriwai, who offers perspective on the moral terrain that is the novel’s field of battle. I, too, he tells Gordon, was tricked by a bad karma. Young, setting out in the world, the doctor rescued a man going cyanotic from an overdose. At the hospital, the patient recovered completely and married his beautiful Welsh nurse, whom he subsequently strangled, for which crime he was hanged. “I was a bit put off by it,” says Siriwai. “In any case, finally, I went for the big bucks and the bright lights just as you did” (107). Here’s illumination for the adventure on the moral plane of the novel. Walker and Lu Anne, because of the heightened awareness of their foul spiritual states, seek respite in each other. The panic-ridden drugged man and his schizophrenic crazy girlfriend make a valiant effort to sustain each other. Lu Anne has no protector on the movie set. She’s been ditched after eight years by her psychiatrist husband. The Drogues, directors junior and senior, know that she’s cracking up in the role of Kate Chopin’s heroine-suicide, and like the way she photographs, being crazy. They’re conveniently blind to her terror of entertainment journalist Dongan Lowndes, sourly pressing her with his lust. Enter Walker with his stash of cocaine and Quaaludes, and quenchless thirst for alcohol. Crisis and elevation onto the moral plane occurs at the producer’s party. Lu Anne, recoiling from Lowndes, feels for a terrifying moment transparent. “‘You have found me out,’ Lu Anne screamed. ‘The shit between my toes has stood up to address me ... He’s all filth inside,’ she said. ‘Look at his eyes’” (219). Lu Anne bolts, desperate to hide, and Walker races after her. Gordon Walker, named after booze, has been tagged in our imagination for an act of spiritual heroics, something analogous to Lowry’s dipso hero at the end of that novel, when he brings the house down. The scene shifts to Villa Carmel, where there’s a path up a mountain to a pile of pig manure, which serves as a shrine. Walker is shown slugging whiskey and taking a pinch of cocaine in every other frame.

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Lu Anne, though she partakes with him, can’t escape herself. That’s her madness. “You don’t think that filthy tomb person with the shit for eyes, you don’t think he saw who I was? Answer me,” she screamed ... “Ah, Christ,” she said, “it’s dreadful. It’s dreadful we have spirits and can’t keep them clean” (243–4). On the plane of the abstract, she’s dazzling: Her hair was wild, her body sheathed in light. Her eyes blazed amethyst ... “Don’t be afraid, Gordon. Look at me. Whose eyes?...” “They are your eyes,” she told him ... “I’m wires and mirrors. See me dangle and flash all shiny and hung up there? At the end of your road?”... “Hey, that’s love, man.” “You’re all lights,” he said. He was seeing her all lights, sparkles, pinwheels ... “I’m not going to make it,” he told her. “I can’t keep it together.” “All is forgiven, Gordon. Mustn’t be afraid. I’m your momma. I’m your bride. There’s only one love.” (234, 235, 236, 237) When he last sees her, before she disappears into the ocean, “[s]he was standing on a bar, her hair wet down. The light gave her an aura of faint rainbows” (252). He nearly drowns trying to save her. “He was terrified that she was gone. That she might be nowhere at all and her furious loving soul dissolved. He could not bear the thought of it” (253). She’s his actress, his dream self, his courage. We get the idea, Mr Stone. She’s the reason hope survives in the world. Any trace of mockery or black mass on the mountain expresses author Stone’s alarm at his own seriousness about religion. After Lu Anne’s memorial service, to which Gordon is not invited, we learn that he has been ill, which hastened his wife’s return to him. He’s off alcohol, and expects to be jogging for his health. Moreover, he’s resumed writing, no doubt a script about it all. A new life that seems drab, and timid, and sad, like surrender

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and collapse. For he had been granted vision. Lamentably, it is not Lear we see, carrying the corpse of Cordelia and calling Creation to account, but only Prufrock, being house-broken. Outerbridge Reach (1992) is about the difficulty, nay, impossibility of stepping clear of that “implacable guardian of our mediocrity,” as the poet puts it, onto a path to a less shameful self. It’s about Annapolis graduate Owen Browne’s breakout: he’s the sort of man who holds steadfast to forms, until chance sets him loose. The book’s title designates a marine junkyard on Staten Island, where old tugs and ferries are “scattered like a child’s toy boats” (73). The area across the channel is the actual Outerbridge Reach, a shoreline littered with metallic filth, storage tanks, power lines, where the junkyard hound never stops barking. It’s a graveyard of something unsettled in Browne, some judgment on him, some calumny by his vicious father, who appears occasionally in Browne’s thoughts as a drunken, mocking presence. So subtly ingrained is the pit prepared in childhood for Browne that his enthusiasm is strangled in infancy. Browne is forty, married to another of Stone’s sensational women characters with the high temper and blood line of a thoroughbred. Anne Browne guiltily smoothing things over, loving him for his promise and hint of unstable violence. Browne sells quality boats to a wealthy clientele. He also writes the ad copy. It turns out the business is in financial ruin and the owner has abandoned ship and disappeared. Circumstances give Browne the opportunity to compete in a race around the world, the Eglantine Solo. Which he seizes. Structurally we’re set up for a Lawrentian tale: a breakaway from a contravened knot which is always in Lawrence on behalf of life. What in fact happens is Browne’s nerve fails him. The novel’s secondary hero, a documentary film maker named Ron Strickland hired to create publicity for the company boat Browne is racing, becomes obsessed with the artistic possibilities of the film (and Browne’s wife), in a way that would sully Browne’s honour. “Hey, Ron,” [his assistant] Hersey said. “These look like nice people.”

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“Well, I mean they don’t resemble our usual run of scumbag.” “Trust me,” he told Hersey. (114) “You have no idea how shitty my life has been,” Browne said suddenly. “How fucking pedestrian and dishonorable.” (154) What happens to him at sea? He starts to fall apart. At the onset, he is choked by an infestation of bugs, disgusting spotted pale yellow wings. And from the first, he is stiff with his wife Anne when she comes on to him during planned phone calls. He prefers tuning in to a missionary station and stops reading. Fasts on unheated, undiluted consommé. The crisis comes with the discovery of the shoddy workmanship of the Nona. “Fucking plastic, he thought, enraged ... Plastic unmaking itself ... He was riding a decomposing piece of plastic through an Antarctic storm. “You bastards!” he shouted, trying to outdo the wind. “What have you done to me? You fucking filthy swine!” (300). Looking for the boat’s design drawings, he finds one of his brochures. He had been his own first, best customer ... Sold our pottage, overheated the poles, poisoned the rain, burned away the horizon with acid. Despised our birthright ... There is a justice here, Browne thought. He had been trying to be someone else. He had never really wanted any of it ... It had all been pretending, he thought, as far back as memory. He was at the root of it. He was what raised the stink at the heart of things. There would always be something to conceal. (300–2) At home, Anne becomes Strickland’s lover. At his chart table Browne makes a game of calculating where he might have been if the winds had held, if the boat had hung together, if the world had been different from what it was. Studying the positions, he finds himself imagining log entries to go with them. Browne begins to put himself in the position of a man given to subterfuge, a man who might fake his positions all the way

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around. He removes the transponder, ensuring invisibility, and busies himself creating imaginative log entries, inventing weather and little incidents, a counterworld with the horizon of a future. He thinks as he prepares to throw himself overboard: “[H]e had faced down every aspect of the ocean. They would have to give him credit for that ... The lie had been only a game. No one would ever know ... He would never be satisfied. He would always be ashamed” (382, 384–5). The Nona is picked up, derelict. The two sets of logs are found. The new widow and her boyfriend fly to the small Brazilian town where the Nona has been towed. Their affair is dead. Strickland’s values have become repellent to her. She arranges to have his film stopped, and is responsible for his being savagely beaten. She is more rowdy, unpresentable, bitter. But it’s chiefly Browne’s defeat that we’re left with. He had all his life been chafing, a throttled force. And then, having broken out, he shrank from the terrifying exposure. In the final analysis, promising but spurned; finally, a mule. Guilt over Vietnam has sapped Browne of his will to love life; his ocean voyage is a penitential pilgrimage, a peccata enormia, as if Browne could be cleansed by the ocean race. Strickland is Browne’s conscience – Strickland like strychnine, caustic for getting below surfaces. “When I’m filming people,” he says, “I see it this way: They’re the town, I’m the clock. Get it?” (161). Implying, I wait for my shots till I catch a subject in the posture I want. Anne has seen his anti-Vietnam War documentary and challenges him. Whose side is he on in the filming of her husband? He’s on the side of the Inquisition. The amulet Strickland wears around his neck is a precisely-wrought miniature, a Mayan sculpture of a sacrificial victim in agony. A vulture has just plucked out one of his eyes. The victim is Browne. It’s Browne, combat veteran of Vietnam, asking his close friend Buzz Ward how he manages. Thinking that the answer must have something to do with Buzz’s surviving five years as a prisoner of war. “Want me to tell you the secret of life, goodbuddy? ... Value your life. Shitty as it may be. Value your fam-

