The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction

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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson

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The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo

Stephanie S. Halldorson

THE HERO IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

Copyright © Stephanie S. Halldorson, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8388–6 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8388–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2007 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

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To my grandmother, Rosalie

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C ontents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Chapter 1 Defining the Hero: Form Where Have All the Heroes Gone? Defining the Hero Welcome the Assumed Hero Defining the American Hero: Story 3D Reality and the End Narrative A Brief Overview of Saul Bellow’s Heroes A Brief Overview of Don DeLillo’s Heroes

1 1 1 5 8 11 11 16 22

Chapter 2 Henderson the Rain King: The Hero Surrendered The Novel and its Hero The Hero in the Novel

31 31 31 42

Chapter 3 Mr. Sammler’s Planet: The Hero Accused The Novel and its Hero The Hero in the Novel

71 71 71 85

Chapter 4 White Noise: The Hero Defended The Novel and its Hero The Hero in the Novel

109 109 109 121

Chapter 5 Mao II: The Hero Returned

145 145

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CONTENTS

The Novel and its Hero The Hero in the Novel

145 158

Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

201

Index

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Pr eface

When I first began my investigations into the hero, it seemed I could not get out from under Thomas Pynchon’s definition. Everywhere I looked, I saw as Profane did in Pynchon’s V.: Nothing heroic about a schlemihl . . . What was a hero? Randolph Scott, who could handle a six-gun, horse’s reins, lariat. Master of the inanimate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman. (10.3, 288)

And there they were, the heroes: Ulysses, Robin Hood, and the latest Hollywood leading man. These men were reaching with both hands to get at the objects of the world and control them: they were heroic. Needless to say, I couldn’t believe this was a definition good enough to truly encompass the meaning of “hero.” Was there not to be some journey? Was there not to be some sort of message? Were all women, academics, theologians, philosophers, and ascetics removed from the possibility of being heroic? Could it really be that a hero was simply the man who held all the marbles at the end of the school day? Pynchon’s definition is not wrong—we all surely recognize this heroic type—but it is a type that sits somewhat uncomfortably in our pluralistic, postmodern world. This hero with his lariat is the hero of a nostalgic black and white world where there were clear boundaries of being in a new America. One still likes to think it possible, as Norman Mailer did when writing about Kennedy’s presidential bid in 1960: And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators . . . would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die. (352–3)

Mailer is correct when he draws attention to the persistent myth of America as the land that came with a guarantee that each and every

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person would have the chance to be the adventuring hero of their own life, but at the same time he fails to recognize that America has faced obstacles throughout the twentieth century and particularly post World War II, which have gutted this myth. The myth, today, can be nothing more than the image of the myth. In the past century, America has had to face the fact that there are no more virgin territories to explore and conquer, and there are no more groups of people whose destruction will be accepted as the foundation of a heroic tale. The American hero of this type has been reduced to accumulating rather than conquering. If the adventuring hero can still be said to exist at all in America he will be found as the mogul of real estate, an extreme skier in Aspen, or possibly the latest, sexy Hollywood serial killer. Literature has taken the hardest hit in terms of the loss of clear boundaries and a homogenous society. If Hollywood and genre fiction can still make their money by presenting escapist black-and-white worlds where American men rise from the barrooms of lower-class neighborhoods to save the world from immanent destruction, authors who do not wish to escape have been left a plethora of choice but little ability to use it. Everyone who is not appearing in genre pieces is available for work, but authors have lost the ability to combine what they truthfully see in the world with creating heroes who have something to give to their readers. Authors continue to write and readers to read, but so many of the stories are end-tales where a hero throws both hands to the heavens and walks off to certain death. These are hardly the stories society is built upon. Rather, these are the stories of a society caught in a kind of heroic limbo not knowing what place a hero has in this new world. I am tossed back to Profane as I witness the incredible success of Hollywood movies that turn to increasingly simple worlds of comic book superheroes who are caught in a clear struggle between right and wrong, and the literary authors who can only disagree with this approach but offer no alternative. It is my opinion that studies into the hero have waned in the recent past because the reason for heroes to exist at all has become an almost impossible question to answer. If a hero has historically been the man who walks away from his society only to return with some message or boon that will create a better society for his fellow citizens, the loss of both a reason to leave and a reason to return to our heterogenous (and often hostile) community leaves little to be said. Turning away from Hollywood, which continues to be primarily a repository of male myths, I turned to daytime television that has a

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target audience of adult women. Afternoon television is a quagmire of victims and heroes where the victim and the hero are often one and the same. Playing on the American myth that each person has the right to demand their own adventure, self-help “experts” on daytime talk shows create the viewer as a victim in order to sell them instructions on how to overcome their troubles and become heroic in their own mind. What is enlightening about these shows is that the want of heroes is such that the viewer is willing to overlook both the media’s obvious focus on doing business and the bizarre logic of a viewer who is both victim and hero. It would seem that the impulse for the heroic leads the viewer (or reader) to do almost anything to fulfil the desire for direction and conclusion even to the point of creating a paradox. For it is impossible to be both reader and hero. By doing so, the viewers are merely shamming their way to a place that is no longer displayed for them through society’s myths and legends. This brought me to the crux of my theory and a rather simple if startling conclusion. The reader and the heroic character are equal in their creation of the hero: no reader, no hero. Stories are written because the reader demands them, wants them, needs them. Even if the hero dies over and over again, and even if the author cannot bring the hero back with a shining key to fix the ills of society, the reader is desperate to engage in the journey. The reader has an impulse to the heroic (to help create the world) but does not have the ability to do so and, therefore, needs a character to do it for them. This need drives the reader. Any available story will be looked at for its heroic potential: the dark tales of failure common in the modernist period of American writing that offer no consolation beyond “once there was a hero who succeeded but no more” or the Hollywood movies that offer escape only for as long as the lights remain dimmed will both be embraced as stop-gap measures. Advertising and self-help media know this and make a lot of money encouraging the non-hero to buy products that suggest a heroic story. A shade of lipstick, a brand of cologne, the right ten-step program, all promise to, if not make the consumer the hero who brings back a boon to society, at least sell them the accoutrements so they might look like Randolf Scott or any other hero who obviously has control and understanding of what is right and what is wrong in the world. So welcome to the heroic and the hero as concepts in America today. On the surface, it would seem that society is so split apart that it no longer believes that anything could be either completely right or completely wrong, and readers would shun a character who claims as much. Yet, the desire for a hero who offers a secure foundation by

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fixing, controlling, and clearly delineating society into what is right and what is wrong continues to be unbelievably strong in the reader (the viewer, the consumer). Like some quantum trick, the reader simultaneously does not believe and believes in the hero. It is another example of the shifting states that exist in a country that embraces the postmodern while looking for a fixed idea of America and the American hero. The American Dream lives on in the postmodern haze. To tease out just how the very modernist, formalist mythology of the American hero has managed to squeeze its way past current literary or cultural discussions is the focus of these investigations. This book is not about people or characters or any other things as things, but rather the fact that we seem to have grown tired of the freedom of the postmodern but are equally disinclined to return to a world of strict boundaries where there are distinct winners and losers (heroes and non-heroes). If this is true and the world has not fallen into anarchy, something must be going on that has not been considered. This book will look at just what is going on. Not in culture but in society as a creation of the heroic narrative. Culture as it is now defined is so often a series of images: flimsy, repetitive, and ultimately boring. I have chosen not to write another book on TV personalities but a book of questions and considerations about the way readers understand the heroic narrative. My focus is on American fiction with Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo as guides who suggest the hero as a narrative moving between fiction and reality. These two authors have been chosen not only because they form an arc from 1944 to the present day but because they, too, have questioned the role of the heroic narrative in American letters and unlike many have made attempts to understand its failure and to write the hero back home.

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Ack now ledgments

I would like to extend thanks to all who have encouraged me in this work. In particular I would like to thank Linda Hutcheon for her time and energy, and Russell Brown and Greig Henderson who were there at the beginning.

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CH A P T ER

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Defining the Hero: Form Where Have All the Heroes Gone? In his book The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (1971), Theodore Gross writes: Yet it is not an idle phrase, the American Dream . . . It reflects our romanticism and our sentimentality; our energetic chauvinism and our parochialism; our idealism and our authority; our hungry need for heroism. (vii)

This hunger for the heroic has long been a defining feature of American literature as much as the American Dream with its tantalizing carrot of social success. Yet as Irving Howe points out in “Anarchy and Authority in American Literature” (1967) the American imagination also seeks to push away. The American imagination is anarchistic and searches for a place outside of restrictive society to reinvent a smaller, more manageable society that is more compatible with the characteristics of the individual hero. In other words, instead of fighting from the inside, utopia is to be found by “lighting out for the territories.” From Huck Finn to Augie March, American heroes have longed to fill the tempting blank spaces of an unexplored continent. Notably, this need to “get out” more often translates into a physical journey than a spiritual one; even acknowledging the long history of American transcendental thought, the hero’s search is not metaphysical but material: In American literature the urge to break past the limits of the human condition manifests itself through images of space . . . The urge to transcendence appears as stories of men who move away, past frontiers and borders, into the “territory” or out to sea in order to preserve their images of possibility. For the enticements of space offer the

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hope—perhaps only the delusion—of a new beginning: so that, for a time, an individual hero can be seen as reenacting, within or beyond the society, the myth upon which it rests but which it has not been able to fulfill. (Howe 106)

What Howe brings to our attention is the first of many paradoxes in American mythology and its heroic narrative. The American Dream assures each and every soul the possibility of social success yet the American hero more often than not has sought a life physically outside of society. Moreover, the hero often seeks to be violently displaced. The body becomes not symbol of but replacement for the soul, the spirit, and its redemption. The unique place of the spatial and the tangible in the American imagination was noted by Jean Baudrillard in the travelogue of his visit to the United States in the early 1980s. In it he writes that the American imagination is essentially practical and its “ideology” is, therefore, material: “They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. Here in America only what is produced or manifested has meaning; for us in Europe only what can be thought or concealed has meaning” (America 84). Or, as Gary Harkness asserts in Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972), America does not seek the sublime but, instead, seeks tangible power: “We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology. People invent that problem, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned” (83–4). The American creative imagination is defined by the intangible dream of social success and its physical proof, as well as by the desire to physically displace the body from social restrictions. Rising out of this is the American hero who, while holding up community as the pinnacle of success, is built upon an intense focus on the individual. In many ways, America has burdened itself with a heroic narrative that recognizes only the singular achievement. Reward may be found in community and society but from the dream to its realization the road is single track. This is not a unique heroic topos but America does not flatter the sage come down from the mountain to tell us all but, rather, the cowboy found bleeding by the side of the road and rescued by the Samaritan townsfolk. Indeed, the stronger the desire to withdraw and the more physically painful the journey, the more society rewards the hero who is pulled only semi-willingly back into town to tell the story.

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But this hero has no crucial message for the town. The hero as loner, rebel, or borderline criminal is not an articulate spokesperson. But, then, there is no need. In fact, the hero may even reject the heroic story. The American hero represents the American Dream and thus the message is quite clearly “it is out there if you want it.” The “out there” is identifiably a physical displacement but the “it” remains an empty signifier enabling the readers to fill it with their own desires and their own version of the American Dream. Where were Huck and Jim going anyway? What could they do when they got there? Mark Twain was careful to draw his story to a close before this question loomed too darkly in the narrative. Tom Sawyer arrives mincing and dreaming, thinking of only how they can endanger themselves and run further away. The hero is there to prove with scars and blood that what is important is not the “it” as much as the action of moving “out there.” Whether by riding on a horse with no name or skydiving on a weekend business retreat, to place one’s body in physical danger becomes the essence of the American heroic quest. However, what becomes apparent as the overlapping layers of American Dream, American mythology, and American hero come into view is that each person not only has the right but the responsibility to prove oneself as heroic. It is this expectation of the heroic that troubles the American hero during the course of the twentieth century although ideas of separateness and equality, upon which America was founded, have haunted the American sense of self from the beginning. There is a huge flaw in this way of thinking: not everyone can be a hero, can they? Surely not, but for the first two hundred years of American life there was an unspoken assumption of social order and a welcoming God who quietly took up the slack. The crossover between the “hero” and the “everyman” is apparent in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. In his 1841 essay “Heroism,” Emerson defines the heroic in traditional terms as extraordinary: “The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic” (149). His ideas of self-reliance, however, seem to be heroic in a degree as well: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” (“Self-Reliance” 31). There seems to be a fine line between “uncommon” and “nonconformity” as Emerson attempts to differentiate between the truly exceptional hero and the necessary exceptionalism in the self-reliant man. One may go so far as to say it is a matter of degree not difference in action. Surely Emerson did not think everyone capable of becoming self-reliant/heroic, but it would be anathema to the American

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myth to say so. It would also be unnecessary because Emerson assumes his audience is aware of and accepting of a non-heroic underclass. The non-hero and the non-self-reliant fell “naturally” into place in a Christian society that holds a reward in heaven even for those who fail to achieve an exceptional life on earth. Emerson could therefore set his sights on the heroes and the exceptional men for words of encouragement because the non-heroes found comfort in the arms of an all-welcoming God. Emerson’s philosophy is based securely within a worldview of accepted boundaries in which there is a teleological narrative (available even for non-heroes) running in parallel to the secular American mythology of heroic expectation. Everyone has a place, even if it would not be glorified by American literature. This assumption is not Emerson’s alone but is a product of the time in which he lived. William Blake anticipates Emerson when he writes the aphorism “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans [sic]” (Jerusalem 10). Unfortunately, such polemical statements seem to be not only a call to action for the hero, but also an implicit condemnation of the non-hero who is reduced to the status of a slave. The negative morphology of “non-hero” may imply an unwanted position but this was certainly not always the case. It is unique to America in its nullifying meaning. A better choice of words may be “other than hero” in a social hierarchy that valued each member’s position. A professor does not consider herself a “non-dentist” or a “nonlawyer” but simply “other than a lawyer.” In America, however, the non-hero is not only a negative state but also an empty space. Emerson does not need to consider the place of the non-hero or the non-self-reliant because there is simply no such thing in American social thought. One either is self-reliant or one is not trying hard enough. This rigidity, however, relies upon belief in a religious foundation. One may not succeed in society but there is a place for one nonetheless. The twentieth century is unique, then, in its erosion of teleological beliefs. There were no more odes to the non-hero such as Milton’s famous “Sonnet XVI” (“When I consider how my light is spent”) in which “[t]hey also serve who only stand and wait” (189–90). Milton’s subject who desires to serve someone or something larger than himself no longer makes sense in the kingless and increasingly secular America. The citizen actively seeking the chance to prove heroic self-reliance replaces this passive servant of God. The non-hero is squeezed out of the picture as an embarrassment to the American Dream, and thrown into crisis with the growing doubt of a religious safe haven.

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It is no surprise that authors (whose very existence relies upon the heroic journey) steadily lose confidence in their narratives as hero and non-hero, society and religion fade in and out as the building blocks of foundational belief systems of the self. As American writers increasingly challenge the neat teleological narratives of religion in the first part of the twentieth century, they inadvertently place the burden of the non-hero upon themselves. It is quickly discovered that there is no place for the secular non-hero in the American imagination. It had all too heavily relied upon a spiritual story to catch these idle watchers. There is no glorification of the many holding together the whole; there are no salary men, no dedicated civil servants, and no secretarial pool leading the way. Where then are all these non-heroes meant to find a space to exist if they and the authors they rely upon to tell the stories of self lose their religion? I am purposefully misleading the reader here to make a point about the absence of place for the non-hero. The non-hero does exist and, in fact, is a necessary contributor to the American mythological structure. However, one cannot simply reinstate Christ’s servants and be done with these failures of the American Dream. One cannot take back the realization that the non-hero is simultaneously an active part in the creation of the American hero and yet needs to be unseen within the narrative itself. Defining the Hero This byway into the place of the non-hero in American thought is all in preparation for a new definition of hero. It is the fact that the American hero has stumbled that brings to light the reliance of the hero on the non-hero to complete or even fully understand the meaning of the journey. The definition of hero is incomplete either as a character (the mythological demigod such as Hercules) or as the journey (separation–initiation–return) defined in Joseph Campbell’s study as the nucleus of the “mono-myth.”1 The definition must include both the character and the action but is not complete until the character and the action become solidified in narrative, heard by the reader, and incorporated into the reader’s belief system. The non-hero or reader is integral to the concept of hero because through listening and incorporation of the narrative it is the non-hero who differentiates between what is heroic and what is not. Samuel Johnson recognized the intimate pairing of player and audience, hero and non-hero in his “Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare” in 1765. Perhaps without realizing he discovers that

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beyond merely passively reading or watching a series of incidents, the audience is there to incorporate the heroic act. What one enjoys about the plays, he notes, are not the heroes because “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion” (1068). It is true that there are no demigods in Shakespeare but who would deny that Henry V or Hamlet or King Lear is not heroic? The fact is that the hero is not reliant upon having godlike power to be recognized as such by an audience. Shakespeare’s heroes may look like ordinary men but few would leave the theater unable to point to which character was the hero. A hero is anyone who extends themselves beyond normal human endurance (character) and returns with a cultural, social, moral, or ethical lesson for the community (journey). Just as important as these two identifying features is the need for the audience to take the hero’s journey with them and incorporate the lessons given, thus concluding that they would have done the same under the same circumstances. Johnson’s criticism is, in fact, proof of Shakespeare’s ability to write the hero. A hero is not one who lectures or demonstrates a proof but one who lives so that readers or the audience may live the fiction as well. Readers have the same impulse to do heroic acts as the hero of the fiction but being unable to complete such acts they content themselves that under the same circumstances (with the same strength or intellect or money) they would have done the same actions. The hero has challenged beliefs and the audience has considered the challenge and either changed or reaffirmed their beliefs in response. The non-hero is the society so challenged, so affirmed. It may be self-evident but it bears repeating that the hero is always and only built upon a fictional narrative. Even if a heroic act happens in factual reality (e.g., a fireman rescuing a kitten from a burning building) the hero and the readers are separated by and meet within the narrative of the act itself: the story as it is told. The narrative creates the impulse, the adrenaline rush, and the emotional reaction, and the resulting lesson (“all life is sacred”) is incorporated. The lesson becomes belief that, in turn, becomes reality when the readers know that they would do the same under the same circumstances, and thus they, as the foundation of their society, are reinforced or repaired. The hero is a membrane through which fiction and reality move back and forth, as well as a scrim that hides this fact. The hero is not a character at all; it is a movement between one and the many, and it is a meeting of poesis and hermenuesis that is safe because it is unlikely

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the multitudes of readers will ever be called upon to prove their heroic potential. Thus, the American Dream of “all for everyone” runs counter to the structure of the hero, but had until the twentieth century been protected by a unspoken safety net of religion for the everyman who failed to get it all. Readers, then, have a twofold purpose: not only must they incorporate the heroic message but they must also claim to have the ability to be heroic (to do the same under the same circumstances). This is another way of saying readers believe the message and engage in harmless self-flattery because it is unlikely they will ever be called to carry out a heroic journey themselves. In the American imagination, however, the non-heroes are instilled with distaste for the lesser role and impatiently wait for success. The American Dream is sinister in that its message is not simply “you can do it too” but “you must.” Such a singular focus was bound to fail for many people. If one is lucky there are endless heroic narratives to defer this moment of crises, or there is the comfort of a teleological narrative with Christ welcoming those who had simply lived a good (albeit unheroic) life. If this loving God is doubted or disappears, the non-heroic self either drifts aimlessly or desperately looks for more and more narrative deferral. The non-hero, unwelcomed and unacknowledged by American mythology, is caught in a secular limbo: if one is not a hero in America one is not even a failure but an empty space. Failure does not exist; there is no place for it. As an Internet site tracking American Medal of Honor recipients has as one of its random running quotations in the main page’s banner: “Land of opportunity not excuses!” (Sterner). What has happened to the American heroic narrative in the twentieth century is a realization that it was tied to a parallel extra-societal religious mythology. Its reliance upon religion was such that it never stopped to consider that its secular mythology was based upon a paradox in which non-heroes were necessary but could not be seen to exist. The reliance on religion becomes apparent the first time an atheistic non-hero doubts the possibility of the heroic self. Religion has built into it a place for doubt, America has not. Non-heroes may continue to flatter themselves that the heroic act they have witnessed merely reflects what one “should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion,” but there are always to be expected moments of doubt when this fiction is revealed as a fiction to the non-heroic self. By creating doubt about the possibility of a reward even for those who “sit and wait” the non-hero is left with Emerson’s call to action and its inherent belittlement of those who would not