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ily. The war’s over and you’re alive. Do it in honor of the men who aren’t” (154–5). The Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway account of the Vietnam War, We were soldiers once ... and young (1992), was written “in honor of the men who aren’t.” It’s remarkable for its sureness of tone. The voices of the numerous individual soldiers blend into and harmonize with battlefield commander Moore’s narration: about pain, death, fear, raw courage, and camaraderie. He swats aside complaints, gives no breadth to the fatal flaws that cost so many American lives and ultimately the war. Thanks God and their lucky stars for air and artillery support, the “ring of steel” (146) when they needed it. That the m16 rifles were constantly jamming, and the North Vietnamese Kalashnikovs were superb infantry weapons, is noted but not dwelt on. At one point in the battle, the air controller senses disaster and uses the code word, “Broken Arrow.” The word calls aircraft from all over north and south stacked at intervals of one thousand feet, each waiting to receive a target (149). It is this view of Vietnam – an unbroken tone of tribute to those who fought and died on both sides – that Buzz Ward recommends to Owen Browne, Stone’s self-hating hero, who’s driven to atone for what amounts to Strickland’s inexpiable view of that war. In the film version that is Browne’s conscience, enemy troops are seen repeatedly blown to smithereens or stacked like cordwood six feet high. Napalm repeatedly being called in. Camera on the exasperating senseless killing known as “pacification.” Inevitably, then, Strickland’s focus is on soldier-kids coming home to hatred and execration. At sea, Browne imagines himself in combat from the first, brought back to Vietnam by the infestation of bugs on the boat. The memory is of an infestation of beetles. Browne reads it like a sign from God. Out there, everything is a sign from God. He’s glued to the missionary radio station. At the moment of his suicide: God, he thought, it’s truth I love and always have. The truth’s my bride, my first and greatest love. What a misunderstanding

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it all had been ... So it had been in the war. Things had turned out strangely. The order of battle, the hamlet evaluation reports, the Rules of Engagement, were dreams ... The thing itself, the pure reality, was always unavailable. Every act betrayed it. Every whimper, every fidget, every argument defamed the truth. He would never be satisfied. He would always be ashamed. (383, 385) At the heart of Damascus Gate (1998) is a central cog that keeps spinning on stripped threads. I’m talking about the hero, Christopher Lucas, a freelance journalist living in Jerusalem, 1992, unattached in his mid-thirties, like a fish gasping for oxygen, flailing about, who by the end of the novel has thoroughly exhausted the patience of the reader. The real heart and soul of the novel (as ever with Stone) is to give a glimpse of miraculous blue celeste, which the novel does, while spitting out (like a sewing machine) an elaborate interconnecting mesh of mockery and cynicism. With throttled Lucas at the centre: throttled because of his Jewishness (in fact it’s on his father’s side). He’s ashamed of it, yet feels driven to atone for turning his back on the Holocaust victims. I say the central cog is stripped because Lucas, it seems, must forever spin futilely between striving to be a good Jew and striving for Christian salvation. He can’t get a grip on his dilemma: how can you be a good Jew in occupied Israel? How can you be a good Christian in a world of repeated holocausts? The plot, which is secondary to Lucas’s spiritual struggle, has Lucas, detective-story wise, collecting information on religious sects in Jerusalem. He discovers a bomb plot to destroy the alAqsa Mosque on Mount Moriah in order for the second temple to be rebuilt. He’s implicated in the plot through his girlfriend, Sonia Barnes, in her worshipful longing to believe that the Second Coming is at hand in the person of Adam De Kuff. For De Kuff ’s chief apostle, Raziel Melker, who enlists Sonia as a follower, is a secret collaborator in the bomb plot, a traitor ostensibly to his best, profoundest instincts, as well as to De Kuff and his followers. Through Sonia, Lucas, too, becomes a pawn in Janusz Zimmer’s stratagem for causing a reshuffling in the Israeli

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cabinet and the reinstatement of his client, Cabinet Minister X. One wonders how Stone resisted scoring the whole performance for a Klezmer orchestra. The novel’s central drama, the coming of Melker and De Kuff with their presentiment of the Rapture, unrolls with the promise of sweetness and affection, but Stone undercuts it. Sonia demands that Lucas open his heart and believe in Adam De Kuff and the imminence of the Rapture. She says, “If you want to hear my song, you have to come with me” (166). As if upon this stage, mounted for farce, Razz and De Kuff can be taken seriously. Lucas can’t do it. He stands in a crowd at a De Kuff event. De Kuff’s arms are raised. Sonia beats a tambourine. De Kuff chants poetry, hecklers drowning him out. Razz and Sonia grinning at each other, and Lucas helpless to cut these lunatics out of his life. He’s exasperating, trivial, a minor detail in a footnote in a history about the machinations of the Jewish state. Too bad Stone couldn’t see fit to end his novel like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, with Razz and De Kuff in animated conversation walking on a moonbeam. In contrast to Lucas and those characters to whom he is intimately linked in the quest for faith, there are all the others pursued by the world in the clash of opposing truths (reflecting Jerusalem in 1992). And one character in particular, a mercenary who fancies himself a great future revolutionary leader in the service of humanity, plays on Stone’s edifice as if it were his very own web. This is Janusz Zimmer, who is successful in creating a disturbance that leads to the reinstatement of his client to a cabinet post from which he had been forced to resign. Because Zimmer’s plot involves linking De Kuff’s apostle, Raziel Melker, to a bomb scare, and Melker to Nuala’s gun running, Sonia is lured into Gaza as if she were Nuala’s accomplice. A Jew is killed and Nuala and Rashid (her Palestinian boyfriend) are executed in reprisal. Zimmer’s staged bomb scare at the al-Aqsa Mosque leads to De Kuff’s death by stoning and mortal injury to Melker, an end fitting in its primitiveness, in a place where the same conflict has been going on for centuries. In Stone’s previous books a sense of hopelessness is linked to the unpardonable sin of Vietnam. Here only the name of the war has changed.

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In Bay of Souls (2003) we get a tale of heavy self-punishment by a God-fearing man seduced by the world. Michael Ahearn is about thirty, a professor in a small university town in the northern plains. He’s from the area, married to an imperious type, a tall, aloof Scandinavian woman who dotes on him. He has a twelve-year-old son, Paul, whom he adores, and who is very unlike and yet crucially like his father in being devout. But the real story is that of a king of a rainy country scanted, censored, fiercely sullen, at war with moral compunction, and an alcoholic. In Dante we get a vision of the eternity in store for souls like Michael’s, swollen with self-regard. There, it’s a vista of iron chests, some with closed lids, mounted above fires, and crowded with souls that can’t imagine dying or mercy. In Michael’s hell, it’s dead deer hanging from the trees, one or two slung over the low boughs, on almost every lawn of every street. He’s just returned to town from a hunting trip. Because Michael, who teaches literature, is not a literary vitalist – rather he feels prodded to mock the assumptions of a D.H. Lawrence, and to preach social responsibility over creaturely comfort – one may assume the voice of the narrator (when probing Michael’s spiritual state) is that of Michael himself, helpless and facetious at his own expense, at the compulsion to destroy himself. Lara Purcell (in political science) provides the occasion. The prober might ask: “Could he have lived without what had just happened? Done without her? The answer was yes, he could have done without her fine” (59). He’s in her shower standing under the force of the water, “Washing, washing, washing all day long” (59). Lying, sneaking, cheating all day long. Going for broke, he’s not careful for his wife Kristin, or concerned about forgiving himself. Armed woman with pistol in skin tight clothing, the two of them high on coke. Boots, leather trousers, black bikini pants already wet, he would empty himself completely. “[T]o take as much of her as he could survive, and risk even more” (118). The question at the end will be whether he’ll survive spiritually. Before long, Kristin’s living with a boyfriend. Michael’s living in the student union. In the final scene, Michael drives out to hunting country. He turns in at the Hunter’s Supper Club to flirt with the

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barmaid Megan and buy a bottle of Willoughby’s scotch. The year before he had been attracted to her in her tight black cowgirl outfit, mother of pearl buttons, tattooed snake at the nape of her neck, brilliant blue eyes. She comes to him in a wheelchair, her neck supported in a brace that’s part of the chair, vacantly grinning. Like two bookends for beginning and end of story. For the centrefold, Michael accompanies Lara to St Trinity, a Caribbean island, her home. St Trinity is in a state of quelled uprising. Despite menacing obstacles and threats of many shapes, he is hers in the ranks of death: dives at night into the wreckage of a submerged plane to salvage contraband for Lara; places himself in bondage to Colombian traffickers to take the heat off Lara. Michael is there for her, sober and steadfast. Lara, on the other hand, is crazed and lost in voodoo mysteries, performing in the ceremony of retirer for her dead brother, John-Paul, who has come back to her from the bottom of the ocean. Above all, she needs Michael with her in the voodoo lodge, in the deep trance of the ceremony. She’s imploring the old hag, Marinette, to give her back her soul. Michael, it seems, is going to have to give his soul in swap for Lara’s, which the brother took into death with him. Old woman, cigar in mouth, points and screams and flaps her arms, suffocating Michael in sweat and cheap perfume. He calls for Lara. Sweet Lara returning to him is blocked by a man with stovepipe hat pushing a wheelbarrow with a goat in it, meant for him in the exchange of souls. A very frightened Michael is suddenly running, running, running, wee, wee, wee all the way home. At the end of this novel we don’t know whether Michael’s homecoming humiliations are a first stage on a purgatorial pathway, or whether he’s doomed – like the sexy barmaid before and after her joy ride – to haplessness and Willoughby’s.

tales from cuckooland Now, with the prospect of introducing Stone’s short stories, the seven he collected and published in 1997 under the title, Bear and His Daughter, and the seven of a second collection, Fun with Problems (2010), I will make a distinction between Stone the novelist