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continually strive to be more and better and bigger and different. The “good man,” the solid non-hero who is the foundation of any society, is inherently set up for mockery in the American Dream and the American imagination. There are no non-heroes in America, says the American Dream, there are merely those proving their heroic selves in various ways. Without a God to comfort those who know the absurdity of this dream, the non-hero has, literally, nowhere to exist. Welcome the Assumed Hero As the definition of hero breaks apart in America, however, it is unfair to cast blame on the non-heroes. If the American Dream were always successful, if the American individual was always heroic the definition of hero would similarly break down. The hero is necessarily a movement, a cycle that demands the heroic story not only be acted but be told and believed in. With everyone acting there would be no one telling, no one listening, no one considering the heroic act. This utopia of a fully heroic society will never exist, of course, because not everyone in America can or wants to be a hero. Burdened with the requirement of a heroic act, the non-heroes inevitably come face-to-face with the fact that they either cannot or do not wish to put themselves out of society. In another system this might be nothing more than a blow to one’s ego or, perhaps, a moment of self-discovery but in a secular America the non-heroes are found staring into space. It is simply impossible that they should exist. But exist they do; so to protect themselves the non-heroes become what I have called the assumed heroes. When the audience of non-heroes is pushed beyond simply feeling the potential to be heroic to a need to prove themselves heroic, the traditional loop between heroic narrative and audience is conflated into the paradoxical assumed hero in which non-heroes are asked to be both leaders and follows of their own narrative. What is remarkable is that this anomaly persists and indeed grows throughout the twentieth century. The loophole and saving grace for the assumed hero is that with everyone a hero, there is, in fact, no one listening and the assumed hero is, therefore, able to find shelter behind an image of the heroic self and claim it as the journey and the story complete. The hero image gains in popularity because it is able to bypass the need for a new heroic narrative that is not only difficult to imagine but is expected to challenge and be open to challenge by society at large. The hero sets out to question and is, in turn, left open to question while an image presupposes an entire “narrative” with a beginning and a conclusion, and presents tangible proof of the result. It is

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self-reliance and the heroic ideal prepackaged and sold on the open market. A Girl Guide badge or an Olympic tattoo is meant to identify one as having performed an act and be both reward and symbol of action, narrative, and conclusion, but there is nothing stopping anyone from buying the image whether the act was performed or not. Taken further, there is nothing stopping anyone from marketing or buying a pair of jeans as proof of a narrative of heroic endeavor. Advertising has long recognized our susceptibility to the image as social shortcut. A certain kitchen appliance or car or deodorant all come with the suggestion of narrative depth. It is not difficult to stuff into this suggestion of narrative depth the implication of a heroic act: the pinnacle of social achievement to be found in the purchase of a shoe or a tattoo or a designer sweater. It must be admitted that it is a stroke of desperate genius on the part of the assumed hero to find safety behind these marketed images. The narrative is suggestive but is without the difficulty of investigation and incorporation. One can presume to be heroic behind the black sunglasses. The only snag is that these images are not narrative and although one may believe them one does not believe in them. Quite simply, a hero and a non-hero cannot occupy the same space because a hero challenges society and its beliefs while a non-hero believes. When the images assumed heroes are hiding behind inevitably come to be scrutinized they immediately fall apart and the assumed heroes are left scrambling once again. No matter what narrative suggestion the advertisers pin to the product, the assumed heroes do not journey in the destruction–(re)creation loop of a heroic narrative and are thus simply not heroes. Neither do assumed heroes come together as a community to hold together the heroic narrative as social foundation and, therefore, are not non-heroes. Blind and deaf, apathetic and stymied the assumed heroes hold on to the thin hope that when one image begins to wear at the edges and cause murmuring enquiries, it will quickly be replaced by another. To be alone and strong and self-reliant and a hero to yourself and your society is a romantic idea but impossible for every uncreative citizen to achieve. And it is America’s secular insistence on a unified state of heroes that the real meaning of hero becomes evident and is found to be lacking. As Saul Bellow notes, this makes for a rather uncomfortable existence: “So now we have the universe itself to face, without the comforts of community, without metaphysical certainty, without the power to distinguish the virtuous from the wicked man, surrounded by dubious realities and discovering dubious selves” (“Where Do We Go” 214).

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The giddy paradox of this situation plays back into one of the ever-present concerns of the American psyche. America champions the rebel and the individual, but what is it to make of the ersatz loner? The purchased rebel? The simulacra of power? Tony Tanner in City of Words (1971) points out that this widespread dissembling is always in danger of exposure because it is ultimately a complete denial of what the American imagination has always prized in the American Dream: American heroes have always been particularly sensitive to the fact that all social life is based on certain kinds of dissembling. What it is important for them to recognize is that one can wear disguises for different reasons, and that the motive may justify the means. And what can be the most nightmarish situation for them is to find themselves surrounded by a society of people who have forgotten “what the disguises are for.” (70)

Yet for the secular assumed heroes to survive they must forget the paradox upon which their lives are built. They must believe the gossamer veils purchased at every Wal-Mart and Calvin Klein store are symbols of their heroic journey. They must convince themselves that even without an audience, even without challenge and debate of society’s direction, they are heroes. They must believe it because, let us not forget, they are their own audience, they are their own believers. It is the America of dissembling and disbelief that Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo attempt to re-narrate. Assumed heroes purchasing old heroic narratives and old reality from magazines, movies, genre fiction, and advertising leave the writer (the middleman between the hero and the non-hero) blocked. The writer setting a pen against this muddle is faced with the realization that these assumed hero fictions serve as a garden hedge against self-doubt, despair, even nihilism and, in some cases, flourish in ways that are hard to challenge. America could never embrace the wasteland because the image is always for sale: America is perfect as it is the assumed heroes say; America is utopia and I have risen to its peak. What do authors have to offer that is better than this image? In the early part of the twentieth century authors found failure and frustration. It is notable how many of the heroes of the novels between the world wars died or disappeared. The authors could send true heroes out into the world but what message did they find? What they discovered was that if religion is displaced it not only affects the placement of the non-hero but the movement of the hero as well. There is nothing out there to bring back. One is faced with the creation of a whole new way of being but, surely, this

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is all ideology. What tangible message could the hero bring to the waiting society? Authors willing to look at this question found that the American Dream of “it is out there if you want it” had worn thin. There was no longer an “out there” at all and the “it” grew into a larger and larger black hole ready to take in anything and release nothing. Further, slapped over this hole was the image of a successful heroic journey supplied by advertising and genre fiction held together with cello tape and sealing wax but held together nonetheless. The non-heroes are a skittish group: vulnerable and set upon a precarious position. How much truth can any one endure? Why bother suffering when advertised images of individual heroic self-reliance can easily be purchased? In the past half-century or more the image has stepped in where the narrative has faded; and it has become a defensive cry holding together America against secularism, postmodernism, and the novel of ideas. “Love it or leave it” is the motto of America, but it may now need to add the concluding phrase: “whether you believe it or not.” This is how the hero limping along without narrative or non-hero has survived and survived so well leaving many authors holding up their empty hands in frustration. In a society that rejects the ideological raft, there could be no other way to keep the American hero afloat. Bellow and DeLillo, however, are unique in American letters as authors with a conventional approach to storytelling, who are unwilling to cower to the power of the assumed hero. Both authors are distrustful of the descriptivist authors (distopia) and the prescriptivist advertisers (utopia). They straddle an increasingly difficult line between belief and doubt. Bellow and DeLillo believe in the American heroic brass ring of “it” and doubt it can be reached in any tangible way. They believe in negotiating between what “is” and what “should be,” and they both understand America’s need to attach belief to something or someone. Ultimately they believe in the power of the imagination, and in the power of the imagination to separate and then once again unite the hero and the non-hero even in an age where reality has been replaced by “reality” and a Hemingway narrative replaced with brand name basketball shoes.

Defining the American Hero: Story 3D Reality and the End Narrative To discuss the hero in contemporary literature one must first and foremost abandon the idea that the hero is only a character. The hero is also a structure, a loop, or a movement between a heroic narrative

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and the reader. The hero is also the belief of the non-hero. What one does and says to recreate the shattered world is just as important as who does it or how. In the course of the twentieth century there have been spectacular narratives of heroic failure not because the narratives fail to offer a conclusion but because, although aesthetically masterful imaginings, they use beauty to cover a lack of an articulated imagined return to their society. Identity is replaced by a romantic feeling for community but one that cannot withstand argument. James Joyce’s “snow was general all over Ireland” (514) in “The Dead” (1914) is like the music he hears beforehand—so “clear and fresh” (491)—but the narrative reaches toward the reader for comfort more than it directs the reader toward understanding. “Are we not connected somehow?” it asks but cannot itself say for certain if this is true. Such narratives articulate at a very high level the impulse for the heroic but cannot instill belief in a pattern of communal identity beyond an intuition of a “community of Man,” which is a euphemism for the failure of the heroic narrative to deliver a specific identity. Another way of saying this is that these authors continue to challenge or destroy identity and move toward the state of unnarration, but they cannot imagine any narrative to protect against it. Or at least not one beyond a vague humanism, which is something like refashioning the gratefulness and despair of “is” or “is not” as a beautiful, painful object. The heroic impulse is a paradoxical impulse to overcome what cannot be overcome.2 It abandons, even destroys identity hoping to find purity and a pure “truth” of being. The heroic impulse believes in authenticity. The hero is one who willingly liquidates identity with confidence that the authentic is the only true starting point of identity. However, arriving at the point of “pure” individuality, it becomes clear that the authentic is not pure; nor is it a point, a location, or even an arrival. And although it is the source of all narration, the authentic itself cannot be narrated. Identity is really circles of narratives of identity and the hero seeks to cast off each layer to come to the inner core: the truth of being. Coming to the point of the first heroic narrative— the narrative of being or “I am because I am not not”—the hero moves toward the ecstatic point of the conception of being which should be the first truth of all narratives of identity. But what the hero finds is not a point of conception and not even the nothing of the not of being, but chaos—an all. The hero, who has pushed to this furthest extreme, realizes that there is neither a way out of this chaos, nor any way to exist within it. Thus, the hero’s role is to reach for the authentic, discover chaos, know it and then choose arbitrary patterns from infinite patterns and create fictions or narratives of identity as a

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way of inauthentically building barriers of being against this chaos for the non-heroes in the community to which the hero will return. In other words, the first order of business for the creating hero is to create an identity that keeps chaos away from the non-hero. Thus the creation of the narrative “I am because I am not not.” This single sentence is a foundational narrative of being and identity that all other narratives assume to be true. The hero then creates protective circles of identity in time that keep this foundational narrative (of being/ nonbeing) always as a point in the future. These first layers of identity are teleological narratives that assume belief in the individual and create fictions based on the assumption that the individual is both the beginning (“I am”) and the endpoint (“I am not”) of narrative. Chaos is thus repressed. Finally, these most simple of teleological narratives put death at an unreachable end-point so that “I am not” and the end of the individual is always a future event. This allows all other heroic narratives of identity to assert “I am” based on the reality of these foundational narratives. Martin Heidegger notes in his work Being and Time (1927) that the authentic needs the inauthentic.3 In the same way, the chaos of the unnarratable needs narrated identity. The reader allows the heroic narrative to take the treacherous journey to the “authenticity” of chaos under contract to return with an inauthentic narrative, or a set of boundaries, or a pattern with which to control (and forget) this state. The reader is patient with the hero’s removal of protective identity because there is the expectation of a new protective community identity in return. Thus, we could generalize and say that the increasing disbelief in the Christian God in the early part of the century demanded a teleological narrative in its place. Authors struggled to find a believable boon. But they found they could go but not return. They could articulate the first part of the heroic loop in its destructive breakdown of identity but could deliver a narrative no more concrete than a general intuition of a human community.4 When Friedrick Nietzsche’s narrative of the death of God was incorporated by some of his readers into reality, the gaping teleological hole was often filled with abstract ideas of other gods or scientific rationalism. Modernist narratives often doubted these narratives and yet, could not create another one more to their liking. They held fast at the first layer of identity: individuality. By pooling individualities together, they made this layer of identity stronger by creating a narrative of a “community of man.”5 Ironically, universalizing individuality as identity only drew attention to its lack of complex narrative. It hardly amounted to much more than identity as survival, with an endless

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pendulum shift between gratefulness (I am) and despair (I am not). Something more was needed. While there can be a kind of beauty to be found in the tragic failure of the heroic narrative to return, the heroic loop was collapsing faster than it could be rebuilt. By the end of World War II even “the community of Man” was shuddering under the weight of doubt. Where was the non-hero to hide fear, then, if the heroes themselves could no longer create the heroic narrative? Heroes were falling like flies before the gods of tragedy. Yet in the postwar period even tragedy ceased to have the strength it once did. The twentieth century had another blow to deliver. Although before World War II heroic narratives were focused on replacing the foundational teleological narrative by asserting the reality of the individual as identity, after the war doubts about the individual appeared. Specifically, doubts about the boundaries of space and time (or multidimensional reality) surfaced. A new question emerged. Were teleological narratives built upon just another fictional narrative of finite space and “end-time”? Authors became increasingly convinced that the concept of reality itself was untenable. Although this age of doubt has tremendously influenced American writers, the loss of the foundational heroic narrative in American fiction can be traced to two different but simultaneous influences. First there is the loss of belief in multidimensional reality in Western thought, and second there is the specifically American imagination that defines its heroes through concepts of self-reliance and anarchy. In his Paris Review interview in 1993 Don DeLillo uses the term “three-dimensional” to describe reality: “There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and maybe Beckett’s—eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These men wrote a kind of world narrative . . . Today, the world has become a book—more precisely a news story or television show or piece of film footage” (296). The idea that art is less than three-dimensions is a metaphor that has been used by both Joseph Campbell6 and Andy Warhol. Campbell suggests that the third dimension, which art cannot by itself contain, is a kind of depth that the hero experiences but struggles to pass on to the community as narrative. Warhol sees his work as “surface,” leading critics such as Benjamin Buchloh to categorize it as “one-dimensional.” These allusive metaphors suggest that art (whether as narrative or image) is a flat surface. Only when art is believed and becomes reality—when it is “folded into” the world—does it gain the dimension of depth. With apologies to Einstein, it seems that all of these authors are defining

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depth as both space and time. When art becomes “3-D reality” it also gains the dimension of time, and becomes subject to the various forces of change over time. DeLillo’s comment suggests that there has been a loss of belief in a three-dimensional world traveling through time. Images, ideas, and art cease to be “believed,” and, outside of the depth of time, become flat, repeating images in an endless present tense.7 Further, the world’s narrative (history) and the artist’s fiction are no longer separate but similar in their competition for the attention of an audience. In effect, space and time have come to be seen as nothing more than heroic narratives themselves. The basic foundation of cause and effect, here and there, before now and now are no longer believed or felt to be the boundaries of what is known as reality. DeLillo conjectures that everything is two-dimensional: a book, a news headline, an image. History and fiction are both surface images. If the fictional heroic narrative has no depth of reality (no history) to which to aspire, if history itself has become a two-dimensional fictional narrative, what happens to the hero? What happens to the heroic narrative? Where does one put the “I am not” when there is no more sense of a future (a goal, a completion) where cause (I am) becomes effect (I am not)? Teleological narratives of community identity that have covered, repressed, and controlled chaos are no longer believed as absolute reality, but mere possibilities of a reality. Both kinds of foundational narratives are exposed for what they always were: hypotheses, twodimensional, fictional. Chaos, because it is unnarratable, is the basis of the impulse for the heroic narrative, which wishes to find the authentic, the truth, and build from it pattern and order; however, the collapse of belief in three-dimensional reality destroys the possibility of a heroic narrative loop. The hero might continue to set out toward the unnarratable, and fictional boundaries and narrative may still be created out of this chaos, but there is no longer belief in the possibility of the resulting narrative becoming reality. The fiction is exposed as fiction. The move from fiction to reality (from hero to non-hero) through community belief cannot be made because belief itself becomes unbelievable. There is no world into which the narrative might fold itself and gain the dimension of time so that death and chaos may safely be repressed as a future event. There is, then, no possibility for the completion of the loop between writer and reader that is the heroic narrative. There are, however, several flaws in this line of thinking. First of all, it would seem that the result would be nihilism, but this is not so. There is, of course, a kind of pop-culture social nihilism that is either

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negatively or positively referred to as a postmodernist stance in which steady streams of images and factoids are pinned together as “events” if not meanings. As DeLillo himself notes in Mao II, these are novels of lists and repetition. Or, as Jonathan Franzen notes in his essay on the social novel in Harper’s: The American writer today faces a totalitarianism analogous to the one with which two generations of Eastern bloc writers had to contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine . . . (43)8

One would have to agree with Franzen, then, that this social narrative is not heroic but narcissistic, and not a little defensive in its frustration over its own lack of imaginative ability.9 It is here, then, that Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo begin. They admit to both an impulse for the heroic narrative and the impossibility of its realization as belief in reality. And yet they also note the pragmatic functioning of the world, and the people who inhabit this world, who enjoy (and perhaps only want) old narratives for comfort and security. What, then, is believed when there is no longer belief? Where are the boundaries when there are no more boundaries? To begin to understand this marked split in the American audience, they must begin to unravel the complexities of the American imagination, which has, in light of the absence of belief, created a whole system of heroic images that have replaced the depth of narrative of their original heroes.

A Brief Overview of Saul Bellow’s Heroes Irving Howe wrote that “From book to book, ornament and variations apart, Bellow has really had one commanding subject: the derangements of the soul in the clutter of our cities, the poverty of a life deprived of order and measure” (“Mr. Sammler’s Planet” 106). In Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), the lead character already shows this poverty of a life without order. Joseph is a man estranged from the world because it simultaneously demands he be heroic and mass-produced in its call for his participation in war. Both a non-hero and a hero feel the impulse to be heroic, but the non-hero does not have the creative ability to do so. The non-hero desires a visceral thrill in a heroic narrative, but ultimately needs secure

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boundaries at its conclusion. Bellow’s first novel and most of the novels following upon it confront the seeming incompatibility of the non-hero and the hero’s wants and needs. Bellow’s heroes desire to just “be,” but they are not non-heroes. Although they wish to have the security and boundaries of a life of simple “being,” they are too aware of the lack of boundaries, too aware of their own limitations, and the vastness and arbitrary chosen-ness of the world. In other words, they have the awareness of the hero but are stopped at the point of departure. Where are they to go? What are they to do? All the while they carry the dirty little secret of wishing to do nothing more than drift and forget. They are truly heroes who want to stop wanting. They are desperate to write the heroic narrative; yet, they cannot. To write the heroic narrative is no less a task than to redefine the need for community and community identity in America. One must differentiate first between community identity and what some conflate into ideas of “mass man” or phonies or even communism. Conformity in any form becomes the bogeyman of the American imagination; it is submission and weakness. It is a loss of agency that melds into paranoia. But what is outside of this conformity, this playing of roles? There is nothing but endless, empty choice. There are no boundaries or patterns, just choices. As Richard Rupp points out about the protagonist of Dangling Man: “The alienation [Joseph] suffers (and all of Bellow’s heroes are preeminent sufferers) is forced upon him by a society that refuses to allow persons to exist without roles” (190). Joseph “dangles” because he refuses to “join up”—whether it be middle-class respectability or the army. He tells his brother: “There is no personal future any more. That’s why I can only laugh at you when you tell me to look out for my future in the Army, in that tragedy. I wouldn’t stake a pin on my future. And maybe I wouldn’t have yours . . .” (65). Joseph believes he is attempting to find “clear signs of their common humanity” (25) but is unsuccessful here as well. He cannot stand the dangling, the empty existential space where he is free to choose to be anything.10 His final line—“long live regimentation” (191)—is ironic because Joseph does not believe in the army, but he does not disbelieve it any more than he disbelieves everything else. He consciously makes his arbitrary choice. The fact that Bellow has been criticized for writing heroes who succumb or give themselves up indicates not only a misreading of Bellow’s work, but the impact of Emerson’s theory of American selfreliance and the loss of the role of the non-hero in American society.11 The narrative must either be heroic or fail trying in which case it will try again. To succumb is not to fail, but to be incomprehensible.

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However, as Bellow suspected, by 1944 the American heroic narrative had become repetitive as an existential quest that was bound to end in suicide, madness, or death. Joseph seems almost European in his conclusion that “I must give myself up. And I recognized that the breath of warm air was simultaneously a breath of relief at my decision to surrender” (183). In this, Bellow’s hero denies either suicide or madness, but, most significantly, he denies the incomprehensibility of surrender and submission. Notably, Joseph Campbell uses the word “submission” in his own analysis of this question: “The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved” (16). Both Campbell’s and Bellow’s critics, however, see submission as a surrender to some thing that is larger and stronger than the individual (a godhead or a bureaucratic or social system). Bellow’s writing would indicate, rather, that the hero “gives up” not to a person or “to” anything. A hero gives up layers of identity not in submission as much as in desire to find a primary layer of identity as an individual self. In order to fulfill the heroic narrative, the hero must come back from this position with a created narrative of identity as protection for the non-hero reader who will take it on as reality. Further, although Bellow’s heroes seem to submit (and even use this word), submission is never accompanied by a sense of permanence or even presence because a hero creates narrative but does not believe in the narrative. The need to question and challenge will lead the hero back into the wilderness of self and society. Joseph, for example, begins by giving up everything and experiencing the ultimate personal (and physical) freedom to find himself. He does not find it, but this does not mean that he “loses” and now must “submit” to an enemy. Rather, he is left exactly where he was—dangling. In The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Bellow writes back to Joseph with a joyous Peter Pan character who delights in what the world has to offer and believes all and none of it. Tony Tanner points out: “All choice may be error, but no choice is death. Augie, it would seem, wants something like movement without choice, something between commitment and inertia” (City of Words 66). Like Joseph in Dangling Man, Augie is torn between his impulse toward the heroic and his desire to get out of a heroic narrative he cannot imagine how to complete. Bellow heroes are often envious of those who seem to just be, but these “be-ers” are anomalous because they lack the heroic impulse.

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They live beyond the need for re-creating narratives. They live comfortably in the world as it is, somehow managing to maintain an almost childlike state of comfort, neither searching out nor being bothered by the unknown and unknowable. Bellow’s heroes are perpetual “becomers,” caught between childhood and adulthood. They struggle between bouts of nostalgia and expectation; they are prone to both wonder and tears. Augie March leans hard on the positive aspects of perpetual becoming. The novel itself was well received by those seeking distraction and a narrative that was always only beginning. When Augie sets out across the field with his French maid at the end of the novel, although he has no more of an idea of things than Joseph or Tommy or any previous Bellow hero, one does not feel that he has “submitted” to anything because he is starting again. Like a record that skips, Augie seems to be moving on but he is merely repeating himself. The ending and his return are forever deferred. Henderson the Rain King (1958) and Herzog (1964) are companion books to Bellow’s growing strength as a writer and his growing frustration with how to be a writer. While Henderson stretches the believability of the Hemingway hero,12 and the physical American hero in general, Herzog stretches the believability of the Enlightenment hero and the intellectual hero in general. The classical hero types and the American heroic narratives fall apart in Bellow’s hands. In both books, the hero is manifestly a hero in search of a heroic narrative. However, this impulse, combined with classic examples of physical or intellectual strength and cunning, is not enough. In both cases, the “journey” ends like Augie’s with a moment of temporary joy, but, like Joseph’s surrender, this is not a resolution but a respite. The hero neither fails nor succeeds, but reiterates the need for the heroic narrative. The choice of words and the sound of voice may be joyful, but the hero’s paradisal moment is visually solitary. The hero continues to believe but can offer nothing more to the reader than a belief in belief. In Henderson the Rain King, for example, Henderson’s final run around the frozen tarmac with the Persian child is all about Henderson and not about the connection between the child and himself or the reader and the narrative. Notably, the child is, effectively, mute. One may accuse Bellow of leading the reader but he cannot commit himself fully. Thus, critics have argued about what happens after the novel. Does Henderson go to medical school? Does the Persian child learn Henderson’s language and find the answers he did not? Does the love between Henderson and his wife Lily conquer all? These are not questions that lead anywhere. Bellow has given his answer. The novel itself happens well after Henderson arrives home,

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and here he is reliving, rewriting it again. Even Henderson cannot tell the reader what happens after. In as much as Bellow refuses to find the absence of a heroic narrative just cause for despair and tragedy, he also refuses to give a spurious ending to a difficult problem. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), when it seems the world is no longer dangling but in the midst of the hopes of the sexual revolution and the Age of Aquarius, Bellow seems to have found the world nothing but ashes and shadows. Twenty-five years after the Holocaust, Bellow finally addresses its horror (albeit obliquely). Mr. Sammler hides himself away with the work of fourteenth-century religious mystics at the New York Library, all the while accusing the present society of decadence, distraction, and madness. There is a tired sadness about Sammler, but unlike the heroes of previous novels—the middle-aged Henderson who is about to enroll in medical school, or Augie who is about to set out on yet another youthful adventure—Mr. Sammler is facing the end of his life. He cannot afford to put off his death any longer. He must reach some conclusion. The narrative, so bitter in its appraisal of youth, stems from Sammler’s own self-recriminations for having simply put things off. Most importantly, however, is Bellow’s assessment of an America that Sammler himself has created in his harsh insistence of self-reliance. For the first time, Bellow is directly addressing the mistakes of his own heroes. As Sammler states: But one notices most a peculiar play-acting, an elaborate and sometimes quite artistic manner of presenting oneself as an individual and a strange desire for originality, distinction, interest—yes, interest! A dramatic derivation from models, together with the repudiation of models. Antiquity accepted models, the Middle Ages . . . but modern man, perhaps because of collectivization, has a fever of originality. (Bellow’s emphasis, 229)

What he condemns as “play-acting” is the desperate reaction of those forced to become heroic who have been unable to do so. They wear the signs and costumes of heroic self-reliance but as Sammler or anyone can see these are images not heroic narratives. Sammler is a harsh judge. He does not consider how well these non-heroes have survived in their new role as assumed heroes. If they cannot find the boundaries of a believable world, if heroic narratives have failed to convince them, and if their heroes no longer try to return; if, in fact, the American imagination has impossibly insisted that it is only right and fitting that they become their own heroes anyway, they have managed

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to survive. They have hidden behind the conveniently marketed images of the heroic. The right hairstyle, the right shoes, sexual or other physical “extremes” replace the absent heroic narrative and its resultant identity. The image is marketed as heroic individualism, and the narrative is implied. The arbitrary choices and the lack of depth of such simulacra of identity are repressed. Unfortunately, these new assumed heroes, if they are challenged or un-repressed by some circumstance, cannot possibly accommodate or narrate their fear. They can only purchase new images to protect their denuded senses of self. The anger Sammler feels throughout the book, then, is at himself. His previous belief in the heroic narrative in the self-reliance tradition has created this society. His belief in the possibility of a world of self-narrated heroes has failed, and now he (who has all the hallmarks of a creative hero) fails to rescue the assumed heroes from themselves. The main confrontation in the novel stems from Sammler still believing that his niece and nephew should simply fix themselves. Sammler sees only images and advertising; these people do not know themselves, they live in the paradox of abandoning themselves to cultural norms while claiming they have done nothing of the sort. Sammler is—even up to his final page—unbelieving of the chaotic shallowness of these purchased identities, and he certainly does not understand how there could be a need for them. In his youth, Sammler had been a hero narrating universal self-reliance. America has responded with a utopia of self-reliance—simulated, of course, but with true followers nonetheless. Sammler does not know how to confront such “truth.” Thus, an important moment in the novel comes near the end when Sammler realizes that his daughter, Shula (who is by all accounts a crazy, old bag-lady), is not only aware of herself and her bag-lady “identity” but has consciously chosen it as the image of self-definition. She tells her father over the phone: “‘I’ve made myself as interesting as I could within my means.’ Her father was astonished by this. Eccentric type? She was aware of herself, then. There was a degree of choice. Wig, scavenging, shopping bags, were to an extent deliberate” (Bellow’s emphasis, 310). Like the bags themselves, “Shula” is nothing but a flimsy image with no depth or true protection. But she knows an image is the best she can do for herself given the failure of her father, not as a father but as a creator of heroic narratives. In other words, without the possibility to simply be a non-hero to Sammler’s hero, she has survived through her assumed hero image. Ellen Pifer writes: “the pursuit of authenticity may begin to constitute its own peculiar version of orthodoxy—nihilism becoming a covert sort of creed. It is this unspoken creed that Bellow has come

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increasingly to suspect and to challenge in his fiction” (5). The meaning of authenticity has strayed from Heidegger’s original intention and has, in some cases, become physical proof of “being alive.” As Joseph in Dangling Man writes: “I am neither so corrupt nor so hard-boiled that I can savor my life only when it is in danger of extinction” (166). Bellow recognizes but cannot fight against this rising tide in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The novel itself is not nihilistic but aghast that the forcing of authenticity and the heroic narratives that accompany this state have resulted in a culture of images of authenticity, and brutal images at that. Even in its former glory, authenticity was only ever meant for serious consideration by heroes; it was never meant for the preoccupation of the non-hero. As far back as Dangling Man, Bellow was worried about what would happen to those who could not create the paradoxical heroic identity for the community of one. Joseph notes that his friend Pearl is an artist, and “[t]hose acts of the imagination save him. But what about me? I have no talent for that sort of thing. My talent, if I have one at all, is for being a citizen, or what is today called, most apologetically, a good man. Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute for the imagination?” (91).13 In the end, Sammler accepts that he has a responsibility outside of himself because he has the tools (the creative imagination) to face the fear of being outside of social identity. A heroic narrative is one that destroys and creates, and a heroic character is one who destroys and creates over and over again. If Sammler’s initial heroic narrative of intellectual self-reliance has become distorted, it is not his place to bemoan but to re-create. Unfortunately, he cannot imagine what.

A Brief Overview of Don DeLillo’s Heroes Within a year of the publication of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Don DeLillo published his first novel, Americana (1971). DeLillo asks many of the same questions as Bellow, but his viewpoint is that of the disenfranchised youth that Mr. Sammler judges so harshly. From the generation that knows only the image, and only the assumed hero, DeLillo sends the young advertising executive, David Bell, out on the anachronistic quest to find himself in America. The novel has many overtones of the tired narrative of a disillusioned American hoping to “light out for the territories.” The hero is restless and isolated and somewhat artistic and intellectual. He is following the “brutality as authentic” formula that Sammler had condemned: “We didn’t know what our illness was but we seemed instinctively to feel that only a trip into the swamp of our own beings could cure us” (122).

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Bell sets out with the romantic ideals of the anarchistic American hero looking for a place to re-create society in his own image; however, the more he tries to gain perspective and distance, the more he finds himself implicated in the culture and society he had hoped to abandon. If in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Sammler must face the assumed heroes that his own heroic narrative had forced into existence, David Bell must face the simulacral America that, as an advertising executive, he helped to shape. Ultimately, Bell returns to the city he left because there is no other city; there is no longer an outer edge of America where one can gain perspective and get in touch with one’s “authentic” self. America is everywhere, and everywhere is Americana. Stan Smith has questioned the validity of these postwar heroes who try to “get out.” In discussing Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Smith writes, “[Chief] Bromden’s flight, like that which ends Catch-22 or the teasing conclusion of Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man (1971), seems to affirm a genuine revolt, but, assessed against the sober options of actual history, is little more than lunatic escapism. Where, after all, is there to go?” (33). Neither a physical space nor a spiritual space opens up for Bell. On his way back to New York City, Bell questions what is meant by authentic in America, and whether anyone in America desires to find it: I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds. (388)

If Bellow’s failure to destroy and re-create a heroic narrative results in his joyous assertion of the need to do so and the need to anticipate future success, and if Sammler begins to doubt the efficacy of heedless movement without boundaries to protect one from oneself, then DeLillo addresses these issues right from the start. This final line of Americana suggests both visceral thrill (a heroic impulse) and aimless fear. Where is Bell going so fast but back to where he began? In his first novel, DeLillo eviscerates the quest for the authentic as a viable structure for the American heroic narrative. Not only does the authentic seem to have lost or at least radically changed meaning, but there is nowhere to go physically to prove one’s existential self, one’s selfreliant individuality. America is faced with the daunting possibility that the physical heroic narrative, the anarchistic hero in Irving

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Howe’s definition, may be nothing more than image, and if one cannot go either out or in, move toward or away from, what possibility remains? America, of course, approaches this fear with practical tools: more and more technology, more and more explanation covering up what remains unexplainable. Herzog lamented in 1961 “A curious result of the increase of historical consciousness is that people think explanation is a necessity of survival. They have to explain their condition. And if the unexplained life is not worth living, the explained life is unbearable, too” (Bellow’s emphasis, 322). The knowable world is never at hand for any single individual, but in the contemporary world there is widespread fear of this unknowing. Explanation is constructed along industrial standards; piecework and specialization have become the new norm.14 However, while the sheer breadth of knowledge creates less of an ability for any one person to incorporate it all, specialization or intense focus on single points of knowledge creates even greater doubt. This is a situation that, as any academic knows, is easily exploited for humor, as such intense focus can cease to be related to the object of study: “Not what something really is, Softly thought, but how we think of it. Our struggle to apprehend it. Our need to unify and explain it. Our attempt to peel back experience and reveal the meaning beneath. The task is to attempt a logical design that may or may not duplicate the structure of the thing itself” (DeLillo, Ratner’s Star 327).15 In the 1970s, DeLillo’s focus was clearly on these rational systems that, under examination, expand explanations like crystals. The closer one gets to these systems, the less one is able to control and unify. The systems self-deconstruct; the people fall into solitudes. In The Names (1982), DeLillo comes up against language itself. It is both arbitrary and consistent; it seems logical and transparent, and yet it hides chaos beneath it. The boy, Tap, writes a “non-fiction fiction” of an elderly friend’s coming of age in the depression-era prairies. The hand-written novel, however, betrays a whole world of hidden meanings behind the melodrama of an Evangelical revival meeting and childish spelling mistakes: There was no where to run but he ran. The farm to market road was mud itself . . . He looked in vane for familiar signs and safe places. No where did he see what he expected. Why couldn’t he understand and speak? There was no answer that the living could give. Tongue tied! His fait was signed. (339)

The language mimics a kind of Brownian motion, each word bumped out of place by the context, by the spelling, by the very history of word

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associations and etymology. Does one know what he means to write despite the mistakes; or, does he in fact write what he really means? In White Noise (1985), DeLillo puts to the test the very possibility of a heroic narrative of community identity. Jack Gladney is a pragmatic man with an identity based upon his idea of the reality of his world. In the novel, however, Gladney is stripped of his circles of identity and is forced to confront the very basis of his need for these protective layers. However, Gladney only desires to purchase the product and subsequently forget himself. Indeed, Gladney has arbitrarily chosen various identities (professor, husband, father) that he wears with great aplomb. He should be contented. Unfortunately, he has managed to forget that who he is, in a sense, is arbitrary and chosen along the way, and that such empty images of identity cannot protect him from either the primal layer of narrative identity (where one simply is or is not) or what lies beyond it (chaos). Thus, when Gladney’s image of university professor in a sleepy little town is challenged by the “bracketed numbers with pulsing stars” (135) that signal that he is “technically dead” (151), he has no narrative identity in which to couch this turn of events: “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 out in the scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are” (115). Unlike Bellow’s characters, who are heroes who have great sympathy for non-heroes and are, in fact, often conflicted by wishing to be both, DeLillo’s characters are more often heroes who are hiding out as assumed heroes. Like Gladney, they are shocked to find their selfstyled, self-reliant heroic image of themselves to be nothing but image. They live narcissistic lives, small and tight, where they are both hero and audience to their own purchased image of heroic narrative. They have purchased the right to wear evidence of their heroic self and now drift, holding onto their own little piece of psychic property. The ease with which DeLillo can peel away these flimsy images of identity is the source of much of his humor. DeLillo is not seeking merely to expose the flimsiness of these images, but is hoping to find the source of them. What is it that must be protected at all costs, even with such hopelessly fragile and false images of identity? In White Noise, the answer is obviously knowledge of death. But what is it that we mean by death? How is it that one can so desperately fear the inevitable? It is not the death of the body that one fears but something else. It is the fact that death itself is hiding something, something that is not physical or conquerable or even knowable. What Gladney finds as the base of his fear is not a point in

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space—not his individuality—not him or the absence of him. It is not a void at all. It is too much. It is chaos, white noise, all the frequencies signaling at once. Without a complex teleological foundational heroic narrative the image of individual heroism is weak and incapable of hiding the chaos beyond it. For this reason Gladney’s various attempts to reidentify himself either through technology (the Dylar pill) or through violence (shooting Mink) or even benevolence (saving Mink’s life), all fall short of their goal. Gladney is not able to make boundaries, control or forget his impending death because he cannot imagine a complex, believable, foundational heroic narrative in which to place it. Remarkably, however, the hero of White Noise manages to come to the same conclusion as do Bellow’s heroes, although with far less exuberant joy. The chaos that constantly assures one’s death is the same chaos that constantly affirms creation. The impulse that unites is the heroic impulse to create narrative boundaries around death and around imagination. Unfortunately, there is no longer belief in these boundaries. In DeLillo’s world there is no longer belief in end-time, endpoints, or Truth. There is destruction, and there is creation. However, there is no community identity because there is no community belief and no community. At the very end of White Noise when Gladney has failed even to reidentify himself with a benevolent image of himself as Mink’s savior, the German nun attending to his wound tells him: “As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe” (DeLillo’s emphasis, 304). The nun, of course, does not believe—“Do you think we are stupid?” she says (304)—but she believes in the necessity of belief. Her argument is proved by Gladney who continues to believe—even after her announcement of apostasy—that there are those out there “who truly believe. I know there are” (305). This type of encounter between the German nun and Gladney will be repeated throughout DeLillo’s subsequent work because it encapsulates the possibility of a return to the heroic narrative. What DeLillo suggests is that the heroic narratives were never meant to stand up to rational investigation. Somewhere along the line it was forgotten that fiction is fictional, and heroic narratives remain fictional until they are believed by an audience who willingly suspend disbelief in order to create reality. Heroes are heroes not only because they are unrepressed, but also because they have the talent to create even in light of what might easily become despair.16 What the unrepressed hero relies upon, then, is not personal belief, but belief in belief. The hero relies upon the possibility that others will accept and believe the given

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artificial boundaries that will define reality. The hero is not a tour guide and the heroic narrative is not a training manual to be rationally studied and worked through; it is a fiction that makes the jump to reality through belief and the incorporation of a believed narrative. Thus, it is Gladney’s realization and assertion that he still believes in belief that changes DeLillo’s approach to his subsequent novels and opens up a possibility for the hero finally to return. In Mao II (1991) DeLillo challenges his own thesis by reworking and complicating the ideas in a previous book (Great Jones Street [1973]) to set forth a “struggle for the imagination of the world” (“The Art of Fiction” 296). If there is belief in belief, then who are these believers and what have they chosen to believe? The novel sets up a grid work of players (the creators and the believers) who each have a chance to present and even defend their positions. The written word defends itself against the image, and followers defend themselves against the hard-boiled self-reliant. In the novel, artists, politicians, the assumed heroes and the non-heroes are all given space to proselytize. DeLillo, however, does not hold out for a winner. He can only hope to begin to understand the struggle. The character of Karen, for example, is both the victor and the victim of the future. Bill Gray, the modernist novelist, says she is “from the future” (85) because she is unanchored belief: she “took it all in, she believed it all” (119). Gray fears the overwhelming, wonder-fullness of this world without boundaries, and believes she is looking to surrender herself to it, drown in its wave. Gray, however, underestimates the complexity of Karen. She believes but she also yearns for some boundary to this belief because, ironically, the tighter the boundaries the better able she is to abandon herself. She wants to get lost in a crowd with its single focus, its single idea.17 First there is Sun Myung Moon who requires that she abandon her previous life and identities and take on the simplified identity—an image—that he creates for her. Later, there is Bill Gray, or the image of Bill Gray, which Karen seems more readily to accept because the “crowd” is much smaller and, thus, contains less possibility for uncertainty. She and Scott can pull up anchor and set themselves adrift under the sail of the image of Bill Gray, and after his death the work becomes even easier. The irony is striking in that Bill Gray, who is the dying representative of the modernist notions of the self-reliant individual, has his narrative consumed but not incorporated. But Bill created his own ending. He abandoned his responsibility to create and became a neurotic follower of his own image. Bill Gray, the writer of heroes, refuses to write and therefore

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abandons Karen’s need for boundaries and her open desire to be a non-hero. In the end, Karen abandons Bill Gray the man for Bill Gray the image, which gives her what she wants, or as near to it as she can manage. Ultimately, it is Brita Nilsson, the Swedish/American photographer, who dominates the final section of the novel. The final paragraphs mirror Karen’s Moonie wedding, which begins the novel, by portraying a small wedding in a street in Beirut where the members of the party “all look transcendent” (240). But looking is not being and DeLillo pulls back from a transcendent ending. The snow is not general all over Beirut, and Brita is looking down upon them from a height. Beirut attacks Brita both physically and ideologically. It challenges her by being both real and hyperreal, but with a singular idea: Beirut. The city is, like Karen, eager to believe anything; it has reached out and been given a single identity, an image, based on “hate and rage” (237). This hate is a kind of truth; it is reality because it has been thought about; it has depth and encompasses all the fear and dread that the American “veneer” (235) could not. And yet, with this terrible, singular image of destruction surrounding her, Brita goes to bed. DeLillo drags her out of bed, as if for another chance, and sets out a wedding party. Although the people on the street have only the look of transcendence, Brita feels that it might be she who is the one to walk “all the way to heaven” (240). Mark Osteen writes that “[t]he ‘new tragic narrative’ of bombs and hostages has briefly been ousted by comedy” (213), but perhaps ousted is not what DeLillo means to suggest. In Beirut the gun is a weapon, a camera, a wedding firecracker all at once. The tragedy is the comedy, the comedy the tragedy. It all waits for signification and if Bill or Brita refuses the task, there are other ways of finding relief from endless possibilities. Bill Gray advocates a “democratic shout” (159), but he has long since abandoned his own ideas to the point that he was afraid of how he would sound if he moved from behind his mute image. It is up to Brita, then, in Mr. Sammler’s words, to do her “duty” (220). The hero’s responsibility is to join the world and abandon it, destroy and create, and to risk the possibility of failure. Her one voice becomes important to the foundation of the world. As a creator she is needed not once but over and over, destroying and creating, challenging and even contradicting herself. For the withdrawal or apathy of the creative self, as Bill Gray discovered, is narcissism, and it does not leave a void, but allows images to repeat themselves unchallenged. The camera’s flash that ends the novel, then, is a warning. The “dead city” is “photographed one more time” (241). But if death is everywhere—skulls

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as tattoos and as writing, human skulls and painted ones (229)—so, too, is non-death. Life itself is hidden within this dead city. Like Karen, Beirut is either the victor or the victim of the future. It is Brita’s responsibility to create what she knows is fiction in the hopes that it can and will be believed by others, by non-heroes. As a hero she does not have to believe anything except that belief is both possible and necessary. Death is a reminder only of itself and it is either the end or the source of the heroic narrative, either the end or the source of community identity.