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and Stone the short-story writer, which puts the novelist among heroic fools going back to a voice in the wilderness, hopeful against ridiculous odds. Cervantes’s Don Quixote being the majestic prototype. To appreciate Stone’s compulsion to transform reality (and feel spiritually clean), which is his enterprise in writing novels, consider Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel, Going After Cacciato (1978). Cacciato being a device, presumably for empowering the author to tell his war story any which way he likes, provided it ends with his feeling peace in his soul. O’Brien’s narrator (in Going After Cacciato) isn’t able to get away from the war – hasn’t been able to find his way out of the vast necropolis US bombers made of the mountainous terrain that was enemy territory in the one significant battle he fought in. He would always be there, mopping up, in that meat-locker vestibule to hell, to which O’Brien would likewise be condemned if he sought to write his way out of responsibility. That’s the problem of presiding as author-god over one’s own soul’s pleading. When, in a village in Quang Ngai, two of his fellow soldiers shoot down ten dogs for the sport of it – “wrong,” his narrator (in Cacciato) cries out in his heart. He feels humiliated. He wishes he could tell the kids: “[t]he others, maybe, but not me” (266). Which plea to the author-god leaves him drenched in that meat-locker smell O’Brien knows to be ineradicable, inexpugnable. Says O’Brien, “Even in imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligation cannot be outrun” (323). Dostoyevsky calls Don Quixote the most profound work in all of literature, perhaps because in it compulsion (to be spiritually clean) triumphs over the facts of life. When Stone turns to the short story, he’s free of the compulsions that make him a novelist. The short stories represent a soldierly detachment from his novels. In effect, Stone is awol in writing them. He’s in a dirty movie theatre that never closes. Stone’s seven moral tales (in Bear and His Daughter) tend to exemplify a distinctly anti-holier-than-thou perspective. More precisely, their comic verve derives from the dignity of their heroes, a dignity

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founded on their being unutilizable as victims, as they could be employed in a conventional moral framework. In “Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta,” Fletch has been flourishing while his wife’s having an affair with a mutual friend, by pretending not to know and secretly watching them. It’s what he wants and needs, a secret agent in place of consciousness. What we get is a heroic tale about outfoxing a determined effort to get him to conventionalize the arrangement, which would rob Fletch of his sense of the poetical, boxing him in. But no deal. Fletch at the end is still back to his old tricks, stealthily watching. “Under the Pitons” is a version of Pablo’s affair with Deedee Callahan in A Flag for Sunrise (1981). Stone is a sucker for a certain type of literary tramp who seems to come straight out of the Merry Pranksters: drugged out of her mind, wildly free and yet self-aware, absolutely accountable for what’s going on around her, clinically depressed and riding it out gracefully. Gillian makes do gambling, chancing the occasion, creating the kick. “I thought it would be radical” (129): putting up big bucks to be in on a drug deal. “Gillian had come on deck stark naked” (123). A striking figure: tall, thin, with long legs, prominent nose and a big jaw. Young lady from Texas fresh from playing sportive, pink piggy to a big man with square, scarred face. Fearless, to whom life’s a dream. Snuffed out by the chanciest of accidents: all hands taking a swim when they notice no one lowered the boat’s ladder. Everyone but the narrator drowns. Life victimizes, somewhere along the way, severely. To Stone, notwithstanding the absurdity of the notion of dignity, that’s all a living being’s got: that is, to be complicated, an unusually complicated amalgam of this and that. Become rock-hard and opaque in the survival process. The usual moral framework Stone kicks aside – because it confers victim status, trivializing suffering with its ready-at-hand psychologizing. There’s dignity in there being no help for Vietnam War vet Chas Elliot in “Helping.” No help for him, no prescription. Having become a social worker, he gets a foothold and tries to hold his own against his history. The street bum, Blankenship, a client, kicks off in Elliot a land mine of bitter rage and lust for alcohol for which

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there is no remedy by pretending he was in Vietnam. If you don’t have to be there to be there, if the nightmares have crossed the ocean, if everyone’s a thieving betrayer: Chas hits Grace, who’s all he has to cherish, with all his pent-up, depthless rage. Mary Urquhart in “Miserere” gets a foothold and holds her own against her history. Mary becomes a Catholic. She saves fetuses from being cut off from God. Thirteen years before, her family had drowned in a lake. For two hours her husband had shouted for help, with the kids clinging to him, until they sank beneath the ice, locked together. “‘Little lamb, who made thee?’ Mary Urquhart asked wearily,” looking at the fetuses. “The things were so disgusting. ‘Well, to work then’” (11). She’s an amalgam, adamantine. Knowing by heart the sacred poems of Crashaw, Vaughan, and Blake. She’s fearless, defiantly uncompromising, yet obedient. I think she nightly dreams of giving herself to whiskey “to drown it all, whiskey to die in and be with them” (14). In the title story, “Bear and His Daughter,” the celebrated poet William Smart makes a rare visit to his bastard daughter with whom he had had sex at an unspecified age. Rowan, who is thirty, works for the National Park Service in one of the mountain states. In the time present of the story, she’s transferred to security: a six-foot-tall knockout in tight pants, boots, and holstered gun. She lives with a native Shoshone and fellow ranger, John Hears the Sun Come Up, in a trailer at the park near the Visitors Center, twenty miles from the town of Shoshone and the college where her father will be reading poetry. The narrative has the structure of Hardy’s poem, “The Convergence of the Twain”: fated impact, piteous ending, and something festive, too, in the tinkling of the spheres. William Smart is seen travelling from a gambling casino (from which he’s physically expelled) to Rowan and John’s trailer. When she was born (to a radical on the lam from the fbi), Smart was living with his wife and children in Boston. He’s burly, overweight, out of shape, with a sore back, not to mention angina pains. And he’s also a drunk with a recent breakdown. Guessing from what happened at the casino, he’s

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subject to alcoholic blackouts: because he has no idea what he might have done to enrage them. En route, he regales himself with memories. And tries to remember a poem he wrote about salmon, which he has lost. No question in his mind but that it’s lost, which on the surface would seem to account for his obsession with it as he drives to see his daughter. God damn, he had felt like cheering at the inspired occasion of that poem. There was a time when, if he cut his face shaving, he’d bleed poetry. They loved him in Russia. He had, in fact, slept with countless Russian women. Smart is now impotent. He keeps obscure any possible connection between the poem and Rowan. Rowan, on the other hand, has taken speed which magnifies her obsession with his visit. Glittering blue eyes that see a fantasy when she looks at John. She has teenagers in the group she’s conducting through the amphitheatre called the Temple, one particular girl innocently flirting with her, eating out of her hand. Were there sacrifices here, the teenager asks. “‘Seems like that kind of place, doesn’t it?’” (199). And tells them about pre-modern, Caddoan-speaking people, who believe that “the sun couldn’t move unless blood was shed.” And that sometimes “‘orphan girls from the Bear Clan were put on the stone and killed ... When Sun saw their blood he ran through the sky ... And the Bears,’ Rowan said, ‘to conceal the blood ... that’s why the ash is here ... all that black world’” (199–200). It’s a made-up story of what Rowan would like to believe she meant to her father, who took her sacrifice, and shines on the world with his poems. John Hears the Sun Come Up knows what happened between them. He’s not repelled. Some Indian people think it’s all right if it’s what the spirit world wants. And he likes Will because he loves hearing his poetry. But he’s not going to hang out to protect either of them, and leaves just about on the heels of Smart’s arrival. Quickly things develop. There’s to be no dinner. She doesn’t want steak. She wants tribute, poetry addressed to her. She kisses her father’s hand and nestles next to him on the sofa, while he tells her about his salmon poem and chokes up crying. She molests him,

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tries to kiss him on the mouth, fondles him. “You’re the only one I want. Ever since then. All my life maybe” (214). “I was drunk,” Smart pleaded. “I was on drugs. I was certifiable. I took some comfort. I was desperate.” “Then,” she said, “what about me? ...” “This is how it was, baby. I hardly knew you.” And more of the same, despite the warning of “her grieving, crazy eyes” (215). Rowan shoots him in his sleep after reciting his salmon poem, with her cheek pressed against his. Maybe he never realized that he wrote it about his desire for her, and convinced himself it was lost so as to cover all traces. More likely, he wrote it to woo her. She shoots herself, sitting on the floor of the public restroom in the Visitors Center. John Hears the Sun Come Up doesn’t think of their story as the world does. Easy to summon their ghosts, he thinks. “[B]urn a little sweet grass, fix her guitar maybe and play it, she would come. Her and her father ... [with] all their songs” (222). The moral here is easy. Don’t be lugubrious. Don’t kick over a table like the sanctimonious Mormon sheriff and bishop who had had an affair with her. John Hears the Sun Come Up is in a festive mood. What happened is what the spirits wanted. Their lives and poems belong to the Shoshone people now: the legend of a poet who comes home to the love of his life to die. Rowan has become a poet while waiting for her father to come back to her. Poems provide “[a] little interior clarity and light. Hope” (183). Listen, it’s beatitude to have one’s poems on call, ever-present in the minds of others. Go ahead and kick a table. In the epigraph to a new collection of stories, Fun with Problems, Stone quotes from a rehab video: “Overcoming difficulties can present spiritual opportunities. It is actually possible to have fun with problems.” It’s not there for the title alone and hardly as a facile guide to the stories. The epigraph, which is a little pep talk, is laughably offensive. Is it possible to have fun with a serious disability? The question appears central to me. Can Stone really be awol and

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feel exuberantly free from the war zone of his novels? Free from a psychological war wound that won’t heal? Temporarily let’s assume so: in the stories he’s not knocking himself out over his need for a God who doesn’t exist. Roughly, his stance in these stories could be modelled on Beckett: Molloy, for example, where life is unspeakable and the problem is how to survive. Predators, narcissists, pulers, the respectable, and the guilty – they’re the problem, the grain against which the occasional good guy sparkles. To sparkle is to triumph over the crucifiers. It’s liberating, exuberant fun. In Stone, ample quantities of booze and drugs are necessary. Where the life force is vigorous and fine, the sparklers are inspired nuts – triumphantly nuts. In all, there are only two such good guys in the collection, and a third who is of a minor key. In the title story, we watch attorney Peter Matthews’s cold-hearted seduction of Amy Littlefield – an easy prey; a credulous, self-effacing alcoholic half his age. We know the violation is meant to be illustrative of the hell Matthews inhabits – his life is his punishment – but it’s no consolation to the reader, who cares about Amy. The honeymooner in “Honeymoon” drowns himself out of fear of the continuous expenditure of energy necessary to make his young bride happy. He actually phones his ex-wife from their Caribbean hotel and begs her to allow him to come home. In “Charm City,” Margaret, it turns out, is a gangster. Her pillage of the Bower house represents a little triumph against the carnage of life. “The Wine-Dark Sea” is the breakaway story in this Stone collection. Washed ashore on Steadman’s Island, Eric, the hero, baits and heedlessly abandons himself to toying with Taylor Shumway, a Laestrygonian, a lobsterman and ferry hand with a long neck and maniacal blue eyes, and missing a whole row of teeth from the time he spent two years in prison for assault. Eric has wangled an invitation to Annie and Taylor’s house through his connection to Annie’s sister, one of his girlfriends. He’s come because the US Secretary of Defense is on the island at a policy conference. Eric is a writer and journalist. The comedy at the Shumways is a high point of the collection. Just as good is the uproar on the ferry between the Secretary and

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Taylor. Unmistakable kinship: the men are doubles of one another, wackily demented crackpots who get away with murder because we like them. They’re on fire and funny. In all, not counting the crackpots, there are three inspired nuts in Fun with Problems: Margaret, Eric, and Duffy (of the last story). “High Wire” is an echo of the story Stone tells in Children of Light. The novel is the real McCoy struggle of the boozy, druggy hero for reclamation, not in a sanitarium, but in worship. Here, Tom’s story about his love for Lucy, by contrast, is an exasperating amalgam of guilt, guile, contrition, self-pity, self-vindication, self a hundred times over. In the final analysis, Tom’s motives are irrelevant. Ultimately, all that matters to him is whether or not his confession makes a good movie. Yet, with Duffy, in “The Archer,” Stone has fun. Duffy, on an academic junket (he’s a painter and professor of art), lives up to the story’s title by playing off the myth of Philoctetes, the famous Greek archer, who’s cast away on a deserted island to preserve the Greeks from the stench of his wound, a wound that won’t heal. Duffy performs at Pahoochee State University on the Gulf of Mexico, in a hotel restaurant with his host and family (the head of the art department, his professor wife, two sons, and the wife’s parents). He produces an amazing stink: drinking from his flask, it being Sunday, and making an address to the restaurant when his food is served – about red painted fish guts squeezed from a tube and dished up as crab. The restaurant calls the cops. Courage in the world of these short stories is to live “unutilizable,” untranslated, triumphantly nuts whenever possible for the confusion of the edifiers and enforcers, in the struggle against immurement, and for the sake of oxygen.

choose your poison Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), is a constant source of my reflections on Stone. Johnson’s hero, William “Skip” Sands, is unhinged by a betrayal. It is difficult at first to assess the magnitude of the smash-up to his credulous, patriotic faith in everything American – America’s mission in southeast Asia and

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his duties there as an intelligence officer. Robert Stone is in the same place as Skip: sitting alone with his thudding heart. Johnson’s hero loves the US of America. He refuses against reason to hear it criticized. His uncle, the colonel, who is the genius of the novel, symbolizes the flawed greatness of the USA. Skip discovers the colonel and himself to be increasingly under attack, both by the intelligence agency (wanting and then hounding Skip for his cooperation), and by the emergence of his own doubts. The colonel suspects Skip of betraying him. Skip ostensibly takes a stand: a sovereign loyalty to the colonel and against truth. This is what the heroes of Stone’s novels are up against. All seven of them are flat-out incapable of mustering such resolution, or of imagining honour in it. Stone denigrates their cynicism and makes them pay for it. They’re drunks. They’re disgraces as human beings. Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam novel about a cia officer’s disillusionment, illuminates for me Robert Stone’s frustrated, tireless striving in each of his novels to find God, which he speaks about in terms of the Vietnam experience. Vietnam was the sin of his generation, and Stone feels the dismay of abetting it and of being corrupted by it. Faith has to be a matter of the soul, as he says in his 2007 memoir Prime Green: “Blazing, blinding faith, that is” (168). And there’s the nub of it. The desire to believe defeated by the terrible world. Which is the whiplash to the critique of himself, the self-castigations, sharp and continuous, novel after novel, as if he could write himself into feeling warm-hearted spontaneous faith and be forgiven. Five heroes in seven novels to date, stand-ins for himself; a sixth (Rheinhardt) pictures the consequence of failing to strive. The seventh, Gordon Walker, “knows” that honourable living implies a living calvary. Stone’s memoir, Prime Green, contributes to an understanding of his motivation as a novelist. For example, Stone (in his late twenties) wrote for a tabloid that was modelled on the National Enquirer. “[I]t sold sex and grotesquerie,” he says, and describes the time as a lark: it “kept me in a state of unsound euphoria,” and was “liberating and bright with possibility, while the true shit keeps you bound to a fallen world” (137, 139, 142).

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Stone’s hero in Dog Soldiers, John Converse, likewise has a flair for tabloid writing. The episode in the memoir is reproduced in the novel. Stone wrote for the National Thunder; Converse writes for Nightbeat. Yet Converse is cheapened by the account as the Stone character in the memoir is not. Because in the novel, his writing for a tabloid is part of a critique of Converse, the first of Stone’s novelistic stand-ins. Item in the critique: that once-a-year visit to his mother on her birthday, featuring the hotel dump in which he’s installed her. It’s a law in Stone’s novels that secular humanists are destructive. Stone, as he describes himself in his memoir, fits the type that Stone the novelist always feels up to working over: for “never [being] able to advance ... beyond the old boring liberalism,” and for keeping religion, which, he says, “was more the thing for me,” exclusively as a literary concern (168). William “Skip” Sands, hero of Johnson’s great novel, reveals himself in a revolting manner: “Hey, you gotta see this, the Kooties are messing with that Vietcong” ... [T]he savagely dressed black guy, stood in a bloody puddle in front of the hanging prisoner, spitting in his face ... The black Kooty seemed to be lecturing them while he dug at the man’s belly with the blade of a multipurpose Swiss Army knife ... “There’s something I want this sonabitching muhfucker to see.” Now the Kooty went at the man’s eyes with the spoon of his Swiss Army knife (337, 338). Just about everyone’s stomach is turned. The colonel shoots the prisoner in the head to put him out of his misery. His nephew is laughing. “Skip Sands could hardly stand up, he was laughing so hard ... something had struck him as hilarious” (339, 341). Johnson makes doubly clear that it’s not a hysterical reaction. Skip relishes the torture. Yet looking at Skip all in all, the reaction seems out of character. Not at all like the man who demands explanation from the colonel about the murder of the priest in Mindanao. But there it is, coexisting, if you will. “[Y]ou like it here. You

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walk very softly and you don’t get your body hot for no good reason. You use the air around you” ... ”You blend with the air like a native” (344). Said shyly, with admiration, by Jimmy Storm, the colonel’s right-hand man, a hard-nosed realist and hipster poet of the craziness. To preserve his patriotism and loyalty, Skip acquiesces to evil. All of Stone’s heroes are to be perceived as Vietnam vets who won’t make this adjustment. They have grappled with truth, succumbed to disillusionment, tried to arbitrate among their loyalties, and have fled to alcoholism and drugs. Because right at the heart of their ability to grasp the truth, they want their minds to fail before the truth, to be paralyzed, to swoon. Their problems and pathologies stem from their inability to forgive themselves, from the feeling that there’s no point to anything they do, and from spikes of vindictive rage. Ray Hicks (Dog Soldiers) injects an overdose into some guy, some jerk, shocking Marge. She stared at the merciless eyes, trying to see him again, trying to make him be there ... “Hue City,” Hicks said. “We had guys who were dead the day they hit that place. In the morning they were in Hawaii, in the afternoon they were dead. I had six buddies shot to shit in Hue City in one morning” ... “Now what I do that for?” he asked after a while. “Revenge?” she suggested. “Honor?” He said nothing. “Manhood? Justice? Christianity? Hue?” (202, 203) Hicks survives by compartmentalizing. Johnson’s hero also survives, explicitly, by becoming a split personality. Skip loves the colonel. He could never betray him. The colonel is “the star-spangled American night, absolutely infinite, surround[ing] the world” (499). Skip betrays him. He has to betray him. His split side is the necessary accommodation. “[Y]ou kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals” (577), you betray, you enjoy lying, you play endless games with a Green Beret officer and the

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cia, you “dodge the wind” (198) and flirt with death, “an imposter and a psychopath” (631) to the end. Here now is a truth incommensurate with truth that I derive from Stone. Choose your side, your poison. Take a vow of allegiance. Stick to it, against the temptation to rationalize it or to arbitrate between sides.