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CH A P T ER

2

H EN DERSON THE R AIN K ING : The Hero Surrendered Those however who aspire not to guess and devine, but to discover and know; who propose not to devise mimic and fabulous worlds of their own, but to examine and dissect the nature of this very world itself; must go to facts themselves for everything. Francis Bacon, Magna Instauratio 259 The facts begin to crowd me and soon I get a pressure in the chest. Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King 1

The Novel and its Hero By the time that Saul Bellow published Henderson the Rain King in 1959, the American hero as literary character had been drawn into several distinct camps, all of which were deficient in defining the American ethos. The code heroes of Hemingway no longer seemed to reflect the American experience, and the wasteland motif seemed foreign, European. Similarly, the absurd hero, although still willing to set out on a myriad of different journeys, had lost tragic intensity. Bellow states in his essay “The Writer as Moralist”: “There is grandeur in cursing the heavens, but when we curse our socks we should not expect to be taken seriously” (61). Literature in the 1950s continued to follow modernist antecedents in portraying the hero as a victim of the mechanizing forces of society in a spiritually exhausted world, but the events of World War II denied the nobility necessary for a tragic hero to exist. As Sarah Cohen writes, the tragic mode “assumes that man has an exalted nature which, though sorely tested, will ultimately reassert itself” (6), and this assumption was no longer valid in the eyes of the intelligentsia. However, this was not the

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pervading sense of self in the popular imagination where America was an icon of prosperity, and practical heroism was rewarded with political and economic power, and moral superiority. Thus, the literary establishment not only found itself struggling with the loss of an exalted human nature and consequently the humanistic foundations of a subjective self, but also found itself in opposition to the popular myths of America, which denied that the 1950s was a period of spiritual absence and increasingly a mechanistic “age of conformity” (Podhoretz 215) with the “organization man”1 unknowingly surrendering his place as a self-reliant individual. Norman Podhoretz remembers, To be sure the old idea [pre-WWII] that the modern world was suffering from a “loss of values” came back again, but even that idea soon began to seem inadequate to account for the dimensions of the spiritual vacuum that many intellectuals saw lying beneath the surface prosperity and apparent confidence of the Eisenhower age . . . (220)

Or, as Von Humboldt Fleisher aphoristically states in Saul Bellow’s Humbolt’s Gift (1975): “Mankind’s old greatness was created in scarcity. But what may we expect from plenitude?” (162). Bellow’s imaginative power came of age in this climate, and the chasm that exists between surface prosperity and subjective worth is one of Bellow’s major themes in his writing. He suggests that this split between the world of subjects and the world of objects can be brought together only through a state of grace. At the same time, he faces the possibility that grace within the imagination of postwar America is naïve. The possibility of a spiritual component within the scientific perfectibility of man was not taken seriously in the higher intellectual debates. Ironically, the result of a scientific focus was an upsurge in often spurious scientific theories that sought to explain irrational human behavior by assigning it to rational systems. One of these rational systems was a return to “primitive” values as a way of wiping the slate of civilization clean in order to find a lost authenticity of self: It is against this background, I think, that the upsurge during the late 50’s of various forms of anti-rationalism must be understood. The sudden popularity of Zen, Reichianism, and existentialism reflected the growth of a conviction that the source of our trouble lay deep in the foundations of Western civilization—deeper than politics could reach, deeper than a mere opposition to capitalist society or middle-class values could cure. We were a people so far removed from nature, so lost

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in abstraction, so cut off from the instinctual that only—as Norman Mailer put it—a “revolution backward toward being” could save us. (Podhoretz 220)

Podhoretz and I disagree on our terminology. What he sees as “forms of anti-rationalism” are often quite the opposite. They are thoroughly rational with systems of thought and with systems of logic and terminology that seek to give understandable boundaries to the unboundable. Desire to return to a primitive state was a desire to find authenticity through basic emotional positions—something categorical—a prescription as it were. Systems contend that there is the possibility of a map or plan to explain or even replace what had previously been irrationally covered by faith. What one notices is that these systems cloaked in rational protocol are an attempt to converge the heroic journey with the scientific process; as if process could replace a loss of belief in the self in society. What separates Bellow from many writers of his time is that although he considered different systems of thought, he could never commit himself fully to any one of them because he could not embrace such idealism without giving equal argument to pragmatic irrationalism. Lionel Trilling faced much the same problem when he wrote in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972): It would of course be absurd to say that the lives we actually live are controlled by the present-day repudiation of the old visionary norm. As householders, housekeepers, and parents we maintain allegiance to it in practice, possibly even in diffident principle. But as readers, as participants in the conscious, formulating part of our life in society, we incline to the antagonistic position. (Trilling’s emphasis, 41)2

The paradox of a human life that instinctively feels a sense of meaning, and an intellectual, cultural, and even social life that repudiates such feelings, replacing them with codes and systems, has always been the essence of Bellow’s struggles with the heroic. Like all heroes, Bellow’s characters have the heroic impulse to conquer or escape and like their modernist predecessors they find it impossible to do either. But unlike the modernist heroes who inevitably moved toward tragedy or tragic absurdity, Bellow’s heroes no longer believe in their own tragedy. His heroes search for a way to remain heroic in a world that would seem to deny them this possibility.3 Earl Rovit contends that what makes Bellow unique in this period is his conviction that there is a viability in the heroic, even at a time when

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imagination seems to have been subsumed by grief over the lost nobility of modern man: The catchwords have multiplied: the age of anxiety; the affluent society; the death of God; the discontinuity of tradition; the loss of self; the anti-hero; victims and rebels; picaresque saints and clowns of the absurd; radical innocence and unpardonable guilt; reactions of alienation and accommodation. Bellow’s special position on this matter has been his unwavering conviction that man’s fate and his opportunities for nobility are essentially no different today from what they were two thousand years ago; and his achievement as a writer of fiction has been his patient capacity to deal with this central theme of displacement without being lured into the fashionable hysterics of either apocalyptic rhetoric or nostalgia. His own constant concern has been a single-minded attention toward defining what is viably human in modern life—what is creatively and morally possible for the displaced person that modern man feels himself to be. (Rovit’s emphasis, 7)

The Bellow hero is first and foremost a viable hero. His hero is imprisoned within the world and within himself, but Bellow denies that the heroic journey must be one of escape or victory or tragic failure. Bellow does not deny the vision of the world as fallen or as an explosion of ideas and objects; however, the discrepancy between the catchwords of modern society and what Bellow sees as an essential humanness is not to be bridged through any product of rationalism, whether it be social or economic utopianism, or psychological or spiritual concepts and patterns. His image of the human struggle is best found in the title of a novel he abandoned in the early 1940s, “The Crab and the Butterfly.” This image reappears in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) when Bellow writes: “the horizon sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter, then failing and travailing” (538). This image, as Bellow indicates through his lyric phrasing, is not precluding a fall into the void, but is still a hopeful attempt. For Bellow, this binary state of heroic and non-heroic is not caused by any modern condition but is the nature of being human: humans are both crabs and butterflies who are perpetually sure that they should be either one or the other. The systems and concepts that are embraced by the American mind are, therefore, almost always absurd rather than tragic, as they seek to manipulate the crab self. There are spiritual systems suggesting the butterfly may be caught, and rational concepts that are akin to gluing wings on a crab in an effort to remove the necessity of butterflies at all. These systems undeniably have an impact on the functions of the world, but they can

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never change the essential self. In fact, Bellow goes so far as to consider the surrender of this self as the only true void in the modern condition.4 The greatest danger to a Bellow hero comes from those who seek to impose their own system of thought as the answer to modern woes; they are the armored businessmen and psychological shysters, the trained intellectuals and the petty gangsters. They are the fathers or brothers or doppelgangers of Bellow’s lead characters, proving their worth by what (or whom) they can hold in their hands. In contrast are the heroes who are hopelessly inept and ridiculously fragile in their soulful, often inarticulate yearnings for escape from the pressures of being alive. Although Bellow’s heroes are failures in being self-reliant, self-made men in a capitalist society, they are not mindless followers of mass systems. They have healthy reserves of hope and a capacity for joy that reflects the mindset of their creator: “either we want life to continue or we do not. If we don’t want to continue, why write books? The wish for death is powerful and silent. It respects actions; it has no need of words” (“The Writer” 62). In an interview with David Boroff, Bellow says of Herzog (1964): “I consider Herzog a break from victim literature. As one of the chieftains of that school, I have the right to say this. Victim literature purports to show the impotence of the ordinary man. In writing Herzog I felt that I was completing a certain development, coming to an end of a literary sensibility” (qtd. in Kim 38). Although Bellow states it is not until Herzog that he breaks with victim literature, I would suggest that it is Bellow’s anti-victim sensibility that established him as an author of note in the early years of his career. Bellow’s victims, even as early as Joseph in Dangling Man (1944) or Asa Leventhal in The Victim (1947), are not really victims because they do not lose anything. In The Victim, for example, Kirby Allbee’s victimization is nothing more than a grain of indignation that becomes a full-blown dramatic performance in an effort to manipulate Leventhal into guilt and self-accusation: “Because you blame me, that’s why,” said Allbee, “You won’t assume that it isn’t entirely my fault. It’s necessary for you to believe that I deserve what I get. It doesn’t enter your mind, does it—that a man might not be able to help being hammered down? What do you say? Maybe he can’t help himself? No, if a man is down, a man like me, it’s his fault. If he suffers, he’s being punished. There’s no evil in life itself. And do you know what? It’s a Jewish point of view. You’ll find it all over the Bible. God doesn’t make mistakes. He’s the department of weights and measures. If you’re okay, he’s okay, too. That’s what Job’s friends come and say to him. But I’ll tell you something. We do get it

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in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing, and there’s no denying that evil is as real as sunshine . . .” (130)

Allbee’s accusation is Bellow’s questioning of the possibility of believing in a system so regulated that victims must be non-heroes, and non-heroes victims. Allbee puts an anti-Semitic spin on his analysis, but he might have easily replaced “Jewish” with “American” in the tradition of Emerson. If people do “get it in the neck for nothing,” it becomes impossible for a system wherein one is either a victim or a hero to exist. This arbitrariness degrades the tragedy until, as Bellow stated, we are left cursing our socks. Bellow’s criticism becomes sharper when Allbee embraces what he had previously condemned: “It makes sense to me that a man can be born again.— I’ll take a rain check on the kingdom of heaven, but if I’m tired of being this way I can become a new man. That’s all I’m saying” (204). Here self-reliance becomes another “fixer” philosophy. These personality changes on demand almost inevitably come from the minds and mouths of secondary characters who are con-artists, such as Allbee or Tamkin in Seize the Day (1956), or the overzealous, such as Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King. To try to conquer and change one’s essential nature is ridiculous. For Bellow, the human being is born with an essential nugget of self that is both the nonhero crab and hero butterfly, and these two beings are nurtured or crushed within the contexts of society’s demands. Thus Bellow calls into question the use of championing the self-reliant hero by condemning the non-hero. In order to find a place within the chasm between these extremes Bellow unfashionably reaches back toward the medieval triad of mind, body, and soul, and reintroduces the possibility of Geist into the heroic quest. This Geist is a kind of mystical ether or essence flowing through the universe, the only evidence of a higher consciousness and the only bridge between the human body and mind and between humans as a whole. Bellow often refers to it as “love” or uses love as evidence of its existence. It is experienced in stop-points or moments of stillness that are often tangible and irrational (sometimes manifested through physical pain). Notably, a sign of this connection can be grasped only in temporary epiphanic moments. Bellow describes an epiphany as a point when “[t]his essence reveals, and then conceals, itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But we never seem to lose our connection with the depths from which these glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes” (“Where Do We

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Go” 219). Bellow implies, however, that it is neither possible nor proper to live in epiphanies, just as it is improper to live continually as the “primordial self” or the “presentation self” (social persona). Bellow’s struggle is to live within the objects and ideas of the world while keeping “an open channel to the soul.” He explains that “[i]t is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgements and put everything together” (Forward 16–17). Intellectuals have chastised Bellow’s personal metaphysics as naïve, impractical, and even, somewhat, un-American. Critics see Bellow as willfully surrendering to a popular demand for an American author to reflect the prosperity of the Eisenhower era, one who would cure the wasteland mentality and prove the essential goodness of Man.5 Bellow’s metaphysics were essentially ignored or misunderstood as a sell-out to middle-class optimism. And with his metaphysics dismissed, the critics focused on Bellow’s social realism. When The Adventures of Augie March was published in 1953 the book established Bellow in the world of American arts and letters as a great writer, but the reviewers were somewhat reluctant to grant Augie the rights of a new and viable American heroic type. The title of Robert Penn Warren’s review of the book betrays a certain hesitation. For Warren, Augie was “The Man with No Commitments.” The fact that Bellow had described the novel as “fantasy” (Kalb 13) allowed for a critical dismissiveness that grew stronger in the following decades.6 Critics felt that Bellow’s hero was a nice fellow and a fun adventurer, but he was not a hero who could deliver a boon to his readers because ultimately he did not reflect society. Warren notes that Augie is “a hero who is the very antithesis of one of the most famous heroes of our time, the Hemingway hero, in that his only code is codelessness and his relish for experience is instinctive and not programmatic” (50), and he notes that “several critics have already said that the character of Augie himself is somewhat shadowy” (51). In 1979, in an article for Modern Fiction Studies, Steven M. Gerson dismisses Augie by concluding that “[h]e chooses to ignore reality and live in dreams; he fails to adapt to the world” (128); and, in 1987 Richard Pearce seems disappointed in Augie as a heroic figure and prefers to read Grandma Lausch as the real hero of comic subversiveness because Augie was never “a real threat to the established order” (65). In Pearce’s view, Augie “may have been naughty, but at heart he was always a good Jewish boy . . . [T]he rebellion never threatened the established norms of writing, thinking, or acting . . . It also succeeded by seeming to Americanize and universalize

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the Jewish hero, but it actually perpetuated a role that was only available to white, acceptable-looking men” (65–7). One is tempted to believe that criticisms such as Pearce’s must have been in the air in the 1950s, if not on paper, simply because the two novels that follow Augie in almost every point address Pearce’s arguments. It became clear that Bellow would have to pry his readers away from such socially bound reading. Opdahl argues that “To read Bellow for the brilliance of his social scene, we discover, is comparable to reading Hemingway as a sportswriter . . . However real their society, Bellow’s heroes are strikingly free from it; Bellow uses a sluggish draft-board or a grandfather’s million to place his hero outside of the usual social context” (The Novels 10). In the two novels that follow Augie March, Bellow, in a kind of tour de force, changes his social furniture back and forth, proving just how little hold either hero as type or hero as social action have on his narrative intentions. Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day and then Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King both live in America, yet they are socially and physically opposite. Wilhelm is Jewish with “striking looks” (7), but twitchy; he is broke; he lives in the city with his father; he is separated from his wife who refuses to give him a divorce; he is passive, and is easily taken in by the conartist Tamkin. Henderson, on the other hand, is a WASP; he is physically huge and his face is “like an unfinished church” (76); he lives in the country and raises pigs; his parents are dead; he loves and is loved by his wife; he is aggressive and intellectual, and is never “taken in” by any of the ideas he reads or the people he meets. Wilhelm’s story is almost tragic and Henderson’s is almost comic; Wilhelm’s story is urban while Henderson’s is relentlessly rural. It is quite easy to compile lists of surface details in Bellow’s works because his novels are cluttered with comfortable indicators of the “real” world; however, these lists rarely take the reader to any new level. Whether his character is good-looking or not has very little bearing on his needs and desires. In his essay “Where Do We Go from Here?” Bellow writes: The modern character on the street, or in a conventional story or film, is what a sociologist has recently described as the “presentation” self. The attack on this presentation self or persona by modern art is a part of the war that literature in its concern with the individual, has fought with civilization. The civilized individual is proud of his painted millstone, the burden which he believes gives him distinction. In an artist’s eyes his persona is only a rude, impoverished, mass-produced

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figure brought into being by a civilization in need of a working force, a reservoir of personnel, a docile public that will accept suggestion and control. (212)

Bellow’s interest is not in this presentation self or the details of time and place beyond what they might offer as a catalyst for his desire to reach beneath the surface. Wilhelm and Henderson have nothing in common in the real world, but beneath the surface they both suffer from the desire to grasp what they cannot and are plagued by an undefined voice that cries “I want! I want!” Henderson the Rain King in particular seems to highlight the absurdity of finding meaning within a spatial or temporal setting, and yet Bellow’s critics were pleased to find a more recognizable American type in Bellow’s work. Norman Mailer had condemned both Augie March and Seize the Day as lacking heroes with “the lust to struggle with the history about them” (Advertisements 402). Similarly, Alfred Kazin commented that Bellow’s writing showed a “lack of someone big enough to fight with life” (Contemporaries 222). One might say that Bellow, allowing for a contemporary ironic spin, had in Henderson the Rain King attempted to return the code heroes of Hemingway to their American audience. Stan Smith defines this breed of hero: “Their defeats become the very ground of greatness: they have gone to the brink and looked over (or even fallen in), and in that act they have proved their masculinity, transformed the humiliation of pathos into the dignity of tragedy, and affirmed unequivocally the human—and the American—spirit” (5). However, for Bellow falling down was not a tragedy. Malcolm Bradbury attempts to explain the complexity of Henderson as hero when he writes: The mythic intent makes it very much a book of the fifties: a decade obsessed with the hope that the imagination might generate at last the saving fable, the tale of the waste land redeemed, the desert of civilization watered by some humanist or metaphysical discovery. But the myth both asserts and mocks itself, takes on a neo-parodic form; and it is the method of comic fabulation, of expansive and pyrotechnic farce, of absurdity finding a path to human measurement, that makes Henderson the Rain King so strangely notable a novel. (66)

The exact nature of Bellow’s parody or “neo-parodic” form has been difficult to identify. Although Henderson the Rain King is overblown almost to the point of farce, it does not mock the essential nature of the heroic desire. In essence, Bellow’s parody is of the nature and the

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value of reality. In his essay on “Reality and the Hero,” Daniel Hughes explains that “Lolita and Henderson the Rain King are essentially serious parodies of comic parody itself because the initial value which the parody is meant to question is restored and with this restoration the unique reality of the experience sought reveals itself: we come into love in Lolita and into selfhood in Henderson” (90). In effect, Eugene Henderson lives within the trappings of a heroic world; his body, his family history, his education, and his military style all line up to serve him in his heroic quest. One by one Bellow mocks their usefulness and Henderson comes to see them more as armor than as tools. Henderson’s personality itself is perfectly, self-reliantly, pragmatically American: he blusters and smashes, he rescues and laughs; he is larger than life, but all of this is mocked by the voice in his head that echoes the very words of the American Dream and the American hero: “I want! I want!” Thus the hero and the heroic journey of Henderson the Rain King are to be found not in the action but in its very rejection. The desire to read Henderson and other Bellow heroes within the confines of literary patterns and myths often leads to disappointment, because these systems tend to rely on binary rhythms that separate the world into here and there. In these exegeses the realistic hero is trapped. There is no substantial difference between Bellow’s America and Hemingway’s America: there is a mechanization and sublimation of the individual to society, and there is still a spiritual void or absent Father; and—as Bellow stands accused of writing only for “goodlooking white men”—it is clear that there is no longer even the illusion of a homogenous audience to whom the hero might return. There are not, and have not been for quite a long time, absolutes in the heroic journey. There is no clarity in the reason to depart or the reason to return. But critics often fall back onto these systems as a way of reading Bellow. Jeanne Braham writes that Bellow’s heroes follow a pattern of “retreats” and “re-entries”: “Their retreats, then, are attempts to escape the psychology of victimization; their re-entries are posited on the belief that individuals can control their own experience, defining relationships to history, country, and family in creative and sustaining ways” (39). Braham, however, demands too much from the surface detail of Henderson’s story. If Henderson was not able to control his own experience before he left for Africa, Bellow offers little hope that he will be able to control it upon his return. Given the abundance of circular images one might even argue that Henderson never truly leaves America, and thus, the retreat and reentry pattern falls short of explaining just where the hero goes on his

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journey. This pattern of retreat leads one to conclude that Bellow overlooks the wasteland victimized hero of the first half of the twentieth century and willfully demands a return to the conquering hero of old. However, this is not the case. Bellow cannot state his position more explicitly than he does in Herzog. There is, of course, a desire to escape or conquer (or, in the words of Braham, to retreat and reenter), but this does not mean that this is the way to an answer: As Walt Whitman marvellously put it. “Escaped from the life that exhibits itself . . .” Oh, that’s a plague, the life that exhibits itself, a real plague! There comes a time when every ridiculous son of Adam wishes to arise before the rest, with all his quirks and twitches and tics, all the glory of his self-adored ugliness, his grinning teeth, his sharp nose, his madly twisted reason, waving to the rest—in an overflow of narcissism which he interprets as benevolence—“I am here to witness. I am come to be your exemplar.” Poor dizzy spook! (Bellow’s emphasis, 324)

In Henderson the Rain King, Eugene Henderson is the epitome of this “poor dizzy spook.” In a cruel twist of authorial fate, Bellow gives Henderson every advantage, every possibility, and every heroic symbol and motif he can manage to stuff within the pages. Yet even at the moment that Henderson becomes the hero 1950s America searched for—the Fisher or the Rain King—Henderson remains powerless and controlled by outside forces. Henderson comes at life with his fists: he touches everything, he looks under every rock, and he captures every flag, but each victory offers only the hollow satisfaction of a child’s game. Henderson is a little boy trapped within a little boy’s imagination with all its heroes and adventures, but what Henderson wants is to “burst my spirit’s sleep” (67), which means to break through “the clouds which wrap this world from youth.”7 When, at the end of the novel, Henderson becomes the guardian of both the lion cub and the Persian orphan, it becomes apparent that Henderson’s desire to break out of his youth and complete a manly heroism was the wrong quest all along. Henderson is a child–man and his accomplishment is not only to recognize this fact but to relinquish the stranglehold he had on his childish self and the childish (and some might say American) heroic desire to be an adventuring hero. In effect, Bellow rewires the heroic journey: he never belittles the heroic impulse and, in fact, praises its usefulness in purely practical terms (Henderson asserts that “There is some kind of service motivation which keeps on after me” [189]), but the heroic narrative remains incomplete without a realization that the main force of the heroic

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journey is acceptance of (but not submission to) the weight of human existence. These moments are seen in terms of hope in Bellow’s books. They are moments of stasis or epiphanies, whether in Augie’s axial lines, Leventhal’s assertion that “everything, everything without exception, took place as if within a single soul or person” (151), or the undeniable lyricism of the last few pages of Henderson the Rain King. Bellow’s heroes become messengers who can only affirm what the reader implicitly feels to be true—that “something deep already was inscribed on me” (Henderson the Rain King 339).8 In Henderson the Rain King the heroic boon Henderson returns to his readers, then, is a reminder of this inscription. A Bellow hero is one who is hit by the realization that the ever-hoped-for spark of truth is contingent and subject to change, but that this is a true state of self. With this uncertainty comes an assurance that the contradictions and paradoxes of an individual life cannot obliterate the primordial self or the connection that is found between that self and all of existence unless we willfully surrender. The Hero in the Novel There is something suspicious about the structure of the heroic journey on the opening page of Henderson the Rain King. It is too neat. It is too finished and polished and completed. Before the page is turned the reader knows (because the hero himself is writing the words) that the hero left and returned and was successful. The story, then, told as a fireside chat to “you people” (3), whether didactic lesson or pleasurable joyride is set up within these reassuring boundaries. One would expect such a closed structure in a children’s bedtime story: once the reader is assured that everything ends comfortably, the lesson or the entertainment can be safely experienced. For readers of Bellow’s work, such strictness of structure is unusual, as Bellow’s writing is hardly mere entertainment, never straightforward didacticism, and certainly offers little in the way of a simple moral message. Yet the structure leads one to read the novel in this way. Jonathan Wilson writes, “If there is a moral here, it is surely one familiar to Bellow’s readers: societies’ rules and conventions are onerous and potentially deathly, but if you break them, chaos is certain to follow” (122). Wilson is careful to hedge his moral-of-the-story conclusion with “if” because Bellow’s novel rebuffs easy morals; the narrative is unwilling to offer a simple take-home message for the reader and, in fact, thwarts attempts to get to the point in a simple fairy-tale fashion. Briefly stated, Wilson’s articulating of a moral is ambiguous

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if one considers that although Henderson purports to flout Western society’s rules, this is not the source of his self-described chaos. The difficulty in reading Henderson the Rain King is inherent in this first page and its initial structure of the hero and his adventure. We know that Henderson has already returned from his journey and the revisiting of his story will be told in his voice. This would seem to offer an assurance that what will follow will be an intimate analysis of a hero’s successful quest. However, the assumption that Henderson has successfully returned from his adventures is an assumption the reader makes based solely on the fact that Henderson is writing this book. In actual fact, the reader does not know that Henderson is safe at home because he never describes his present life. Where is he writing from? Did he become a doctor? Where is his wife? Although the tone of Henderson’s first page is passionate and seemingly without guile, the words are vague and lack coherence as he struggles to identify just what his call to action was and what boon he brought back for his readers. He gives a vague sense of accomplishment when he writes that “the world which I thought so mighty an oppressor has removed its wrath from me” (3), but he is less successful in articulating his earlier impulse to leave: What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated. When I think of my condition at the age of fifty-five when I bought the ticket, all is grief . . . I have to cry, “No, no, get back, curse you, let me alone!” (3)

Although the structure suggests a story written by a hero after the fact as homage to himself and a lesson to those less heroic, the difficulty with which Henderson explains his purpose challenges the seeming simplicity of the tale. On the first page, then, Bellow sets up the contradictions that define the heroic pattern of his novel: his narrative structure indicates a heroic adventure and his style and ideas subvert the pattern. Where is the morality tale in the hero only “feeling better”? Where is the adventure in the hero—like a coddled teenager—running away because he finds the world annoying in some undefined way? The simple patterns, indeed the very fact that Henderson is taking the time to tell his story to us, imply that there will be some applicable lesson for the reader, but already we begin to suspect that this may not be the case. Perhaps the journey never ended. If this is true, then

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this may be the greatest irony of the novel: Henderson’s epiphanic moment at the end of his account—although undeniably beautiful— does not stop him from needing to sift through the facts of the case once again and review his life in an effort to achieve enough intellectual order and coherence for it to be written down. After all, the heroic narrative must not only be explained but understood and incorporated by the reader. In other words, a hero’s journey only exists once it has become tangible, repeatable, and, therefore, real. The question of tangibility and the real will come up over and over again in the novel, but already on the first page Bellow manages to complicate the reader’s sense of reality by problematizing it in much the same way that Eugene Henderson finds it problematized before he leaves for Africa. The structure suggests an easy ride but by the end of the page we find ourselves haunted by a nagging voice crying “I want! I want!” What do we want? We want instructions; we want the hero to fulfill our own narrative impulse and give us the boon. We want Henderson to explain us to ourselves, and challenge and rebuild our society. We want nothing less than to be (re)built inside and out. The book itself is a mirroring of Henderson’s journey. The book’s structure is akin to Henderson’s oppressive reality with its blithe assurances of beginning and endings, facts and conclusions, but these assurances are not fulfilled by the substance of the text or of life. Like Henderson himself, the reader will be faced with intellectual jumbles and endless patterns and symbols. Like Henderson himself, we live and relive his initial chaos and his exotic journeys, but, even if we experience the lyric moment in Newfoundland over and over again, we are offered little hope that the facts, when added up, will give a tangible (meaning a written) boon or a pattern for living. At this point one should remember that Bellow has always been suspicious of such patterns. In his earliest novel, Dangling Man, patterns for living— even if they can be identified—are “particular” and not absolute, and not to be trusted: for study, for wisdom, bravery, war, the benefits of cruelty, for art; the God-man of the ancient cultures, the Humanistic full man, the courtly lover, the knight, the ecclesiastic, the despot, the ascetic, the millionaire, the manager. I could name hundreds of these ideal constructions, each with its assertions and symbols, each finding—in conduct, in God, in art, in money—its particular answer and each proclaiming: “this is the only possible way to meet chaos.” (140)

The need to read Henderson the Rain King as developing certain patterns and delivering a certain kind of hero with a certain set of

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instructions has been the basis of much of the critical inquiry into this book. Taking cues from surface details, readers and critics alike find a certain satisfaction in identifying allusions and rephrasing the story, and solving it as if it were a crossword puzzle. Judie Newman writes in her book Saul Bellow and History that “Henderson is established as a serious quester after real values, victim of a representative American malaise, setting out to bring back a healing boon to society” (74–5). Her analysis quickly becomes a discussion of patterns and symbols as she moves from the beginning to the end of the novel. This linear path, although interesting, is in the end merely distracting. Certain actions or images can be pulled out of the novel and assigned to defined limits of literary, political, or social history, but they work only in isolated pockets. To stand back and look at the whole of the novel is to be faced with interlocking grids that overlap as much as they remain disconnected, and that ultimately refuse to offer up a meta-analysis of the hero’s journey. Howard Harper explains that “Henderson is caught in the familiar existential dilemma of Bellow’s heroes; yearning for order and meaning in his life he finds only chaos and meaninglessness” (qtd. in Wilson 123). It should not surprise the reader, then, that the retelling of his story continues to offer provisional models that ultimately cannot control the chaos of the whole. In Henderson the Rain King, Bellow creates a baroque architecture replete with references and cross-references to keep the collector, the scholar, and the dilettante busy. These patterns are not unproductive; they are not dead-ends, but rather water-wings for those splashing about the edges of the pool. They give a sense of security but only in certain bounded situations. They are not meant to keep one afloat in the deep sea. Robert F. Kiernan argues that although Bellow might understand the desire for a bounded life, one that carries the illusion of coherence and safety, Henderson the Rain King cannot sustain any one ideal throughout its pages: If it is not up to the seer to make the world consistent, on whom does the task devolve? Not me, Bellow seems to say. Vastly amused by myths and rituals that reduce the world to coherence, Bellow offers an alternate vision that readily embraces the inconsistent and irreconcilable. Almost everything in the world he creates consorts jauntily with its opposite: the dialectically opposed Arnewi and Wariri are really the same tribe; Freudians are functional Reichians; Sancho Panzas and ideological Don Quixotes; and, in James Miller’s useful terminology, the quest surd is also the quest absurd. (Kiernan’s emphasis, 93)

Henderson the Rain King is most often read as a comic adventure tale, playfully nudging the too serious hard-boiled Hemingway heroes

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of the first half of the twentieth century. Within the context of literary history, the novel offers a productive and valuable argument. Henderson himself finds it is possible to complete arguments that pick and choose their points or work within certain constraints, but there is always another question they have not answered. To put it another way, the novel stands up to certain academic probings, the kind of research that begins with the adverb how: “How does the novel relate to other novels in the literary tradition?” or “How does Bellow prepare the architecture of his narrative?” These can be readily answered by analysis of the structure and the surface details. But if we were to ask why, then the real meaning of Henderson’s heroic narrative might become clear. “What made me take this trip to Africa?” (3) Henderson asks, but all he can say is how he did it, when he did, what he did, and where. But why? It is the one question that is the core of the Bellow hero. The quest for why is difficult to pursue because it is simultaneously over- and under-articulated. The question Henderson asks himself in the first line of his account is a question that is asked of him several more times in his journey. Each time he fails to encompass the complexities of his reasoning: The examiner showed a row of unusually mutilated teeth. Was he laughing? Then he spoke, Romilayu translating. What was the purpose of my trip, and why was I traveling like this? Again that question! Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall.9 That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe. (132)

If Henderson knew why he was in Africa, he would not be in Africa. He has simply run away from America (believing that he could run away) and is—for all his heroic bungling—passively waiting for himself to be explained to himself. His desire is no less than Herzog’s—or anyone’s—that “life may complete itself in significant pattern” (Bellow’s emphasis, 304).10 Although Henderson the Rain King does not complete itself in significant pattern, its strong inclination toward the heroic narrative has prompted readings that, as Leslie Field stated, become mere “parallel and source hunting, and . . .‘pattern probing’ ” (10). The most oft-repeated parallel in Henderson the Rain King is that of Henderson’s already overblown self being blown into an allegory of the spirit of America. Podhoretz writes that Henderson is “an allegorical personification of the vague malaise, the sense of aimless drift and unused

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energy, that seems to afflict a prosperous and spiritually stagnant society like our own” (225). L. Moffitt Cecil, in the title of his essay, calls Henderson the “American Imago of the 1950s.” And Eusebio L. Rodrigues is very clear in “Saul Bellow’s Henderson as America,” writing: “He can be seen as the embodiment of mid-twentieth-century America, bursting with vital energy, victorious in war, triumphant in technology, at the very peak of its prosperity” (120). Or, in his book Quest for the Human (1981) Rodrigues sees the novel as “a Jeffersonian cry for the renewal and resurrection of the true spirit that had animated America in the past” (113). In reading Bellow’s critics, one begins to see a consistency in a demand for a “real American hero.” These critics suggest that it is desirable and possible to create a hero who is both an idealization of America itself and reflective of modern social reality. In Henderson the Rain King, Bellow teases his critics by seeming to give them what they want. He creates a hero who is America: a man who has it all but wants (and deserves) more. He is the hero of practical use and strong arms, the hero of money and political influence, the hero of all or nothing, the hero of single-mindedness. It is worth noting that this heroic type draws strongly on the tradition of Hercules and Odysseus who are known for brute strength or military prowess; they are men of constant movement; they are men’s men who stand solitary and above a male society. They have wives waiting at home. They fight to the finish and are rewarded for the extremes to which they will go to conquer or escape their obstacles. Bellow’s heroes, however, turn out to be heroes more like Theseus or Jason. His heroes are small, pretty, and soft, and often lazy or dreamy or fickle; their egoism is a detriment to their heroic deeds because they think too much and talk too much, and they do not stick to their guns. Perhaps as a consequence, they are emotionally tangled up with too many people and especially with strong women who succeed in challenging their heroism, making them less than heroic, always reminding them that they are human and domestic. The complexity and absurdity of Bellow’s heroes have made it difficult to identify any one of them as an American icon. Although Henderson has all the outward trappings of a Hercules or an Odysseus (right down to the loving wife at home), he cannot restrain his flaws and frailties. If one can see America in the Henderson of the first forty pages, as he blusters and suffers as a great man of history, it becomes much more difficult to do so when he is in a dungeon in Africa, dressed in translucent billowy pants and stained underwear, crawling on his knees and doing his best to imitate a lion, but only

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succeeding in yelling “Hooolp!” and “Moooorcy!” (274). Henderson’s mythic self introduced in the tradition of Hercules in the first forty pages is shifted to the tradition of the flawed heroic types of Jason or Theseus. Unlike his Greek counterparts, however, Henderson cannot raise his flaws to the level of the tragic; he remains ultimately comical. He is still great, but certainly not within the limits of acceptable American myth. The American mythic imagination will not stand (or perhaps the right word is understand) degradation of this sort, and the desire to see Henderson as an allegory of or a parallel to America cannot be sustained throughout the narrative. What, finally, is one to say when Henderson as America finds his freedom through a Persian orphan on the flat ice of a small Canadian airport? Bellow is unwilling to deliver a conquering, untouchable hero, but he is just as unwilling to reassert the modernist wasteland sensibility of the failed hero. On the surface Henderson seems to be the opposite of this latter type, and the opposite of the entire sensibility that gave rise to such a hero: And while he is exposing the absurdities of the “absurd” hero, Bellow also parodies the major stylistic clichés of the modern novel. The book is in fact a Joycean-type museum of all the artillery pieces of modern literature—consider its reliance on anthropological materials like the ancient fertility rituals lifted straight out of Eliot’s favorite source, Jesse L. Weston; dense patterns and symbol and allusion; heavy-handed wasteland imagery; Freudian personality theory; the ironic hero-flight from civilization; and the intermingling of underworld nightmare and surface realism. (Cronin, “Henderson” 195)

What Bellow seeks to prove through such a heavy-handed parody is hard to define because he is sympathetic to wasteland Angst. The wasteland hero is not wrong (or even, as Cronin implies, outdated) but rather, incomplete. Thus, Bellow’s barbs are not aimed at the impulse that gives rise to such a sensibility but at the interpreters and the pattern-makers who use incompleteness as the foundation for a systemization of a victim hero who belies realism while claiming (like Henderson does) to be a great lover of the real. The modernist heroes, while claiming life’s tragic reality are, in fact, given to romantic endings in which they slip away, they disappear, they simply stop living, or, as Stan Smith asserts, they fall into the void (5). It is here—at the moment in which a hero fails or flees or fades—that Bellow argues with the modernist sensibility. It is ironic that Bellow (who has been accused of romantic, unrealistic endings himself) is, underneath it all,

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a pragmatist refusing to allow his heroes to succumb to a wasteland romanticization—and a kind of pseudo-meaning—of darkness and void. Bellow writes against the absurdity and rigidity of any doctrine, but he is without mercy for those who have fallen in love with their nihilistic tendencies. As Theodore Gross notes: “There is an attraction toward disintegration, Hannah Arendt suggests, that can be as sentimental as a thoughtless optimism—sentimental and equally prone to distortion” (252). As Bellow explains in his essay “Recent American Fiction,” a nihilistic stance must be earned and it seems impossible to believe that it could be earned in twentieth-century America: “There are modern novelists who take all of this for granted as fully proven and implicit in the human condition and who complain as steadily as they write, viewing modern life with a bitterness to which they themselves have not established clear title . . .” (7–8) It stands to reason that as the hero faces the climax of his journey or quest, there are only three possibilities: conquer, escape, or die trying. The return is, therefore, marked by the fact that the hero returns on his or her own or is saved by an outside force (salvation or resurrection). In the modernist pattern the heroic quest is cut short when the hero fails in the test and dies (or falls away) without the possibility of being saved or resurrected. In other words, the hero’s journey is incomplete. This is the very foundation of the wasteland story and the issue that spurs Bellow to write in the vein that he does. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Bellow is reaching back to the nineteenth century and replacing his heroes with the old heroic ideology: “Beneath the evidences of death, despair, sterility, pestilence, and madness in the novel lies that ancient resurrection myth, the Grail legend, unearthed by Bellow from the junkpile of wasteland ideology and polished anew through the burnishing away of nihilistic despair” (Cronin, “Henderson” 197–8). Gloria Cronin’s argument that Henderson’s bursting of the spirit’s sleep is akin to his unearthing the old grail quest pattern does not seem to reflect the main movement in Henderson the Rain King. Henderson is neither “restored to everyday life,” nor has he burnished away nihilistic despair because his howling was never despair and certainly not nihilistic. He repeatedly states: “I am a true adorer of life” (150). He identifies his trouble when he explains that “Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated” (3). Henderson is a man enveloped in too much, a man of chaos who desperately believes there to be a pattern or an architecture that will contain the chaos and him.