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morning at the brink What is this book on the three Americans if not a study of their panic at the death of hope expressed in novels born of a terror they cannot think away? Any and every structure that presumes to offer shelter, to give meaning and order to existence, whether it be religious, sexual, political, social, economic, if it be in any way consolatory, the Judge Holden in them despises and would pervert. He represents the enemy in the heart of our desire to redeem history from the service of darkness. Similarly, in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the most illuminating, nay, amazing display of the spirit of postmodernism, civilization’s desire to redeem history has run amok in its zeal against the overbearing meaninglessness of existence. Pynchon depicts dark romanticism collaborating with fear of death in a selfannihilating apocalypse, all the while unmasking and mocking our doomed culture in a ceaseless parody. If there is a “heroic” side to living in hopelessness, it lies in improvisation: not to be enmeshed in paranoia, but, rather, to be cheeky, clownish, in our impotence. Among gathering scholars speculating ever more abstrusely on how this novel works, its principle of organization and agenda, are Scott Sanders (1976), John A. McClure (1994), Joseph M. Conte (2002), and Stefan Mattessich (2002). But especially in John Johnston’s 1998 essay on Gravity’s Rainbow we get the polar star version of postmodernism, the lure enchanting these Catholic cowboys to

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despair. In the time present of the novel (following Johnston) the world is dominated by a techno-political order spectacular in its growth and omnipotence. The only narrative is that of this all-powerful, abstract machine stifling, rearranging, overcoming, manipulating. The glimpse of reality that is given the novel’s main hero (right on the heels of a sodium amytal injection) is depicted, in a dazzling poetic display, as a trip down a toilet, imagined for pages, breathtaking in the sense of his and our colluding to enjoy the flush. Anyone seeking understanding hasn’t a chance to hold out against the disintegration of personality brought on by the paranoia of being hunted, by the power of the inchoate, incessant, flood of images. As if in some kind of horror movie, the helplessness and death of the hero redounds to the eternal hegemony of power. The attraction of postmodernism for these renegade Catholics is to know the “truth” and to curse the absent God they want to love. There are no grand narratives. There can be no discoverable sense of purpose to a quest for meaning. There is only the parody of purpose and all you can do is write. The modernist Conrad’s respect and admiration for what he calls “the honor of labor” in The Mirror of the Sea (1906) epitomizes for me a humanism strong to the core, which the postmodernists have abandoned. How Conrad praises to the sky the value of skilled performance, the attention to craft that turns it to art, the beauty of attainment. Whether it be yacht racing or literary criticism, “[i]t is made up of accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it is spurred on and sustained by discriminating praise” (37). Is it not hope, anchored in this moral vision, despite the horrors of Kurtz, that inspires Marlow to exclaim, “[Civilization] is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!” (Heart of Darkness 106). I’m not surprised by the importance of The Waste Land to these Americans. Because, the main thing, the poem doesn’t equivocate about hope: hope for spring rain, hope in blessings, in a way out. Besides, Eliot was king in the fifties and sixties when they studied him. They grew up with the poem. I don’t think they’ve got the 433

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lines by heart. They’ve got the layout by heart, the poem’s scaffolding, which comes effortlessly to hand for the ordering of artistic material, which Stone surely had in mind for the mountaintop scene in Children of Light. In Underworld, DeLillo invents a lost Eisenstein film, Unterwelt, containing scenic imagery right out of The Waste Land, so there’s no missing the sport. He uses the poem to identify his hero with Eliot’s quester for redemption, in an experiment to discover whether faith will be an option for Nick. And maybe for himself. Allusions to the poem dry up about two-thirds of the way through, due to the increasing cynicism of the author. One amusing transmogrification, poem into novel, converts the waste display of condoms astonishing the shrubbery along the Thames after “[t]he nymphs [have] departed” (at the opening of part III of The Waste Land, ln. 175–6), into a condom store at the nearby mall, to which Nick hies on the recommendation of his crony, Brian, who, as one of those “loitering heirs of City directors” (ln. 180) cuckolds Nick. The condom store is another impressive DeLillo set piece. McCarthy, who also, like Eliot in The Waste Land, doesn’t equivocate about hope (there is none in McCarthy until The Road) uses The Waste Land to play a dirty trick on the reader. The kid (Blood Meridian) is forty-four, drifting on the north Texas plains. He enters one of the killing fields, millions of buffalo carcasses, teams of pickers in ox-drawn wagons, bones in windrows ten feet high and hundreds long. We’ve admired the kid for hard-nosed practicality. He came out of his desert of slaughter when just sixteen years of age. He’s still a tough hombre, broad, on the short side, but not so solidly grounded psychologically. Fact is, the kid is again feeling buried alive in slaughter. “The air smelled of rain but no rain fell” (318), says the narrator, suggesting by the allusion to The Waste Land that the kid is ready for salvation, ripe as one can be, if only some revelation were at hand. What comes, rather, too bad, is just another killing. D.H. Lawrence in the fifties and sixties, when these Americans were in college, also reached the pinnacle of his influence. After which, in the early seventies, he was found to be too crude and moralistic for the classroom, though it took another fifteen years

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before professors removed him from their syllabi. It came as no surprise, after reading Damascus Gate, that Stone should remark in his memoir, Prime Green (2007), that he had read The Plumed Serpent straight through, nonstop. Of course, reading the book selfishly, with an eye, perhaps, on the insurmountable problem he was to tackle ages later in Damascus Gate. By selfishly, I mean the way writers invariably read: in the festive spirit Elizabeth Bishop read and loved Lawrence, knowing best how to value his Tourette’s dance on lesbians. Stone certainly knew from The Plumed Serpent that a novel about the birth of a new messiah had to fail, unless he courted cynicism and derision. So the best he could do in Damascus Gate, with having to produce religious mysteries and pronouncements on the spot, the whole business to be taken in from back stage, is the contrivance of subordinating Raziel and De Kuff’s story to the meshugass of palace intrigue. In the sixties, reading Lawrence meant inviting him to stick his ugly mug right up to yours: i.e., to allow him to paw your private life with intimate fingers and try to defend yourself. But since the sickness Lawrence sought to treat is so many times worse today, there’d be no purpose to wrestling with the angel now. Lawrence is a constant remonstrance that without faith in the future, the novel amounts to objectless blasting. Conrad, the deeper one goes in, is paradox. But flagrantly misused if to support moral confusion or hopelessness. Reading Heart of Darkness (frequently tuned-in to by these novelists) is like moving a dial across a radio band loaded with great stations – for adding dark, suggestive resonance. That’s why they tune in. Nothing conclusive is ascertained. Marlow says he detests lies. Well, he is morally upright, emphatically like us, and requires tight constraints to keep from abandoning himself to an instinctive, protective mendacity. Ergo, Marlow admires the Accountant at the company station, safe in his spotless deportment. The man is savage about it, not allowing distraction, and untroubled otherwise, in an absolute bedlam of murder, piracy, and enslavement. Conrad is poet extraordinaire of rot from the underneath flowering as despair and violence: feeling zero sympathy, negative zero, for Kurtz, the prodigy of the type, or for Marlow’s accession to admiring him. No, what we might mis-

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take for sympathy is Conrad’s understanding that Marlow’s selfpossession depends on a rotten fabric of equivocations. The nearest to truth is that he’s there to grease the gears, and that’s what he does; and the longer he stays, and the more it’s forced upon him, the more he gives way to hysteria. It’s the number Kurtz did on himself. You reach a point when you can’t wake up from the nightmare. Ultimately, Conrad’s force of conviction derives from the apprehension of a miracle. Civilization, at sea in a very leaky boat, manages to survive with great labour at the pumps. So there’s hope. It’s not tenuous either, oddly. When Conrad is evoked, it’s to conjure a massive force of common sense and practical sagacity. These English modernists represent a moral point of view that must remain implicit or the novel is dead. Nor is the passionate defence of the novel given in Mao II worth a damn (the novel goes on to imply) if its proponents are armed with nothing more than their secular humanist witness. The three American writers wrote their first books in the postmodern era, during the most shameful of America’s wars. In a history that “includes Cooper and Melville, Crane and Hemingway, Jones and Mailer, Heller and Pynchon” (Myers 33), Vietnam was different in its voice of a subculture of teenage kids who dreaded and fought the war, and later wrote about it; different in the violent protest against the war at home after the 1968 Tet offensive; and different from other wars in its continuing corrupting influence after it was over. Beidler says “Stone is the chief novelistic exegete of ... fear and loathing of ... the world’s greatest consumer nation” (1991, 256–7). Says Melling, “As an imperial power, the United States preys on the weak and explains its mission by denouncing the enemies of God. Stone’s theme is salvation through cannibalism – a cannibalism generated by overproduction and a surfeit of capital” (170). In 1961 President Kennedy said, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty” (qtd in Melling 171) – a euphemism for our commercial interests abroad. According to Melling, “Few novelists have been more critical ... more willing to expose the commercial considerations on which American adventurism has rested than Robert Stone” (171).

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“Fellow Americans!” ... “Let us consider the American Way” ... “The American Way is innocence ... In all situations we must and shall display an innocence so vast and awesome that the entire world will be reduced by it. American innocence shall rise in mighty clouds of vapor to the scent of heaven and confound the nations!” (A Hall of Mirrors 366) In A Flag for Sunrise, American economic and cultural imperialism intersect and exercise absolute control. Here, “[t]he penetration of Latin America by the corporate culture of the United States appears irresistible” – as it does most anywhere in the pre-industrial world in which America has declared an interest (Melling 190). Vietnam: a virulent cancer “specifically American ... in the age of ... globalized free market capitalism” (Knight 27). DeLillo’s Gary Harkness fantasizes about purifying the world by destroying it. Glen Selvy “runs to serve an anonymous, dehumanizing capitalism” (Osteen 109). In The Names, “capitalism subsumes all other human enterprises ... making investments, destabilizing governments, visiting tourist sites” (Osteen 120). Business as usual: “the encroachment of consumer capitalism into every last realm of human endeavor” (Knight 36–7). Peter Knight asks, “[I]s [DeLillo’s] writing a symptom, a diagnosis, or an endorsement of the condition of postmodernity?” (27). The senseless, irrational, excessive violence in Blood Meridian can be seen to reflect the savagery of the killing after the Tet offensive. I haven’t found this surmise in the McCarthy criticism, but it would make sense. McCarthy “shows us what the myth devolved from the reality looks like in a postmodern world” (McGilchrist 126). Megan Riley McGilchrist goes so far as to say that “Glanton’s gang’s loss of connection with both their own histories and any connection with lawful activity mirrors the chasm between America’s purported ideals and its actual activities in Vietnam” (130). Hence, summarizing the views of her colleagues, McGilchrist believes McCarthy was motivated (in the aftermath of the Vietnam War) by America’s economic colonization of much of the rest of the world, seeing in the judge (like Sara L. Spurgeon) American capitalism’s cannibalism.