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In reflection of Henderson’s state of mind, the novel itself is chaotic. Further, it is a reflection of Henderson’s own modernist understanding of heroic duty and is filled with incomplete actions. As his Hemingway allusions suggest, Henderson sets out to conquer and contain his life, but he suffers setbacks at the penultimate moment. Henderson’s incompleteness as a hero is echoed is the many incomplete heroic allusions and half-finished actions that litter the novel. It is tempting to see Henderson as moving through a series of initiatory gestures,11 but this would imply that Henderson is learning along the way—an argument that cannot wholly be supported. A more useful image is to see these encounters as Sisyphean, with each new traipse up the hill a different rock. An indication of what Bellow is doing is suggested in the plethora of heroic allusions that pop up and then disappear throughout the novel. Cronin is not the only critic to list them but her inventory includes most of what has been found and discussed: Within Henderson are subsumed all the great questing heroes of Western literature: Moses, whose burning bush miracle Henderson can’t quite duplicate; Daniel, who flirted even more heroically with lions; John the Baptist, who also had a romantic predilection for desert places; Atlas, who supported an entire globe, not just a mere bridge; Don Quixote, whose windmills remind us of Henderson’s quest for transcendence; Hemingway, who faced lions and death in Africa; Oedipus, who was rejected by his father and expelled from society; Tristram Shandy, the egocentrist who lost himself in flashbacks and nose problems; and, finally Ahab, the ultimate existentialist, who was also hypnotized by fear of death. (“Henderson” 194–5)

As Cronin points out, Henderson reminds the reader of various quests and desires, but in no way does Henderson bring any one antecedent to a successful conclusion or even a consistent parallelism. A search for a meta-pattern of accumulated myths presents similar difficulties. Brigitte Scheer-Schazler calls attention to the complexity of taking the whole of these allusions as parody when they are couched in apparent sincerity: The various myths that are used enforce, at least partly, the impression of parody: Henderson as “God” who lights a thornbush in the desert, Henderson as Sir Percival who takes the curse off a wasteland, Henderson as the exemplary hero of redemption-resurrection myths, Henderson as young Hercules at the parting of the ways, Henderson as Daniel in the lion’s den. Yet the urgency of his outcry for salvation— ”What shall I do?” he cries, using the words Christian speaks when he

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reaches ultimate despair (in Pilgrim’s Progress)—calls forth certain doubts about the level of such parody. Two other aspects of the book stress the serious concern underlying the comic surface: the nature of the revelations through objects and colors that Henderson shares with most of Bellow’s other protagonists, and the conjuring powers attributed to the imagination, a subject that no author of Bellow’s standing would take lightly. (86)

Although the shell of the novel clearly caricatures the Hemingway hero and his quests, the content of the novel does not wholly support this stance. Where does such a parody actually take the reader? As Daniel Hughes has noted, the reader seems to come full circle and the parody becomes a parody of itself. Once again the pattern is incomplete. If one wishes to see Henderson the Rain King as a parody, a more useful focus might be to look to a word that both Henderson and his modernist predecessors take very seriously: reality. The great question of why Henderson chose to go to Africa plagues the book from the very beginning. Is Henderson running away from or embracing reality? In one sense, Henderson desires to escape from American reality because it has become chaos to him. In another, he desires to embrace a primitive or baseline reality in the way that Norman Mailer had called for a move “backward toward being” (Advertisements 307). Indeed, as Henderson walks into the valley of the Arnewi, he states that “I felt I was entering the past—the real past, no history or junk like that. The prehuman past. And I believed that there was something between the stones and me” (46). What Henderson desires is to start again in an effort not to escape reality but to understand and, therefore, accept it. He desires to strip away his American reality because he has lost the ability to explain it (and by association explain himself). By taking himself down to a primitive or base reality of self he hopes to refashion himself into a “Be-er” who he imagines is a person who has the answer and lives at peace. Of course, to do this, Henderson must first rid himself of his obsessive “Becoming” self: a self that, like the chaos of America, cannot be comprehended, instructed, or controlled and, therefore, finds no ease. Simply put, Henderson leaves America because he cannot control his Becoming self there. In Africa, he hopes to find the role or the religion that will make him a Be-er who, in Henderson’s mind, is the true form of a hero. To “Be” is to conquer, to grow up, to burst the spirit’s sleep, and to cease “becoming.” The fact that Henderson believes he must leave America to find his answers places him within a strong tradition of heroes that retreat and

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reenter. In Henderson’s own mind he willingly embraces the chance to burnish his self to prove his power and to create himself anew. Scheer-Schazler writes that: “By his violence he partly expresses his impotent anger at a life that he can neither bear nor change. This is the reason for his sudden trip to Africa. Like Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin (‘The Bear’), like Mailer’s D.J. (Why Are We in Vietnam?), he accepts the idea of relinquishment, deciding that on the road to salvation one must leave everything behind” (80). Henderson does not quite fulfill this pattern, however, as he never fully retreats or relinquishes in the same way that, for example, Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man does when he sits alone in a New York City basement in belief that “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action” (16). Similarly, Ortega y Gasset’s definition of retreat does not fully reflect Henderson’s journey: “Without a strategic retreat into the self, without vigilant thought, human life is impossible” (185).12 These definitions rest on a retreat being a period of removal from society, a period of stillness and self-contemplation. Henderson fulfills none of these requirements. If there is an image of Henderson’s escape from America, it is not a running away but a running toward. Or a more helpful image might be one of Henderson being chased by death toward an unknown horizon. Henderson encounters death in many forms through war, through the death of his brother, the deaths of his parents, the death of Mrs. Lenox, and even the death of the former Rain King in the Wariri village. As Henderson tells his story, his life shapes itself as a nightmare of dead-ends with each new attempt at conclusion confounded, and death appearing to warn him that time is running out. Whether he pins a “Do Not Disturb” note on Mrs. Lenox or futilely throws the former Rain King over the edge of a ravine only to have the body reappear in his hut by morning, Henderson cannot remove the specter of death from his life. Indeed, he finds warnings everywhere he looks. As he abandons Lily in Europe, an octopus at a local marine center seems to chastise him for another failure: It was twilight. I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular—blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, and the Brownian motion in those speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. The tentacles throbbed and motioned through the glass, the bubbles sped upward, and I thought, This is my last day. Death is giving me notice. (19)

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Henderson is not fulfilling a pattern of retreat and reentry, because he cannot retreat. He cannot escape his self. Braham confirms this: “The American imagination portrayed by Bellow is not escapist. His heroes find no cessation of anxiety simply by lighting out for the Territory. Neither are they able to achieve peace in a willed divorce from society” (123). In an interview in Show, Bellow explains that he sees his novel as a satire of those who assert the possibility that the anxiety over death can be conquered through conscious effort: What Henderson is really seeking is a remedy to the anxiety over death. What he can’t endure is this continuing anxiety: the indeterminate and indefinite anxiety, which most of us accept as the condition of life which he is foolhardy enough to resist . . . All his efforts are a satire on the attempts people make to answer the enigma by movement and random action or even by conscious effort. (“Successor” 34)

Henderson does exert a tremendous amount of effort in his quest. He believes that this is necessary. The hope that he will find relief from the chaos and anxiety of his life rests in his confidence in his physical power. Physical and mental stamina are the foundations of his imagination and his view of the world. This leads to a most ridiculous moment in the novel, when he explains the nature of reality to Romilayu. As Henderson describes it, reality is just another woman to Henderson’s libertine adventurer: I have always argued that Lily neither knows nor likes reality. Me? I love the old bitch just the way she is and I like to think I am always prepared for even the very worst she has to show me. I am a true adorer of life, and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation. (150)

Henderson’s image of reality is consistently dark, displaced, and brutal; it is a reflection of how he sees himself. The irony is that this bravado comes from the man who hides in the basement when his daughter brings home a foundling. Henderson’s sense of what is real and even “true” is bound up with his male ego: reality and truth are only what he can suffer or conquer or comprehend. For this reason

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he equates truth as coming to him only as a form of physical violence: However as I felt the blow my only thought was truth. Does truth come in blows? That’s a military idea if there ever was one. I tried to say something about it to Lily; she, too, had felt the force of truth when her second husband, Hazard, punched her in the eye. (Emphasis in the original, 23)

Henderson, of course, has misinterpreted Lily’s meaning when she had said that she had felt “some truth” (16) when her ex-husband had punched her. Lily had meant that an uncontrolled and unexplainable outbreak proved that he was human and had a depth of feeling. The violent act was inconsequential.13 Henderson, however, translates the image into his philosophy of reality and truth as it is tied to his own stereotype of maleness. These foundations of existence manifest themselves in physical violence and pain, and only the strongest—the most heroic of men—can endure and understand their harsh lessons. Henderson’s boasting philosophy goes beyond parody to absurdity when he takes it to the metaphysical level. Placing himself in the position of God, of “the redeemer” of America’s future, Henderson believes that he can conquer the death of his soul by finding the wisdom of life, which, as he explains it to Romilayu, is to be found like some buried treasure in an exotic locale: All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We’ve just got to do something about it. It isn’t just me. Millions of American have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place . . . And it’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. (276–7)

Henderson is justifying his blundering and endless movement as a kind of travel quest. Somewhere out in the simpler world—but not in America, which by Henderson’s account has become nothing but chaos—is the “wisdom of life.” But where? Henderson is in Africa simply by chance, but perhaps he should be in India or China or South America or simply “all over the place” to find the answer. Henderson’s eagerness to find this treasure as well as the belief that it will be found only at the end of a physically and mentally

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arduous journey suitable only to the most heroic of men leads him to many incorrect conclusions. Although there are many advisors and although Henderson seems to intellectually understand the meanings provided by these advisors, the image he holds of himself as a physical hero in pursuit of a tangible prize means that incorporating such advice is impossible. For example, when Queen Willatale says to Henderson that the “world is strange to a child. You not a child, sir?” (84), he interprets the message with great subtlety: So what I thought was something like this: The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnapper—this gipsy? It is the strangeness of life—a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood. (84)

Of course the elusive phrasing of “you not a child, sir?” is interpreted as a negative state by Henderson. It is a state he wishes to “burst,” a state that is endless becoming, a state in which he is ridiculous and unfinished. A man’s job, a hero’s job, is to grasp death and conquer it. His assumption is that the queen is warning him against being a child (as opposed to simply stating a fact), and he understands it as an affirmation that his quest to burst through this childishness is correct. But the comedy of Henderson’s heroic egoism that immediately follows would indicate that something is not quite right. Henderson thanks Willatale by singing lines from Handel’s Messiah that blur the line between Christ and Henderson himself. In a moment of unintended hubris he says, “God will reward her, tell her, for saying it to me. I’ll reward her myself. I’ll annihilate and blast those frogs clear out of that cistern, sky-high, they’ll wish they had never come down from the mountains to bother you” (85). Of course, as it will turn out the Arnewi will wish that it was Henderson—as either vengeful God or bungling American—who had not come down from the mountains. Much as Henderson’s understanding is repeatedly incomplete throughout the recounting of his journey, so, too, are his heroic actions. His actions are without guile, but they are short-sighted and self-centered. Edward Bloomberg’s article on Henderson the Rain King reads the novel in light of Pascal and investigates the possibility that Henderson’s heroic actions are mere divertissement. Bloomberg gives Pascal’s rationale for this state: The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents

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us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death. (Pascal’s emphasis, qtd. in Bloomberg 177)

Henderson’s divertissement is ironic in that he believes he is facing reality. His experiments with King Dahfu, however, which outwardly seem to be fulfilling Henderson’s desire to break down his self and face harsh reality, are merely diverting himself from the issue of death. Although he is terrified, and physically and even emotionally in pain while in the lion’s den, Henderson cannot differentiate between reality, which is diversion, and “real reality,” which is what he strives to achieve. It becomes clear—even to Henderson—that his life is stuck in a loop. Although he does conquer his adversaries where they present a physical challenge (e.g., the frogs and Mummah), this is never enough to calm the voice that cries “I want! I want!” Henderson completes his heroic task right up to the point of being rewarded and yet he is never rewarded; he is never given the boon that defines a successful hero. He is always driven back by his inability to answer the voice. Henderson’s dilemma is that he does not know what he wants; he is simply grabbing at what he vaguely believes to be heroic deeds, hoping that in the end he will be explained to himself. As he tells Romilayu: “Why did I have to blast those holy frogs without looking left or right? I don’t know why it is I have such extreme intensity. The whole thing is so peculiar the explanation will have to be peculiar too. Figuring will get me nowhere, it’s only illumination that I have to wait for” (204). Unfortunately, if he cannot define what he wants, then Henderson is doomed to repeat himself as he aimlessly keeps moving in hopes of stumbling on an answer. In response to Queen Willatale’s question of who Henderson is and where he came from, Henderson, in typical fashion, goes only so far in his answer before he cuts himself off and begins again: That I had ruined the original piece of goods issued to me and was traveling to find a remedy? Or that I had read somewhere that the forgiveness of sin was perpetual but with typical carelessness had lost the book? I said to myself, “You must answer the woman, Henderson. She is waiting. But how?” And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn’t know where to begin. (77)

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Indeed, Henderson does not know where to begin. How many times does he start and restart his life and never move outside of the cusp of his childhood? He believes that it is in Africa that he can “break the spirit’s sleep,” which, as Shelley writes, is the point at which “youth did pass.” He believes that Queen Willatale has cautioned him against being kidnapped by his childish self; he believes that what the voice crying “I want! I want!” wants from him is for him to grow up. And Henderson is frustrated by his endless attempts that do not stifle the voice. Henderson, as Bellow portrays him, could not be any more adult: his size, his masculinity, his “military style,” his money, his women, his heroic exploits are all the trademarks of the very highest of American hero types. Henderson has faced life head-on with his money, his intelligence, and his physical power; as he assures almost everyone he meets, he knows and loves reality. He has conquered and controlled and, when he could not, he set out for the territories in true American heroic fashion. His goal was to become fully adult, and to do no less than to conquer death. What Henderson does not realize is that if he is not fully adult, neither is he fully a child. He has the trappings of both, but the stage of life he seems to be trapped within is the narcissistic egoism of a troubled teenager. He has the power to be adult but refuses to relinquish the sheltering, enclosed circle of childhood. A child is without the burden of an adult’s experience, without complexity, confusion, or fear of death; the child exists in a centered state, an egotistical completeness within the self and the focus of all adult eyes. A child believes that the world has order and will be explained. A child can wait for this explanation because he or she has no fear of death. When Henderson describes himself, he uses images that allude to his childlike state. The first few pages include images such as Henderson’s “Persian lambs fur” (4) or later “karakul” (64) hair. This unusual description is ripe with allusions that include Henderson’s image of himself as an animal (lamb or lion or bear), the Persian child that figures in his final epiphany, and the Christian image of the Christchild (one of the great heroes) as a lamb. A few paragraphs further, Henderson remarks that after their divorce his ex-wife Frances took one of their children with her to Switzerland. Henderson states: “What she wants with a child I can’t tell you, but she has one, and that’s all right” (4). One wonders, however, if having a child along with her is not the same as being married to Henderson. These remarks begin to create a picture of Henderson as a grotesque: a huge man in knee-pants refusing to let go of his childish place of safety and assurance until there is an answer to the chaos that

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confronts him. Without embarrassment he informs his readers that he is uninterested in his children (and has trouble bringing himself to remember their names),14 and he feels that some of the best times he had with his second wife Lily were during her pregnancy where “in the scent of the baby oil we went to sleep” (6). It is important to note that Henderson is in no way infantilised by Bellow, but his jealous egoism naturally leads one to see him as emotionally young. Also, Henderson is neither a toddler nor an infant, but a youth. He is on the cusp of adulthood but refuses to take that final step to break the spirit’s sleep, and yet he cannot—with all he knows of the world— return to innocence. As a result he suffers. He suffers as children do when they realize that the world is chaos and will not be explained, as they suffer when they realize that they cannot maintain their central position within family and community. When Henderson’s daughter, Ricey, brings home a foundling, for example, Henderson completely rejects the child and refuses to discuss the subject. Like a jealous sibling, Henderson will suffer no other gods but himself. Indeed, in his inability to name his children, his refusal to acknowledge the foundling, and even such ridiculous actions as wearing an earring in college to provoke his classmates, or starting a pig farm to annoy a Jewish war buddy, Henderson works to remain the center of everyone’s attention. He demands to be seen suffering, and when he is in danger of losing this central position he takes it as a personal affront and challenge to his dominance. When Lily attempts to take her place as the lady of Henderson’s fortune, he treats her poorly in public because “I, the sole heir of this famous name and estate, am a bum, and she is not a lady but merely my wife—merely my wife” (6). It becomes clear that Henderson recognizes that he is stuck in a state, but he cannot fully comprehend where he is stuck. He knows only that he is “wrong” and suffers as a result. Suffering, however, comes to be how Henderson defines himself and he comes to see it as a sign of his greatness and even his heroism.15 His suffering, however, is merely another diversion. Suffering is difficult to maintain over long periods; it is physically and mentally challenging and, therefore, it fulfills Henderson’s mistaken belief that heroism is a brutal and manly sport. As long as he suffers he is able to maintain his childish central position as everyone watches him suffer,16 and his physical and mental pain assure him that he grows closer to “breaking the spirit’s sleep” as an adult and a hero. This is the person Henderson believes he is: “I was monstrously proud of my suffering. I thought there was nobody in the world that could suffer quite like me” (Bellow’s emphasis, 304). By the time “it became merely dirty” and

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he was “tired of being such a monster of grief” (313), he could not imagine how to be anyone but the suffering type. In Africa, Henderson continues much the same way that he did in America. As he approaches the Arnewi village, he comes bearing the identity of a monstrous outcast and suffering hero. When a weeping girl approaches, he thinks that she is weeping at the sight of his “badness” and he asks himself “what have I done?” (49). He wonders if he should go back to the desert” and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look” (49). When Romilayu tells Henderson, “No, no, sah. You no mek him cry” (50), Henderson reproaches himself for being self-involved but immediately decides, “She’s coming to me for help. I feel it” (50). Of course, the girl’s weeping and her approach have nothing to do with Henderson, but he cannot comprehend the possibility. For him, suffering needs to be rescued through heroic effort and he is the man to do it. He believes that “something could be done, that I did not have to stand and bear the sight of those tears boiling out” (50). Thus, the Arnewi become a test for Henderson; he hopes to end their suffering through a combination of American know-how and heroic effort—just the combination he hopes might serve to answer his problems as well. Of course, Henderson finds that such a combination answers neither the Arnewi’s nor his own needs. Henderson’s encounter with the Wariri, however, is more successful. Not only does he successfully lift Mummah and become the Sungo or the Rain King, he comes under the tutelage of Dahfu who offers just what Henderson desires: a long arduous journey with a sudden “burst” or “eureka” at the end of it. Bellow’s heroes are characteristically men who desire this kind of eureka to control their lives. They search for “fixer philosophies” that are tangible, defined, and patterned, explainable and, thus, doable. Henderson initially does not differ from these other heroes. At the beginning of his narrative he remembers searching through his father’s library for a book. Although he had committed to memory the phrase that had affected him—“The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required” (3)—he is anxious to know what book the quotation had come from. From the very beginning of his narrative it is clear that Henderson puts great weight in bounded (and bound) wisdom; being without a book to prove his experience somehow makes it less than truthful. It is ironic, then, that when Henderson looks in the library he finds not the book he searches for but hundreds of dollars that his father had used as bookmarks. The image of Henderson “shaking out books

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and the money spun to the floor” (4) explains just how mistaken Henderson is in his pursuit. Leather-bound books, like the millions in Henderson’s bank account, are not without practical and enjoyable purpose, but they are just containers of experience and not the experience itself; they are not the answer that Henderson desires. It is not until Dahfu assigns scientific reading to Henderson in order to educate him about his “system” that Henderson realizes that “I am the inspirational, and not the systematic, type. Besides, if I wasn’t going to abide by that one sentence, what good would it do to read the entire book?” (244). It is this reason that Henderson, unlike many of Bellow’s other heroes, is so fully protected from the fixer philosophy put before him. Unlike Tommy Wilhelm or Asa Leventhal who fall under the spell of men confidently asserting a philosophy of living, Henderson cannot fully commit to Dahfu’s Reichian metaphysics, although he longs to become, like the king, a Be-er. When first confronted with Dahfu’s assertion that Henderson must become like the lioness Atti, Henderson asks: “If she doesn’t try to be human, why should I try to act the lion? I’ll never make it. If I have to copy someone, why can’t it be you?” (263). Later, Henderson chastises himself for being unable or unwilling to change, but both he and Dahfu suspect that a lion is not Henderson’s true nature. Dahfu states: “it is another animal you strongly remind me of. But of which?” (266). Indeed, the only real danger Henderson encounters in his journey is the possibility of surrendering to a system of thought that as a precondition of acceptance demands one deny or change one’s “primordial person.” As Bellow states in an interview with Matthew Roudané: “there is something invariable, ultimately unteachable, native to the soul. A variety of powers arrive whose aim is to alter, to educate, to condition us. If a man gives himself over to total alteration I consider him to have lost his soul” (“An Interview” 276). It is a mistake, however, to think that Henderson consciously chooses not to follow Dahfu’s philosophy. As he explains to Dahfu upon first meeting him, he passionately desires to change his self, but as he reluctantly admits at the end of his tirade, he has no more commitment than a tourist: “You know,” I said, “you have to be very rich to take a trip like this.” I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some people found satisfaction in being (Walt Whitman: “Enough to merely be! Enough to breathe! Joy! Joy! All over joy!”). Being. Others were taken up with becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy. The Becoming people are always

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having to make explanations or offer justifications to the Being people. While the Being people provoke these explanations . . . Becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough! Time to have Become. Time to Be! Burst the spirit’s sleep. Wake up, America! Stump the experts. Instead I told this savage king, “I seem to be kind of a tourist.” (160)

More than anything Henderson desires to achieve the kind of calm repose and lion-like nature that Dahfu has achieved, and he is willing to put himself through mental and physical pain to achieve it. But even his descent into the bowels of the earth and his performance as his “lion self” do not convince Henderson that this is the correct path. Henderson must admit that: “I didn’t have full confidence in the king’s science” (273). He understands the king’s philosophy but he does not feel it.17 Nevertheless, as Henderson’s lessons continue under Dahfu’s tutelage, Henderson’s ill-defined journey begins to come into focus. He questions for the first time whether it is possible to transform one’s soul,18 and, more importantly, he begins to question whether this is a suitable pursuit for a life. It is ironic that at the point that Henderson is most deeply involved in Dahfu’s experiment, he reaches for the first time outside of his own egotistical self. In his letter to Lily, he writes that: “For me the entire experience has been similar to a dream” (280). One expects that Henderson will write that he has finally awoken or “burst the spirit’s sleep,” but once again Bellow is unwilling to give Henderson his eureka in print. Henderson’s letter to his wife is fraught with problems of interpretation from the very beginning, and his most heartfelt insight is most problematic of all: “I had a voice that said, I want! I want? I? It should have told me she wants, he wants, they want. And moreover, it’s love that makes reality reality. The opposite makes the opposite” (Bellow’s emphasis, 286). These lines mark an important change in Henderson’s view of the world, but they must be read in context. To take them out of context, and read them as a kind of aphoristic affirmation is to skim too lightly over a difficult moment. Bellow is careful to couch these soaring lines of hope and redemption within pages of contradiction and have them written by a writer who is both drunk and feverish and admits not only to forgetting but to losing the last few pages that culminate in this insight. In the letter, Henderson writes that he wants Lily to enroll him in medical school so that he might help people. His desire to be a medical doctor is a dream of his childhood but one that sounds suspiciously like another way to avoid or objectify death, this time by confronting it with science. He writes to Lily: “ ‘I expect it to be quite