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Peter Knight has the penultimate word: “The problem with the analysis of postmodernity as the encroachment of consumer capitalism into every last realm of human endeavor is that the more convincing it is, the more depressing it becomes because if true, there is nothing that can be done about it” (36–7). Capitalism unchecked becomes fascism, its dark twin. Literature is reduced to twilight in a bunker. No point in seeking standards there.

safe passage through a bad night Let’s look at K. again, striving as ever to get into the Castle. The facts are these: he’ll never get in, he’ll never penetrate the Castle. He’s absurd, a laughingstock to the Count’s crowd. But until the nails be driven into his coffin, he won’t admit to discouragement. Up to a point his lunacy is amusing. Shall we leave him, inevitably “to stand like a beggar before the threshold, to one side of the entrance, to rot and collapse”? (The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–1913, 317). I mention K. because his quest embodies the ambivalence of these authors towards their own central issues. Like K., they seek preposterously. I’m looking at the body of work produced by these three Americans: forty-one books, thirty-two of them novels; five plays; a screen play; two collections of short stories; and a memoir. Just how bleak are they? I’m tempted to answer like Clov in Beckett’s Endgame, who repeats the word “gray,” and finally screams it, “GRRAY” (for Hamm’s benefit), as he scans the moribund world from their bunker. In his best works, Cormac McCarthy creates pageants of hope throttled, sticking a sock into its death rattle. The world, having triumphed over the spirit, is out of control. Incest, maniacal killing, and madness, in Outer Dark, which is, notwithstanding, a comedy. In Child of God, a small, deformed, ugly man goes on a killing spree and beds down with his female corpses. In Suttree, McCarthy introduces the quest for spiritual sustenance, hope, in a barbaric world; in a world, as we find it in Blood Meridian, cleansed of sentiment by awesome, depraved power. The judge pulls all the strings, including those controlling the kid’s forlorn quest to discover deliverance.

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With Billy Parham in the Border Trilogy, the retrospective impression of Billy’s suffering seems to indicate a dynamic equilibrium between McCarthy’s pained mockery of the kid in Blood Meridian and an anguished sympathy for Billy. But spirituality floods into his universe with his last two novels, weakening his remarkable austerity of vision. A telling difference between McCarthy, DeLillo, and Stone is the nature of rage. In McCarthy, rage is life force, a craving to inflict pain. In DeLillo, rage is a safeguard against unwanted self-awareness. The world of his novels is the creation of people living in terror of being found out, and of strategizing survival skills to forestall suicide. In Stone, rage is a weapon of exasperation that he continuously turns on himself and his characters for being holdouts against God. Rheinhardt (A Hall of Mirrors) is the debased hero of a morality play, a drunk trying to live without spiritual suffering. His being a Vietnam vet doesn’t excuse his behaviour after the war. The Vietnam of Herr, Wright, O’Brien, Heinemann, Caputo, and Stone doesn’t excuse any of Stone’s heroes. Ray Hicks and John Converse (Dog Soldiers) are heroes linked in a story about the world’s triumph over spirituality and the struggle of a Stone stand-in to rise above his mediocrity. Frank Holliwell (A Flag for Sunrise), morally flabby and likeable, is the Stone stand-in with a boy hero’s name. He stupefies himself with drink and lust when given the chance of redeeming a little of his self-respect. Gordon Walker (Children of Light) is the hero of another missed occasion for moral courage. On a mountain top he is given proof positive of spiritual truth but merely elects to patch up his marriage and go on the wagon. Owen Browne (Outerbridge Reach) literally goes mad in a struggle to be rid of spiritual infection, a sense of shame that can’t be appeased, and that at one level of the novel is caused by the Vietnam War. The infected hero Christopher Lucas (Damascus Gate) struggles to believe in God, but the struggle is exasperating because Stone’s novel is primarily a vehicle for ridicule. Michael Ahearn (Bay of Souls) is the wayward Catholic in a Christian morality play. In Ovid, we’d see him transform into a monstrous, hairy, steel-blue horsefly, crazy for garbage.

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Among DeLillo’s protagonists are an uncommon number of psychopaths and marginally psychopathic types who’ve cashiered their private lives in order to have nothing to fear from the past. Like Dante, DeLillo has amassed a handy symbolic nomenclature for infractions of the moral law. DeLillo’s roster: • • • • • • • •

• • •

David Bell, Americana: an inventive psychopath who lives in the third person. Gary Harkness, End Zone: a sweet lad, a ticking time bomb, amorphous rage held in check by football. Bucky Wunderlick, Great Jones Street: a rock star unable to control his violence through art. Rob Softly, Ratner’s Star: a math genius driven frantic by his libido. Pammy and Lyle, Players: gapers, as if innocent assassins, irresponsibly, wickedly treacherous. Glen Selvy, Running Dog: robotic, defenceless against his special forces training, a gauge of social disintegration. Jim Axton, The Names: a floater increasingly driven by rage after finding his urbane self-vindication useless. Jack Gladney, White Noise: founder of “Hitler Studies,” trying to control his fear of death by immersing himself in the ocean of Hitlerian murders. Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra: lives and dies as a third person persona. Bill Gray (novelist), Mao II: victim of his lack of identity, which he blames on the death of the novel. Nick Shay, Underworld: in the arc of Nick’s life we see the full breadth of Underworld’s poetic vision, a vast mural of America dominated by death.

In his four most recent novels, the heroes are destroyed by some carnage in the past. Lauren Hartke, body artist, has made an art of suicide. The other heroes also come on stage to engage us with their disintegration. They’ve been imposters ever so long, waiting to be

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found out and taken by the throat. All of them pay extravagantly to forestall suicide. When you think about living without hope, a spectre raised by all three novelists, there’s a perception that might at any time rush upon you. That of being meat, with bones and gristle. Red meat for a meat locker. Dostoyevsky was physically seized by Hans Holbein’s painting, “The Dead Christ,” which the Dostoyevskys saw at the city museum in Basel just before he began The Idiot in 1867. Holbein used a drowned man for the model, a fisherman who had begun to rot. There was no hint of anything else, other than the swollenness, discolouration, the vacant eyes, and blue tint of decay. Death was absolute. No hope of resurrection. According to his wife, Dostoyevsky was frozen in terror. Is it far-fetched to see DeLillo’s novels as analogous to K.’s forays to penetrate the Castle, as endeavours driven by the soul’s yearning to validate the sacredness of the self, thus to enable truth and hope to survive? Can there be a parallel sublime interpretation to the farce that is K. versus the Castle? In DeLillo, the answer is ambiguous. The answer for Stone is no, it’s not far-fetched for his novels. Stone’s stand-in character is a hero in every one of them. None of them is writ large, none is a romantic figure like Ivan, not to say Stavrogin, a giant magnet, a black hole, sucking in as much of the world’s light as he can engorge. Just the opposite. John Converse (Dog Soldiers) has been principal writer for a pornographic tabloid over seven years. He has no capacity for character development. By contrast, Ray Hicks (Dog Soldiers) lights up the world of the novel when his soul shines through at the end. He is an angel fallen into this world by error who survives at the unspeakable cost of becoming human and no longer accountable to his former self. His is the story of the impossibility of beauty and goodness surviving in our world. Father Egan (in A Flag for Sunrise) has been continuously reworking a manuscript about a priest feeling outcast and condemned in the general, hopeless condition of life, who cannot get on without drink. The manuscript would seem to be made up of poems on his moribund faith, about sustaining himself in despair with hardly more than a piteous yearning to rise like a phoenix from Pascal’s fire. He’s

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brought down hard by Campos’s brutality. Lieutenant Campos, out of uniform and drunk, arrives like retribution. Egan is destroyed morally by loading the girl’s body into the mission’s outboard. Browne, too, in Outerbridge Reach, is defeated by a deep sense of uncleanliness. Damascus Gate is so structured that the two interlocking stories of Lucas’s struggle for faith and that of Raziel and De Kuff appear peripheral to the chief thing, palace intrigue involving a bomb scare threatening the Temple Mount. It’s impossible for Lucas to take De Kuff’s faith seriously because De Kuff operates in a context that belittles him. It’s also impossible for the reader. Lucas must go on floundering. Nevertheless, Stone the novelist is like K., in that every new novel is a hopeful foray smack in the face of the Count’s crowd. Because it is also true, for any one of Stone’s stand-ins, that he’s afraid his selfabsorption has become the whole meaning of his life. He’s a boozy, druggy drunk stuck in moral mediocrity, but promising as a convert because in torment. Christopher Lucas, hammering on the locked door of the Benedictine Church, is beside himself to deny his revulsion for things spiritual. “Let me in,” he howls. But they’re Germans on the inside, “Huns,” murderers! The sight of himself, banging on that door to be let into their mass, makes him grin. Crisis over: Lucas’s revulsion for things spiritual returns, unchallenged, temporarily. Gaza is a solution to his problem, that is, working out his Christian salvation by living there openly as a Jew. At least the novel allows for a remedy. DeLillo, in contrast to Stone, seems removed from the human scene of his novels. He’s the guide exhibiting hell to us pilgrims but with these big differences: what we’re shown is not an eternal abode of the damned, but the world, a most terrible world because of the hopelessness and secret terror with which people live. And, moreover, DeLillo’s novels provide no intrinsic religious rationale for his vision, whereas God’s love permeates all of creation in Dante, promising salvation to those genuinely striving for it. McCarthy doesn’t equivocate an iota, especially in Blood Meridian. His art would have us shouting from our bunkers like Clov, and merry with mockery at the likes of K. In McCarthy’s judge there is no ambivalence. In the kid’s universe, there is no salvation.

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Stone’s novels reveal a treasure that he might otherwise have kept under lock and key. I mean (using Conrad’s words), “the fascination of hope, the excitement of a half-penetrated mystery, the longing of a half-satisfied desire” (The End of the Tether 236). DeLillo’s books are darkly hopeful. He’s kindred to Dante in the punitive world he depicts, and in his judgmental stance toward his characters. The resemblance imposes expectations based on the existence of an Almighty God. The existence of God is implicit in what seems an encoding of Original Sin as childhood trauma. DeLillo doesn’t spell it out, but not to be crippled and, finally, pulled under, would require something like divine aid. The dismal failure of secular humanism in his novels also contributes to the feeling that what’s gone terribly wrong is the result of hubris. As for McCarthy, a blood red sun, huge as a grapefruit, shone on the alien world he inhabited when writing Blood Meridian. Unable to harken, infatuate and half fond in the red demise of day, to twenty thousand angels singing hallelujah to the Lord, he withstood temptation and wrote a masterpiece. We hope McCarthy returns and again maroons himself in that world where he wrote his best work.

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Recto Running Head

175

Index

Ahearn, Michael (Bay of Souls), 20–1, 138–9, 147, 149, 158 Akhmatova, Anna, “The Sentence,” 101 Arnold, Edwin T., 6, 52–3 Axton, James (The Names), 74, 101–3, 159 Babel, Isaak, Red Cavalry, 112 Ballard, Lester (Child of God), 22, 44, 56–60, 157 Baudrillard, Jean, 10–11, 84 Beckett, Samuel, 3, 4, 18, 20; “Catastrophe,” 108; Endgame, 157, 161; “Fizzle 3,” 35; How It Is, 40, 53; Ill Seen Ill Said, 4–5, 71; Lost Ones, The, 29, 33; Malone Dies, 27, 45, 55, 73; Molloy, 30, 45, 55, 73, 145; Nouvelles, 59, 110; Play, 74; Rough for Theatre II, 19, 88–9; Unnamable, The, 44–5, 55, 73; influence on DeLillo, 106; influence on McCarthy, 27,

28, 34, 36, 39, 47, 55–6; influence on Stone, 146 Beidler, Philip D., 14, 15–16, 119, 122, 155 Bell, David (Americana), 12, 19– 20, 84–5, 86–9, 159 Birnbaum, Robert, 24 Blanchot, Maurice, 38 Bloom, Harold, Anxiety of Influence, The, 17; Genius, 18 Brewton, Vince, 8 Brita (Mao II), 104–5, 109; as Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, 20, 75, 107, 108, 109 Browne, Owen (Outerbridge Reach), 132–6, 147, 149, 158, 161 Bull, Jeoffrey S., 123–4 Campos (A Flag for Sunrise), 125, 127, 128, 160–1 capitalism, American, DeLillo’s critique of, 11–13, 83, 84, 92, 118, 156; in critique of

176

Index

McCarthy, 6–10, 46, 156–7; Stone’s critique of, 122, 123, 125, 155 Caputo, Philip, 123, 158 Catholics, wayward, in DeLillo, 3, 5, 75, 76, 92, 118, 151–2; in McCarthy, 3, 5, 32, 48, 53, 55, 151–2; in Stone, 3, 5, 128, 151–2, 158 Cervantes, 18; Don Quixote, 140 Chamberlain, Samuel E., My Confession, 37–8 Chigurh, Anton (No Country for Old Men), 60–3 Coetzee, J.M., Diary of a Bad Year, 3 Cole, John Grady (All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain), 8, 9, 20, 48–9, 50, 52 colonel, the (Tree of Smoke), 22, 147, 148, 149 Conrad, Joseph, 18; End of the Tether, The, 162; Heart of Darkness, 152, 154–5, influence on DeLillo, 75, 102, 113; influence on McCarthy, 44; influence on Stone, 16, 122– 23; Mirror of the Sea, The, 152; Nostromo, influence on Stone, 126 Conte, Joseph M., 151 Converse, John (Dog Soldiers), 16, 122, 147, 148, 149, 158, 160 Coover, Robert, 18–19, The Public Burning, 10, 47

Cowart, David, 10, 12, 13, 84–5; “Anxieties of Obsolescence: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” 92 cowboys and Indians, 5–10, 36– 47, 47–56 Crich, Gerald (Women in Love), 87, 99 Dante Alighieri, 3, 18; influence on DeLillo, 12, 23, 159, 161, 162; influence on Stone, 5, 20–1, 138 DeCurtis, Anthony (Conversations with Don DeLillo), 21 De Kuff, Adam (Damascus Gate), 136, 137, 154, 161 DeLillo, Don, 3, 4, 10, 18, 21, 23, 24, 73–118, 153, 157, 158, 159–60, 161, 162; Americana, 12, 19, 25, 84–5, 86–9, 92, 159, 160; “Baader-Meinhof,” 83–4; Body Artist, The, 25, 76–7, 85– 6, 110, 159, 160; Cosmopolis, 25, 85–6, 89–92, 110, 159, 160; Day Room, The, 25; End Zone, 12, 24, 25, 75, 85–6, 110–13, 156, 159, 160; Falling Man, 25, 74, 75, 77–9, 83–4, 85–6, 110, 159, 160; Great Jones Street, 6, 12, 25, 74, 75–6, 85–6, 159, 160; “In the Ruins of the Future,” 83–4; Libra, 11, 25, 73–4, 85–6, 117–18, 159, 160; Love-Lies-Bleeding, 25; Mao II, 20, 25, 75, 85–6, 97, 103–9, 109–10, 155, 159, 160; Names, The, 13, 25, 74, 75, 85–6, 101–

Index

3, 109–10, 156, 159, 160; Players, 12, 25,74, 75, 85–6, 97, 109, 159, 160; Point Omega, 6, 25, 82–3, 85–6, 110, 159, 160; Ratner’s Star, 12, 13, 24, 25, 75, 85–6, 92–6, 159, 160; Running Dog 25, 85–6, 99–101, 109, 156, 159, 160; Underworld, 5, 13, 23, 25, 73, 75, 79–82, 85–6, 109, 110, 153, 159, 160; Valparaiso, 25; White Noise, 13, 24, 25, 75, 85–6, 113–17, 159, 160 Des Pres, Terrence, 38 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 3, 4, 14, 18, 20, 45, 140, 160; Brothers Karamazov, The, 20, 63, 102, 107–8, 128, 160; Crime and Punishment, 39, 72; Demons, 60, 160; House of the Dead, The, 29; Idiot, The, 15, 20, 48– 9, 50, 160; “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (in The Brothers Karamazov), 14; influence on McCarthy, 45, 63, 72; influence on Stone, 140 Duvall, John N., 10 Eduardo (Cities of the Plain), 48–9, 50 Eliot, T.S., 18; Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The, 132; Waste Land, The, 75, 79, 80–1, 96, 152–3 Elster, Richard (Point Omega), 73, 82–3, 159–60

177

Father Egan (A Flag for Sunrise), 24, 125, 128–9, 160–1 FitzGerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake, 120–2, 123 Giles, James R., 122–3 Gladney, Jack (White Noise), 113–17, 159 Glanton, John Joel (Blood Meridian), 36–7, 40, 41–2, 43– 4, 47, 156 Gray, Bill (Mao II), 104–8, 159; as Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, 20, 75, 107 Guillemin, Georg, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, 45–6 Haddad, George (Mao II), 105– 6, 108–9 Hamilton, Geoff, 122 Hardy, Thomas, 18; “The Convergence of the Twain,” 53, 142 Harkness, Gary (End Zone), 11, 110–12, 156, 159 Hartke, Lauren (The Body Artist), 73, 76–7, 159 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, 124–5 Heinemann, Larry, 5, 19, 158; Close Quarters, 14–5; Paco’s Story, 15, 39, 44 Hellmann, John, 14, 16, 119 Hemingway, 14, 119, 155 Herr, Michael, 8, 119, 158; Dispatches, 14, 123

178

Index

Hicks, Ray (Dog Soldiers), 4, 5, 16, 122, 147, 149, 158, 160 Hoare, Philip, The Whale, 47, 123 Hoban, Russell, 19; Riddley Walker, 39 Holliwell, Frank (A Flag for Sunrise), 14, 17, 123–4, 125, 126, 127, 128, 147, 149, 158 Holloway, David, 9 imperialism, American, 5–10, 122–4, 129, 155–6; Belgian, 113, 122–3 Johnson, Denis, Tree of Smoke, 18, 22, 146–50 Johnson, Lyndon, 5, 6, 120 Johnston, John, 151–2 Judge Holden (Blood Meridian), 5–6, 20, 36–47, 61, 63–4, 72, 151, 156, 157, 161 K. (The Castle), 21–2, 157, 160, 161 Kafka, Franz, 18, 21, 48; Castle, The, 21–2, 157, 160, 161; Diaries of Franz Kafka, The, 1910–1913, 157; influence on DeLillo, 77, 160; influence on Stone, 161 Karamazov, Aloysha (The Brothers Karamazov), in DeLillo, 20, 75, 107; in McCarthy, 63 Karamazov, Dmitri (The Brothers Karamazov), in DeLillo, 20, 75, 107, 108