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an ordeal, especially dissecting the cadaver.’ Once more, Death, you and me” (Bellow’s emphasis, 284–5). Further, Henderson continues to define himself as an outcast, one who is essentially “bad,” when he writes that he could not have a practice close to home because he would “scare the neighbors to pieces. If I put my ear against their chests as an M.D., they’d jump out of their skins” (285). He decides that India would be the best place to become a medical missionary because there “Healers are sacred” (285). At this point, it would seem that Henderson the blustering man–child has changed little under Dahfu’s tutelage. His plans look like nothing more than the start of another incomplete loop, an elaborate, heroic divertissement that will not stop his anxiety. Most telling, however, is the fact that although Henderson admits to “true feeling” for Lily, “which sometimes wrings my heart” (284), he finds the word love to be too banal and overused for a man of his stature: “ ‘You can call it love. Although personally I think that word is full of bluff’. . . I am too peculiar for that kind of stuff ” (Bellow’s emphasis, 284).19 Within this context—having both lost the final pages of the letter and unable to remember anything but two lines—his conclusion seems wanting.20 Henderson has not conquered his self and he has not detailed the boon that he can bring back to his readers. Earl Rovit remarks that Bellow’s determination to complicate his heroes in this way (forever denying Henderson the ability to choose and explain his choice) leads to a danger of losing the heroic journey entirely: Bellow’s realization that “innocence” and “experience” are outmoded terms—superfluous baggage left over from “the disintegrating outline of the worthy and humane Self”—is perhaps his most radical and subversive perception, but it deprives him of any dialectical resonance in his employment of the mythic structure of the quest. (22)

So what is Henderson doing? What is the boon? There must be one because Henderson steadfastly refuses to fall into the void. We know that he returns; we know that he is writing this book to explain himself and to offer his boon, but the reader is left as much as Henderson is in a state of chaos and unfinished acts. The last page of Henderson the Rain King—as he holds an orphan in his arms and dances in a state of joy on a frozen tarmac in Canada—has left many critics unsure how to read the ending. Tony Tanner is willing to be content with a certain vague but hopeful conclusion: “enigmatic, its overall intention unclear . . . uncertain to the point of hysteria on the question of individual value . . . [Yet] something important . . . is brewing even if we

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cannot quite identify it” (qtd. in Kiernan 76). Other critics see this final image as a sudden insight into the possibility of a transcendent being who will rescue Henderson’s heroic self from his endless looping.21 There are some who interpret the final image as escapism, and as much a non-ending as the modernist disappearing act: “It is an ending that Leslie Fiedler has called one of ‘unearned euphoria’, and it promotes certain doubts” (Bradbury 66). To read Henderson the Rain King for its final image, however, is analogous to reading Henderson’s letter to Lily for its final two lines, or to interpreting the reassuring structure of the first page as an assurance that the ending will bring one back to safety. Bellow’s works rarely offer such easy intellectual rewards. The final pages of the novel are denouement not climax; the heroic lesson has already been learned and assimilated in Africa; what the final image shows is the applicability of this lesson. Using Bellow’s own vocabulary, what the final epiphany shows is a man who has found “an open channel to the soul” (Forward 16–17). Although critics have remarked that the reader never sees Henderson return to his American home and question whether Henderson might achieve his goals once he returns, to challenge Henderson in this way is to fail to receive Henderson’s boon. To search for tangible proof of the success of Henderson’s heroic journey and to look for a pattern of living is to continue to search for fulfillment in the sphere of “reality” that had deceived Henderson all along. Such a reading leaves one in the position of Henderson at the beginning of the novel, searching through the library looking for the book, as if life must be tangibly felt in the hands, or quarantined to leather binding or bounded in a pattern of logic before it is real. In order to piece together Bellow’s ending we must view it within the context of the lion hunt Henderson undertakes with Dahfu. This hunt is, ironically, the one moment in which Henderson is denied a chance to be heroic. It is Dahfu’s moment, the climax of the king’s life. However, even here Henderson falls into his old self as he offers himself up as a physical force for the king and then chastises himself for being a “bum” or “wrong” in comparison to the king’s staid nobleness: “King,” I told him, and I spoke so earnestly it might almost have sounded like a series of threats, “you see these hands? This is your second pair of hands. You see this trunk?” I put my hand on my chest. “It is your reservoir, like. Your Highness, in case anything is going to happen, I want you to understand how I feel.” My heart was very much

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aroused. I began to suffer in the face. In recognition of the fellow’s nobleness, I fought to spare him the grossness of my emotions. (296)

Henderson’s relationship with Dahfu is of prime importance to the story because he is the only person whom Henderson openly respects and learns from. Henderson encounters others who should command his respect, but they do not fit Henderson’s limited idea of nobility and strength. Lily, for example, has much to teach Henderson, but although she is a “big broad” (332) and his equal in many ways, she is a woman, often slovenly dressed and reflects neither intellectual nor class nobility. All of this lessens her ability to teach and her insights are dismissed as moralizing by Henderson.22 Only King Dahfu is everything that Henderson holds in awe: he is a king, an educated man, a man of science, a strong man, and, most importantly, he is a Be-er (calm and composed) with a teachable pattern for life. What Dahfu’s system implies is that by embracing his hitherto unconscious natural self through imitation of an animal totem—a lion—Henderson will meld his outer and inner selves into a coherent whole. His hope is that “You can have a new poise, which will be your own poise. It will resemble the voice of Caruso, which I have heard on records, never tired because the function is as natural as to the birds” (266). The system appeals to Henderson not only because of its scientific underpinnings but because it comes with a pricetag of degradation and terror that fulfills Henderson’s understanding that reality and truth must come in blows. Even when Dahfu assures Henderson that violence only brings about more violence (and, thus, suffering and more suffering) and not truth, Henderson believes that he is the man who “can return good for evil” (214). It is obvious at this point, however, that there is a disconnection between who Henderson believes he is—an outcast, heroic, an independent man of sorrows—and who he is. One is struck with the irony of Henderson asserting his ability to “return good for evil” when one remembers how he has made Lily suffer. Henderson was quick to denounce Lily’s father for actions that he himself was guilty of: “Damn these unsteady men! I can’t stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are” (8). This chaos that defines Henderson’s view of himself and his place in the world continues throughout the lion experiments with Dahfu. Henderson states that: “It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them—finally!—and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical publications” (246). Although he is periodically able to glean some

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intellectual fodder, he can no more come to a successful eureka than he can become the lion-self that Dahfu believes he can. All Henderson can hope for is that “I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt” (298). What matters most in the scenes with Dahfu is that Henderson’s physical and mental respect for the king blossoms into a non-reasonable and passionate love. At first, however, Henderson loves the king much like a child loves a parent: he desires to be that person, to imitate and please him. This form of love—although it temporarily takes Henderson out of his own suffering, self-centered gaze (as it seems to do when Henderson writes his letter to Lily)—is ultimately idolatrous. As such, it is the foundation for yet another incomplete journey because Henderson could ultimately never be Dahfu, and Dahfu could never live up to the requirements of an idol. When Dahfu dies during the lion hunt, it is not merely his death that is significant, because it might easily have faded into the list with all of the other deaths in the novel. Indeed, the relationship between Dahfu and Henderson bears a striking similarity to the one between Henderson and his real father. Once again Henderson fails to be the son his father desired him to be, and once again Henderson finds himself inheriting a kingdom he feels he does not deserve. He says, “I’m a broken man. And I’ll never make out with the wives” (312). Dahfu is not only a parental figure to Henderson but also much like a brother, and there is a correlation between the death of Henderson’s elder brother and Dahfu 23: in a just world, both deserve the place of king to Henderson’s clown and in both cases Henderson would willingly give up his life to preserve their rightful nobility, but in both cases the men fail to live to fulfill their roles. Henderson places himself in the role of the bad man as he did when approaching the Arnewi tribe. He is the hero gone horribly wrong: “I am a jinx, and death hangs around me. The world has sent you just the wrong fellow. I am contagious, like Typhoid Mary” (311). Once again, Henderson finds himself in what should be a culmination of a hero’s journey (becoming a king) and finding himself not up to the task. He assures Dahfu that: “The spirit’s sleep burst too late for me. I waited too long, and I ruined myself with pigs” (312). If one were to predict Henderson’s next move, given the pattern of his journey so far, one might assume he would take on the role of king but with a great deal of guilt and suffering and with the voice continuing to want. However, there is a difference between this episode and the others that significantly changes the outcome: Henderson’s outlandish love for Dahfu.

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While Henderson waits for Dahfu to capture the lion, he finally rejects the feasibility of re-creating himself into a lion as he thinks: “this was all mankind needed, to be conditioned into the image of a ferocious animal like the one below” (307). Henderson’s feelings toward Dahfu are further challenged when Dahfu admits that he had tricked Henderson into becoming the Rain King and, through succession, his heir. When Henderson asks “Was this a thing to do to a friend?” (312), Dahfu, “smiling in his increasing weakness,” said: “It was done to me . . .” (312). As Dahfu had warned Henderson much earlier, it is human nature to avenge the blows one suffers in life by passing them on to another. In this way the yoke of suffering is temporarily relieved and the soul, Dahfu concludes, “feels peace and joy” (213). When Henderson remarked that there were brave men who could suffer the blows and return good for evil, he trembled “in all my length and breadth as I realized on which side of the issue I stood, and had stood all this time” (214). Of course, Henderson was thinking of a kind of physical suffering he believed he was capable of enduring, but the very fact that he is in Africa is a sign that he could not suffer spiritual blows. He could not bear the burden of death and chaos; after terrifying his neighbors and harassing Lily, learning the violin, and shooting at housecats, he found that these petty revenges were not enough and looked to Africa to find relief. But now, given the chance to prove himself as either the sufferer who will take “infinite” (214) blows or the average man who will find a way to avenge the suffering imposed upon him, Henderson is in a quandary because of his love for the king. Although the king has betrayed him, Henderson finds himself easily forgiving the king in an enactment of the message he had searched for in his father’s library: “The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required” (3). Henderson is even able to read into Dahfu’s betrayal a hope that “[h]e believed that I was royal material, and that I might make good use of a chance to start life anew” (315). To his surprise, he finds that the grief he feels over the loss of Dahfu—although it causes him much suffering—is not akin to his usual suffering, but one that is tied to a human time frame24 and one that does not replace his love for the king but merely overlaps it temporarily. As Henderson notes, “I never took another death so hard” (314) and Dahfu’s death resonates with all of Henderson’s other encounters with death. By continuing to love a man who shows himself to be as flawed and ignoble as any man (including Henderson), and by forgiving a man who tricked him into what Henderson allows is certain

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death, 25 Henderson begins to understand that his own misery may have arisen out of the narrowness of his vision of what it means to love. He tells Romilayu: “Well, love may be like this, too, old fellow,” I explained. “I suppose my dad wished, I know he wished, that I had gotten drowned instead of my brother Dick, up there near Plattsburg. Did this mean he didn’t love me? Not at all. I, too, being a son, it tormented the old guy to wish it. Yes, if it had been me instead, he would have wept almost as much. He loved both his sons.” (Bellow’s emphasis, 318)

Henderson finds that the love that he bears his father and Dahfu is the connective force or catalyst that unites their disparate and unchangeable personalities. Bellow writes in his essay “Summations”: But I found justification in my belief that there was such a thing as human nature, which not even the most farfetched exotic combinations offered by this American “new world” could unseat. I did not look to human nature as sanctuary, nor did I believe it to be in all respects an attractive thing, a safe haven for the endangered. What I did assume was the psychic unity of humankind. (188)

This love that Henderson “discovers” has, of course, been discovered several times in the novel already.26 But this is the first time that it has been actualized by Henderson’s own experience. Henderson finally differentiates between what he thought of as reality (the tangible, the explainable, the scientific, the presentation self) and the “really real,” which is based on this “psychic unity” and is transferred through the world through the force of love. As they await their fate in a cell in Africa, Henderson tells Romilayu: It wanted reality. How much unreality could it stand?27 . . . We’re supposed to think that nobility is unreal. But that’s just it. The illusion is on the other foot. They make us think we crave more and more illusions. Why, I don’t crave illusions at all. They say, Think big. Well, that’s boloney of course, another business slogan. But greatness! That’s another thing altogether. Oh, greatness! Oh, God! Romilayu, I don’t mean inflated, swollen, false greatness. I don’t mean pride or throwing your weight around. But the universe itself being put into us, it calls out for scope. The eternal is bonded onto us. It calls out for its share. (318)

Bellow’s metaphysics have received much criticism in an era in which such spiritual optimism is regarded as suspicious, but Bellow’s

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use of the word love is always cautious. Love is similar to Henderson’s definition of forgiveness—perpetual but often confounded by human perception. As Asa Leventhal thinks in The Victim: “Would we have to be told ‘Love!’ if we loved as we breathed? No, obviously. Which was not to say that we didn’t love but had to be assisted whenever the motor started missing” (72). It is Henderson’s perception of himself and his place within reality that has, ironically, always held him back from achieving what he believed to be his place as hero. Henderson’s perception of the world was one of brutality, of conquering, and of control. He cannot comprehend Itelo’s desire to wrestle him as a light-hearted greeting to a guest because it conflates the high and the low, the violent and the passive. As he explains to Itelo, he does not wish to fight the prince because, in the army, “They taught us to kill, not just wrestle” (64) and he believed that “We’re too high . . . on the scale of civilization” (65). Henderson’s desire for the eureka that will “burst the spirit’s sleep” marks a perception that the world can be conquered, and it is the role of the hero to do just that. To conquer, however, one must control and to control one must understand. Dahfu warns Henderson that “it is not up to me . . . to make the world consistent” (208). Henderson’s suffering, then, over his inability to make the world consistent and controllable is nothing more than stalling; it is a refusal to move forward and a yearning to go backward. On the cusp of innocence and refusing to admit the experience that bombards him everyday, Henderson merely suffers. The choices that Henderson makes upon Dahfu’s death are recognition of this. Each position he takes is a struggle and often the positions he takes are incompatible and changing. He refuses to fulfill Dahfu’s betrayal by becoming the king of the Wariri, although “I will never have another chance to become a king, I guess” (315). He also refuses to revenge the king’s murder, although he struggles with this as he downgrades his revenge from strangling the Bunam’s wizard to breaking bones to beating him and finally simply locking him in a room. Henderson also takes the lion cub that was to represent Dahfu’s reincarnation because Dahfu has “got to survive in some form” (326). It seems that although Henderson convinces himself that “[t]he moonlit horizon was extremely clear. It had the effect of making me feel logical” (326), there is little logic in his decision. It becomes clear that Henderson has not fundamentally changed; he has not received his eureka and although he writes several times at different points in his journey that he has felt the burst of the spirit’s sleep, there is no final explanation. There is never a moment in which

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a critic or a reader can stop and say “this is how to live.” Henderson emerges from Africa a man changed only in discreet and particular ways. There is some relief, but when he is close to death in Baventai he still wonders “why this has to be fought by everybody, for there is nothing that’s struggled against so hard as coming-to” (328). Although he remembers that the king said that he should change and “shouldn’t be an agony type” (329), he realizes that he cannot change: “But my back is breaking. I’m loaded down. It isn’t fair—what about the grun-tu-molani?” (329). Henderson does not become what he thinks of as an adult, or a Be-er. He reluctantly realizes that he can never escape his Becoming self, nor can he escape his essentially childish nature. Augie March faces a similar fate when he says to Mr. Mintouchian: “You will understand, Mr. Mintouchian, if I tell you that I have always tried to become what I am. But it’s a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by nature isn’t good enough?” I was close to tears as I said it to him. “I suppose I better, anyway, give in and be it. I will never force the hand of fate to create a better Augie March, nor change the time to an age of gold.” (530)

Romilayu, one of the wisest of Henderson’s unregarded teachers, worries about the man who instead of becoming more a lion, seems to be taking on the appearance of a lamb in the wilderness.28 He follows Henderson right up to the airplane that will begin the journey back to America. The quick succession of images, first of Henderson acting much like a child when he jumps from his seat in the airplane to cry “Romilayu!” through the sealed window, and then Henderson as his old belligerent self staggering around the consular office in Khartoum, seems to suggest that Henderson has not changed in the slightest. The suggestion is that rather than conquering or escaping himself, he has, as his voice had once suggested, intensified himself: Harken unto me, you shmohawk! You are blind. The footsteps were accidental and yet the destiny could be no other. So now do not soften, oh no, brother, intensify rather what you are. This is the one and only ticket— intensify. Should you be overcome, you slob, should you lie in your own fat blood senseless, unconscious of nature whose gift you have betrayed, the world will soon take back what the world unsuccessfully sent forth. (Bellow’s emphasis, 187)

Bellow implies that Henderson’s childish self does intensify not only in the growth of his lamb’s wool hair, but in his memory of

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nursery songs, and the connection he forms with the lion cub and the Persian orphan. What is significant, however, is the fact that Henderson recognizes this aspect of himself. Further, the image of Henderson in the presence of the lion cub and the Persian orphan is a rare moment of visual equilibrium. Henderson is not the leader of this motley cub pack but a participant. Unlike the image of Henderson unfairly and uncontrollably using his experience to beat his children at checkers, this image is one of a man who consciously balances his experience and his innocence: protector and participant. As he writes, “As for this kid resting against me, bound for Nevada with nothing but a Persian vocabulary—why, he was still trailing his cloud of glory. God knows, I dragged mine on as long as I could till it got dingy, mere tatters of gray fog. However, I always knew what it was” (339). The words that are usually applied to Henderson (submission, acceptance, receptivity, salvation) all imply a kind of passiveness that is not quite accurate. The final image of the novel is of a moment not a lifestyle. Henderson is still grappling as he leaves Africa; he has not essentially changed; it is likely that he will suffer again.29 He has written this book: he remains an unsettled man, struggling to find logic and coherence. Although, when he forgave the world for being the world, he found that he was not alone in it and, when he forgave himself for being a child, he found that it was not a deformity to be corrected but a state of being he could not change.

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CH A P T ER

3

M R . S AMMLER’S P L ANET : The Hero Accused All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars. H.G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future 36 Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out of hand, wasn’t it? Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet 34

The Novel and its Hero With the increase in Bellow’s reputation in the 1960s came the increasing need to categorize him as the great hope of American letters. As Charles Berryman writes: “Critics were ready [after Herzog] for Bellow to take a ‘stand against the cultural nihilism of the twentieth century’ ”(5). Berryman clarifies this expectation by stating that although “[t]he novelist cannot be held responsible for the confusion of literature and philosophy inherent in such hopes . . . [Bellow’s] fiction has often been praised by those looking for a qualified affirmation of life in the pages of literature” (5). In response to this expectation, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) was a surprise and a disappointment. Bellow himself did not seem to foresee the disturbance the book would create. In an interview in 1970 he remarked that he “had a high degree of excitement writing it . . . and finished it in record time.” He goes on to mislead his readers with a hint at the affirmative message the novel might offer: “It’s my first thoroughly nonapologetic venture into ideas. In Herzog and Henderson the Rain King I was kidding my way to Jesus, but here I’m baring myself nakedly” (“Mr. Bellow” 80).