Karamazov, Ivan (The Brothers Karamazov), 3–4; in DeLillo, 20, 75, 102, 107, 108; in Stone, 14, 128, 160 Karamazov, Smerdyakov (The Brothers Karamazov), in DeLillo, 20, 75, 102, 107, 108 Karen (Mao II), 103–4; as Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, 20, 75, 107–8 Kauffman, Linda S. (“‘The Wake of Terror:’ Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man”), 83–4 Keats, John, 105; “Ode on Melancholy,” 48 kid, the (Blood Meridian), 5, 20, 22, 36–46, 50, 55–6, 63, 72, 153, 157, 158, 161; as Son of God, 36, 40, 44, 45 Knight, Peter, 10, 13, 117–18, 156, 157 Kurtz (Heart of Darkness), 44, 102, 122–3, 152, 154–5 Lawrence, D.H. 18, 153–4; Man Who Died, The, 48; Plumed Serpent, The, 154; “Snake,” 27; St. Mawr, 75, 97; Studies in Classic American Literature, 99–100; Women in Love, 87, 99; in DeLillo, 75, 87, 97, 99–100; in McCarthy, 27, 48; in Stone, 132, 138, 154 LeClair, Tom, 10, 12

Index

Lowry, Malcolm, Under the Volcano, 19, 31, 130 LuAnne (Children of Light), 4, 129–32, 147 Lucas, Christopher (Damascus Gate), 136–7, 147, 149, 158, 161 Luce, Dianne C., 6 Lyle (Players), 12, 74, 97–9, 159 Magdalena (Cities of the Plain), 48–9 Mailer, Norman, 155; “The White Negro,” 122 Marlow (Heart of Darkness), 152, 154–5 Mattessich, Stefan, 151 McCarthy, Cormac, 3, 4, 20, 22, 23, 27–72, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162; All the Pretty Horses, 7, 8– 9, 25, 47–8; Blood Meridian, 5–6, 7, 8, 10, 20, 25, 27, 28, 36–47, 73, 153, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162; Child of God, 25, 28, 44, 54, 56–60, 157; Cities of the Plain, 7, 8, 9, 20, 25, 27, 47–9, 50, 158; Crossing, The, 7, 8, 9, 22–3, 25, 47–8, 49, 51, 52, 158; Gardener’s Son, The, 25, 54; No Country for Old Men, 6, 25, 56, 60–5; Orchard Keeper, The, 25, 28; Outer Dark, 25, 28, 157; Road, The, 25, 54, 55, 65–72, 153, as Christian parable, 66, 68–9, 72; Stonemason, The, 25, 53, 54; Sunset Limited, The, 25, 54,

179

55; Suttree, 5, 25, 27, 28–36, 49, 53, 73, 157 McClure, John A., 151 McGilchrist, Megan Riley, 8, 9, 156 McGowan, Todd, 10, 12, 84–5 Melker, Raziel (Damascus Gate), 136, 137, 154, 161 Melling, Philip H., 119, 124–5, 155, 156 Melville, Herman, 119, 123, 155; Moby-Dick, 46, 47 Milton, John, 17, 18, 77; Paradise Lost, 71, 96; Samson Agonistes, 75–6 Molloy (Molloy), 30 Moore, Harold G. and Joseph L. Galloway, We were soldiers once … and young, 135 Moss, Llewelyn (No Country for Old Men), 6, 60–4 Myers, Thomas, 17, 119, 155 Myshkin (The Idiot), 15, 20, 48– 9, as Prince Christ, 49 Nabokov, Vladimir, 19, 45; Lolita, 117 Nadeau, Robert, 10, 11 Nastasya (The Idiot), 15, 20, 48– 9 Neudecker, Keith (Falling Man), 73, 78–9, 159–60 O’Brien, Tim, 5, 19, 123, 158; Going After Cacciato, 14, 15, 140; “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” 41

180

Index

Oedipa (The Crying of Lot 49), 85 Orton, Joe, Head to Toe, 94 Osteen, Mark, 10, 11, 12, 95, 101–2, 103, 156 Oswald (Libra), 11, 73–4, 117– 18, 159 Owens, Barclay, 9, 10 Packer, Eric (Cosmopolis), 73, 86, 89–92, 93, 159–60 Pammy (Players), 12, 97–9, 159 Parham, Billy (Cities of the Plain and The Crossing), 9, 20, 22–3, 48–9, 50, 53, 55-6, 63, 158, as Prince Christ, 52, 63, 72 Postman, Neil, 84 Powers, Richard (introduction to White Noise), 13, 117 Pynchon, Thomas, 16, 18, 151, 155; Crying of Lot 49, The, 85; Gravity’s Rainbow, 10, 151–2 Rashid, Abu (Mao II), 104, 105, 107, 108, 109 Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), 39, 72 Rheinhardt (A Hall of Mirrors), 4, 16, 122, 147, 149, 156, 158 Robinson, Marilynne, The Death of Adam, 13 Rogozhin (The Idiot), 20, 48–9, 50 Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses, 107–8 Sanders, Scott, 151

Sands, William “Skip” (Tree of Smoke), 146–50 Scott (Mao II), 104, 105; as Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, 20, 75, 107, 108 secular/liberal humanism, disappointment in, 3; pilloried in DeLillo, 107, 108, 155, 162; pilloried in McCarthy, 54, 55; pilloried in Stone, 16, 20, 128, 148 Selvy, Glen (Running Dog), 99– 101, 156, 159 Shaviro, Steven, 8, 46 Shay, Nick (Underworld), 73, 79–81, 153, 159 Sheriff Bell (No Country for Old Men), 6, 60–5 Simmel, Georg, 12 Sister Justin (A Flag for Sunrise), 4, 5, 125, 126, 127, 128, 147 Slotkin, Richard, 7–10; Fatal Environment, The, 7; Gunfighter Nation, 7; Regeneration through Violence, 7, 10 Softly, Rob (Ratner’s Star), 92–6, 159 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 67, 72 Spurgeon, Sara L., 8, 46, 156 Stavrogin (Demons), 60, 61, 160 Stephenson, Neal, 11 Stone, Robert, 3, 4, 13, 17, 18, 20, 23–4, 25–6, 119–50, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 162; “Archer, The” (Fun with Problems), 146; Bay of Souls, 20, 26,

Index

138–9, 158; Bear and his Daughter, 26, 139, 140–6; “Bear and his Daughter” (Bear and his Daughter), 142– 4; “Charm City” (Fun with Problems), 145, 146; Children of Light, 4, 26, 129–32, 146, 153, 158; Damascus Gate, 22, 26, 136–7, 154, 158, 161; Dog Soldiers, 4, 5, 14, 15, 16, 26, 119, 122, 124, 148, 149, 158, 160; Flag for Sunrise, A, 4, 5, 14, 24, 26, 119, 123–4, 125–9, 141, 156, 158, 160–1; Fun with Problems, 26, 139, 144–6; “Fun with Problems” (Fun with Problems), 139, 144, 145, 146; Hall of Mirrors, A, 4, 16, 26, 119, 122, 156, 158; “Helping” (Bear and his Daughter), 141; “High Wire” (Fun with Problems), 146; “Honeymoon” (Fun with Problems), 145; “Miserere” (Bear and his Daughter), 142; Outerbridge Reach, 26, 132–6, 158, 161; “Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta” (Bear and his Daughter), 141; Prime Green, 26, 147, 154; “Under the Pitons” (Bear and his Daughter), 141; “Wine-Dark Sea, The” (Fun with Problems), 145 suicide, in DeLillo, 19, 73, 74, 75, 77–8, 82, 87, 88, 90, 98, 104, 108, 109, 110, 158, 159– 60; in McCarthy, 28–30, 39,

181

54, 55; in Stone, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 144, 145 Sullivan (Americana), 19, 86–9 Suttree, Cornelius (Suttree), 22, 28–36, 49, 50, 55–6, 63, 72; as Christ figure, 29–33 Svidrigaïlov (Crime and Punishment), 72 Tabor, Pablo (A Flag for Sunrise), 126, 128, 141 Todorov, Tzvetan, 38 Tolstoy, Leo, 59, idea of faith as a heavily furred great coat, 43 “VC Sweetheart” (Great Jones Street), 6 Verhovensky, Pyotr (Demons), 60 Vietnam War, the, Blood Meridian as allegory of, 46; books on, 15; bosom serpent, 5; corrupting influence of, 155, 156; DeLillo and, 6, 12, 83, 100; Heinemann, Larry and Paco’s Story, 39; Johnson, Denis, Tree of Smoke, 18; literature to emerge from experience of, 14; McCarthy and, 6–10, 22, 38, 64; O’Brien, Tim, and, 41; search for meaning in, 3; Stone and, 13, 15–6, 17, 23, 119–50, 158 Walker, Gordon (Children of Light), 129–32, 147, 149, 158 Webb, Stephen H., 103

182

Weil, Simone, 52 Wells, Alan, 124 Wilcox, Leonard, 10 Wright, Stephen, 5, 158; Meditations in Green, 15

Index

Wunderlick, Bucky (Great Jones Street), 6, 11, 12, 74, 75–6, 159 Young, Robert, 101