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The easy misinterpretation of this remark serves as a model for how the novel itself would be misread. If one reads only “ideas” and “Jesus,” it is easy to conclude that yoking together these nouns would result in Bellow’s strongest affirmation yet. However, there has never been a yoking together, let alone a neatly packaged philosophy to Bellow’s writing. John Aldridge writes that Bellow’s creative imagination is: “dialectical and is always engaged in a debate between the secular and the transcendental, a debate he can carry on because he is almost alone among contemporary American novelists in having the power to tolerate, without collapsing under the stress of, philosophical ambiguity” (108). Bellow’s ability to withstand this philosophical ambiguity is central to his imagination, and he has never been able to offer in his work conclusions or patterns for living, regardless of the many lyrical endings he has written. At best, Bellow moves through the chaos of the post-enlightenment world to land (briefly) on an inarticulate feeling, his “something, something, happiness” (Herzog, Bellow’s emphasis, 340) that supports a qualified affirmation of human life. In effect, although Bellow’s heroes do journey and offer something like a return from their journey, theirs is not a once-in-alifetime adventure drawn to completion; the ending is a beginning of yet more necessary journeys to come because the hero never stops being the hero in temperament or inclination. Bellow’s novels conclude at a crossroads between the despair inherent in the chaos and diversions of American society, and the happiness inherent in the “something something” of the naked soul. If Bellow’s heroes pause at the end of his novels, it is clear that the heroic journey is a lifetime of tramping and not a single “eureka.” In the years before Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow had attempted to draw his readers and his critics away from their desire to read his novels for a “fixer philosophy” better suited to the self-help shelves across the nation. Although Sammler was only the latest of Bellow’s characters to discover that “[o]nce take a stand, once draw a baseline, and contraries will assail you” (118), he was the most successful in refusing to choose a path at that fork in the road, or, rather, the most successful in disallowing his readers to choose for him.1 Against Bellow’s desires, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog became novels of hidden patterns.2 In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow so successfully immerses himself in contraries that the reader cannot find stable ground. In the end, critics who searched for the yoking of Jesus and ideas would find neither iconic symbols nor Christian fellowship within the pages of the new novel.3 The result was a tribe of bitter and often personally affronted critics who—had Bellow chosen to engage them—would

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likely have turned the novel’s reception into a brawl in the street. Bellow’s reputation had been building up to become the great voice of American “reality,” but this novel betrayed expectations as he no longer appeared to be “with it.” He seemed unable to comprehend late-1960s American culture. That critics felt personally attacked is attested to by the fact that many used experiences from their own lives as arguments against Sammler’s opinions. John Jacob Clayton conflates reality and “realism” as he presents an analysis of the scene in which Mr. Sammler’s lecture at the university is abruptly cut short by a vulgar heckler: “Not only is such an outburst not typical; not only have I never encountered it in the course of hundreds of political meetings; but it is inconceivable that such a fool would not be booed out of the hall or laughed down” (Clayton’s emphasis, 247).4 Robert F. Kiernan is most succinct in his analysis of the clash of the novel and its audience: “Published in a year of acrimonious political debate, Mr. Sammler’s Planet was criticized immediately by both the Old and New Left as a peevish novel that looked with disdain upon passions engendered by the Vietnam War” (136). Malcolm Bradbury concurs when he views the novel as “a work of social indignation, a radical revolt against the radical revolt of 1968” (81). Unfortunately, in a decade in which some of its greatest works blurred the lines between fiction and biography, and in the dawning of an age when the personal would drown out the political, many critics found it difficult to separate the work and its author. The focus was such that one critic saw Bellow as the only real interest in the book: “Since there is as little difference between Sammler’s language and that of his author as there is between their ideas, we can read the book as Bellow’s personal testament” (Samuels 180). Sammler was seen as little more than the mouthpiece for his entrenched author, spouting “essentially a conservative lament” (Pritchard 169). Sammler and Bellow were dismissed for a voice that betrayed “a defect of sympathy” (DeMott 27) and “a smugness . . . common to Jewish mandarin intellectuals” (Salter 64). Even recent criticism focuses on Bellow’s stumble, as the novel continues to be viewed as a political, spiritual, and aesthetic wrong turn. Kiernan is confident that the novel’s “bleakness” is a result of “Sammler’s unrebellious point of view” (140). It is important to note that Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a troubled book and does come close to collapsing as it investigates contemporary life in late-1960s America. Ideas and form, tightly knotted up with a politicization of culture, all contributed to the numerous and sometimes vitriolic criticisms of the novel (and Bellow). Notably,

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much of the criticism focuses not on the fact that the novel is aesthetically bad but on that it is first and foremost “wrong.” In a backlash to the expected pinnacle of affirmation that Mr. Sammler’s Planet should have been, some critics accused Bellow of not advancing as an author, or of a radical conservatism in reaction to the rapid revolutions, sexual and otherwise, occurring in America at the time. Aesthetic criticisms were secondary and seemed to be the price that Bellow had paid for his conservative turn. Most commonly, the novel was accused of “deadness” and lack of imagination. Jennifer M. Bailey calls the novel “Bellow’s most disappointing work” (67) and a lumbering piece of “symbolic machinery” (72). Mas’ud Zavarzadeh complains of the “aesthetic and ideational thinness” of the novel (77). David Galloway, who stands out as the most harsh of the novel’s critics, writes that “one sign of Bellow’s failure as a novelist is his disinterest in formal experimentation or, to put it another way, his apparent contentment with a narrative formula which dangerously constricts his vision” (“Mr. Sammler’s” 28). He concludes that the novel is an example of “the bankruptcy of Bellow’s novelistic imagination” (19). There have always been defenders of the novel, but as Jonathan Wilson points out, “Until very recently, Mr. Sammler’s Planet has largely been read as an aberration in Bellow’s canon” (143). Even recent defenses are more comfortable discussing the politics and not the aesthetics of the book. With the emergence of an ironic backlash against “political correctness” in the 1990s, critics found a platform from which to praise Sammler for his prophetic abilities and courageous opinions. Jay Parini in his 1995 reflection, “Mr. Sammler, Hero of Our Time,” writes that “[t]he only thing on any journalist’s mind seems to [be] the threat of Political Correctness. Is it any wonder that one feels alienated?” (67). But this political focus, whether to defend or attack, takes the novel away from itself and uses it only as a tool to forward a political objective. In many ways the fears Mr. Sammler has for his planet are borne out by the cultural and political levels on which the novel is discussed. Indeed, according to Bellow the literary climate of the 1990s might be worse than that of the 1960s as he could not imagine having the freedom to write the novel again: “By now, twenty five years later, the whole subject has been surrounded by taboos . . . we are constrained to deny the operations of our senses for ideological reasons. Ideological distortion and repression are forced upon us” (“Moving” 45). What seemed to be coming to a crisis in the late-1960s—a dulling down of America through idolatry of violence and sexual energy, and a need to appear

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both “with it” and “without it” through the cult of the individual—is as firmly in place as it ever was. When Sammler is looked at in some detail, however, many interesting and innovative aspects of the hero narrative emerge. It becomes apparent that Bellow, as he did in Henderson the Rain King, is rewiring what is meant for and by a hero in the contemporary American novel. Although Galloway calls the novel an imaginative failure, Mr. Sammler’s Planet is, in fact, Bellow’s most radical departure in both form and perception from his previous work. Bellow has always playfully changed the surface details of his novel (people, places, and things) but their spatial relationship (i.e., the distance between reader, narrator, and the hero) had remained relatively steady through the years. Before Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow worked with autobiographical elements, with a detached realism, and almost exclusively with a transparent narrative voice created through plenty of letters, diary entries, self-analysis, and dialogue that is then challenged and elaborated by third-person observations and actions. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, however, is not so well-rounded. Bellow’s protagonist is reluctant to relate his life in a cozy, diary format. Additional points of view (whether in dialogue or action) are rarely highlighted. The reader finds herself turning toward the narrator to balance the overwhelming, inward-looking focus of Mr. Sammler, but the narrator is singularly unhelpful and void of readerly direction. Although the form of the narrative voice has changed very little from Bellow’s previous work, the focus on it is much more acute. Further, Bellow so radically changes some of the key elements expected of his novels that one is forced to learn how to read Bellow all over again. For example, the central character, Mr. Sammler, is much older than Bellow at the time of writing. In fact, he is an old man without vigor or youth or physical desire. There is also no wife or girlfriend or ex-wife or anyone to act as ballast in his life or in the novel’s plot5; he is the first of Bellow’s characters to confront directly both the Holocaust of World War II and the Israel question,6 and, most importantly, Sammler is the first of Bellow’s heroes not to show a childish chagrin at the impossibilities of life. Mr. Sammler is nobody’s child, and he is neither foolish nor fumbling. If the critics were pleased to see “someone big enough to fight with life” (Kazin, Contemporaries 222) in Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler, Holocaust survivor and intellectual though he might be, was impossible to understand. He was dismissed as an avuncular curmudgeon who is a “symbolic grotesque” (Samuels 180), “unmarked by psychological conflict”

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(Pifer, Saul Bellow 11), and, as Allan Chavkin observes, is read as “a static, detached observer full of prejudices” (33). How much of a change this was is emphasized when one reads Richard H. Rupp’s description of the Bellow hero written just before the publication of Mr. Sammler’s Planet: “The composite Bellow hero is a drifter, part bum and part philosopher; self obsessed, witty, naively optimistic; down on his luck, but always waiting for it to change; half hero and half buffoon; alive. As several critics have observed, vitality informs all the Bellow heroes” (189). Mr. Sammler hardly fits this description. In fact, no one on Mr. Sammler’s planet fits this description. Sammler, and his planet, suffered all the more in comparison to predecessors. Indeed, Mr. Sammler was read not as a variation of a Bellovian hero or even a new idea, not as advancement or a deeper character but as the old hero/buffoon dropping his comedic mask and “baring himself nakedly” in conservative and angry monologues. Bellow’s readers were aghast to find that behind the comedic mask there was all the wasteland Angst and anger that critics had long supposed Bellow was suppressing. Through his actions (or inactions) Mr. Sammler demonstrated what had all along been feared: the hero was dead and the rest was silence (or, perhaps, white noise). There is, in fact, a break in the historical representation of the hero in this novel, but it is not so much a rejection as some critics see it. Bellow’s breakdown is much more of a breakthrough, just as it is for Sammler in the final scenes of the novel. Having sat quietly, allowing his nieces and nephews to project onto him the idea of a wise and worldly imago, Sammler erupts from this stagnant self and possibly cuts off his inheritance by calling his niece as he sees her: a morally shallow painted doll, lazy, perhaps not human enough. This is not funny. Sammler waited until Angela was at her father’s deathbed (where she was imprudently discussing the breakup of her last love affair) when, it might be argued, she needed comfort the most. It all seemed too cruel, too angry. Yet it could not be called tragedy. No one expected a Bellow novel to be tragic, but his famous middle ground tempered by quintessential Jewish comedy was gone. Sarah Cohen notes: “To maintain that existence is ‘nauseous,’ that life is a ‘plague,’ that we have no chance of winning the ‘endgame’ is, according to Bellow, to convey only partial truths. It is to fail to give a comprehensive account of reality” (3). However, as Cohen’s own thesis asserts, Bellow’s comprehensive account of reality, incorporating the underbelly of existence, was always couched in comic terms. In 1965, in an interview with Gordon Lloyd Harper, Bellow agreed stating: “Obliged to chose between complaint and comedy, I choose comedy,

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as more energetic, wiser and manlier” (“Saul Bellow” 187–8). With Mr. Sammler’s Planet Bellow seemed to have changed his mind, and by his own terms written a passive, dim, and “womanly” work. One might make the assumption, then, that Bellow did not see his book this way. In Bellow’s conception of the work, the novel must have been seen as a comedy on the very darkest of terms. For indeed, it is an angry, ironic debate between a creator and his created world, between a novel and its readers, between the transcendent and the secular needs of the human, and finally, between the hero and his audience. Sammler’s story begins well past the lyric endings of all Bellow’s previous novels. If Bellow’s detractors had snidely insinuated that the Bellovian hero was incapable of surviving beyond his temporary withdrawal from the “real” world, Sammler answers that challenge. Sammler is an old hero, one who has been in withdrawal—against the demands of his inner-self—for decades. The focus of the story is not simply another heroic journey but a demand from the hero for justification. If Sammler were to drag himself back into the role of a hero, he would demand more from his followers than following. The novel asks the same of the readers: if there is still a place for the hero of foundational narratives in American fiction the reader must not simply look for a role to imitate but actively participate, argue, and consider. Robert Dutton writes that: “As in Swift’s work [Gulliver’s Travels], the education of Bellow’s protagonist has meaning only insofar as the reader brings his knowledge and insight to bear on the experiences of the protagonist” (92). Unfortunately, added to the new complexities of the hero, there is a change in the form of the novel. Although Bellow has always locked the reader into the perspective of the hero through the narrator, the reader always had a wider understanding of things, if only through how the foolish ideas of the hero were challenged in comedic actions against him. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet Sammler does not act and therefore cannot be judged by either the characters or the reader. Thus, the narrator becomes the only “third party” to the hero’s version of events. This form of a central consciousness served Bellow well for his comic turns but it becomes aggravating for the reader who wants a serious answer, a straight answer, from someone other than Sammler. Michael Glenday points out that “[t]he narrator seems so hand-in-glove with Sammler that the reader is taken aback on those few occasions (I could only recall two) when he places Sammler in a reproving manner or context” (112).7 Allan Chavkin counters that Bellow has done his duty as an author as he “deliberately puts some ironic distance between himself and his cranky septuagenarian protagonist” (33). In a comparison

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of these two remarks it becomes clear just how conflated Sammler, the narrator, and Bellow are in the novel. There may be “some ironic distance” as Chavkin asserts, but such distance is difficult to find for the average reader. Although Mr. Sammler claims to be disinterested and distanced from the action, he is never removed from his own understanding of the action. Similarly, the narrator is never removed from the hovering influence of Mr. Sammler. In an interview Bellow explained his intentions with Sammler, stating that: The internal processes of Mr. Sammler require the very narrowest attention. You have to see that he is never speaking out of character and that he never says anything simply for the sake of saying the thing, but what I wanted to create—I don’t know how successful I was in this—was the thinking of such a person never disconnecting the thought from the person, so that these things are not presented in the book as sermons, but rather as a monologue. (“A Conversation” 85)

The difficulty is that the reader must recognize that the central consciousness has not only been taken over by Sammler, but that Sammler is not prepared to let anyone else speak. Thus, like all Bellovian characters who wish to co-opt the argument—such as Allbee, Thea, Tamkin, or Dahfu—Sammler is not to be fully trusted. He needs to be debated: if not within the confines of the plot, then by the reader. Only when this jump has been taken does the novel begin to advance. The difference, however, with Sammler and other big idea people such as Thea or Tamkin, is that Sammler never puts his ideas into action. He never extends himself and he is, therefore, never in the position of being seen as foolish or mistaken. He can never be directly challenged by any of the other characters. Without seeing a mistake in his logic, the reader is never really sure if Mr. Sammler is not to be trusted in his opinions or if the reader is simply missing the point. Bellow went into the writing (perhaps erroneously) without feeling a need to hide behind the bulk of Henderson’s comic foolishness or Herzog’s intellectual farce. Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a serious novel, pushing the need for action onto the reader; it invites the rebuttal—in many instances it demands a rebuttal—but inevitably the chaos of its structure and the literary climate of the time could not be overcome. It demands that readers of the work stand up and account for themselves, defend their ideas and their own “painted millstones” (Bellow, “Where Do We Go” 212). Unfortunately, critics and readers could not understand why they were being attacked. The characters in the novel have a similar difficulty understanding Sammler’s intentions.

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Angela asks her uncle: “I thought everybody was born human.” “It’s not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural.” ... “You’re criticizing me.” “No, I’m praising your father.” (304)

What readers had expected to hear, after taking the lessons of previous novels to heart, was some praise. What they received instead was criticism and all the praise was lavished upon Elya, a dying man of the “old system.” What the age demanded were the free-flowing openminded reminiscences of Augie March, and what it received was the convoluted and condensed ratiocinations of Mr. Sammler surreptitiously controlling the consciousness of the narrative. It is no overstatement to write that critics and readers alike felt betrayed. Jonathan Wilson notes that “Sammler’s cardinal sin is to do what a Bellow hero is never supposed to do—express hate for a Bellovian world that is clearly hateful” (156). It is the hero in Mr. Sammler’s Planet that is the key to understanding the novel both in form and idea. If one cannot understand the form in which to read the hero, one cannot understand the idea of the hero. Just what is Mr. Sammler’s journey? What is his call to action? What boon could he possibly bring back? These are the questions that the old man asks himself. Over the three days of the novel’s action, Mr. Sammler is not courageously fighting against and then coming to temporary terms with ambiguity, but, rather, questioning what it means to take that first step toward struggle. In other words, rather than a hero attempting to be a hero, Sammler needs to be convinced there is a point to heroic narrative at all. He is an old man, he is an old Wellsian who has had the misfortune to live long past the effectiveness of his ideology.8 Although Mr. Sammler’s inner rumblings might be once again awakening to the need for action, his inner voice, if it has anything to say at all (and in stark contrast to Henderson’s “I want! I want!”), is simply “why bother?” or “who cares?” There is no doubt that Sammler believes himself to be a hero type, but his inner urge, his instinct toward the heroic, was damaged in the early 1940s when he lost his wife, his intellectual and cultural superiority, his money, his past, and his eye. Sammler finds himself living on his nephew’s charity in a city in which everyone acts as if they were their own heroes. Sammler is prized not for his inner struggles but for his ability to appear static, becoming nothing more than a toe rubbed on a statue of a saint in a cathedral, the ideas long forgotten or never

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known and certainly never challenged. He is an old idea, not an active participant: “Feffer in the furious whirling of his spirit took him for a fixed point. In such hyperenergetic revolutions you fell in love with ideas of stability, and Sammler was an idea of stability” (115). Sammler’s society is one in which there is an acceptance of the idea that there is no longer anything too great or too small. The prevailing opinion is that of mass man, of shallow roots, and disconnection and chaos. Margotte echoes Hannah Arendt’s ideas as blithely accepted belief: A mass society does not produce great criminals. It’s because of the division of labor all over society which broke up the whole idea of general responsibility. Piecework did it. It’s like instead of a forest with enormous trees, you have to think of small plants with shallow roots. Modern civilization doesn’t create great individual phenomena any more. (16)

In such a society, there is little place for a heroic figure. Bellow has stated that he is personally not convinced by this banal form of nihilism: “I don’t like the snobbery implicit in the idea of the ‘mass man’ developed by Ortega, his German predecessors, and his recent successors” (“Common Needs” 148). Sammler also disagrees with this position, although his argument comes from far off in the distance where he is free to judge without acting: Accept and grant that happiness is to do what most other people do. Then you must incarnate what others incarnate. If prejudices, prejudice. If rage, then rage. If sex, then sex. But don’t contradict your time. Just don’t contradict it, that’s all. Unless you happened to be a Sammler and felt that the place of honor was outside. (73)

The fact that Sammler is trying to convince the reader of this outside “place of honor,” as well as his ongoing research into “disinterestedness,” should be a clear indication that Sammler is not on the right track. If one believes that Sammler has already achieved his objective (a place “outside”), or that disinterestedness is a feasible option, then the novel becomes nothing more than a topsy-turvy sermon, a long didactic training manual of how to achieve sainthood in a secular society. Where is this outside of which Sammler seems so convinced? When the novel opens, Mr. Sammler is introduced as a man who has long been alone in his head and buried in books of mysticism in the public library. He is hiding away, not with questions but with assurances: “Mr. Sammler could not say that he literally believed what he was reading. He could, however, say that he cared to

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read nothing but this” (254). Although he may not believe in Meister Eckhart he finds comfort in the dusty words. Thus, in the same way that Sammler is to those around him (the toe rubbed on the statue of a forgotten saint), so, too, is Eckhart to Sammler. Even here, however, there is a creeping of life that distracts him from his distraction. It is this unwanted creeping, a creeping that combined with the approaching death of his nephew, Elya, that forces Sammler to make some kind of move, a move that he states again and again he does not want: For quite a long time he had felt that he was not necessarily human. Had no great use, during that time, for most creatures . . . But then, ten or twelve years after the war, he became aware that this too was changing . . . in short, creatureliness crept in again. Its low tricks, its doggish hind-sniffing charm. So that now, really, Sammler didn’t know how to take himself. He wanted, with God, to be free from the bondage of the ordinary and the finite. A soul released from Nature, from impressions, and from everyday life. (117)

Although the novel is not a first-person narrative, the reader is confined to Sammler’s sensibility, and the journey that Sammler takes we take (willing or not) with him. Sammler’s yearning for release becomes the reader’s yearning. Although there is something seductive and true about such a desire, where does this yearning take us? It becomes a death drive maneuvering through and past the chaos of American life, and human life. But like so many of Bellow’s heroes, Sammler is pointed in the wrong direction. As Sammler himself comes to see, what is the point of directing your sights toward death, toward the inevitable, the unremarkable, and the silent? The true heroic quest that Sammler faces is a much more difficult one but one that at least has the possibility of life in it. It is to find a place between his static intellectual withdrawal and the mindless doing of the younger generation. Further, although the impulse is within him to answer this quest, Sammler must leave behind the easier and quieter (albeit futile) search for disinterestedness and convince himself that there is a place for him, as hero, within late-1960s American society with its rampant individualism, its claims to egalitarianism, its babblers and all their convictions and contradictions. In essence, before Sammler can become a hero he must convince himself that there is an audience to listen, to understand, and ultimately believe in his efforts. This yearning of Mr. Sammler to silently withdraw and his reluctance to act out, have contributed to what critics have decried as his deadness. Clayton writes: “In Mr. Sammler’s Planet I do not find this

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refusal to submit. I hear a voice that denies eros, denies love. It is a voice from the dead” (250). However, to read Mr. Sammler’s Planet as dead is to be conned by those mystical tendencies. It is to take Mr. Sammler at face value. Mr. Sammler is hiding, reluctant to appear, but he is not dead. A parallel may be drawn between the Sammler that ends his Oxonian career and the Sammler that will end his mystical career. In both cases, society has left him for dead. Indeed, Sammler himself might wish it. The inner debates Sammler has are the struggle to believe that there is some purpose in his desire to struggle against this death. Intellectually, he might appear dead, but there remains the inner spark that demands its right to life. If in Poland the choice to live was a simple one, for the death was physical, in New York the choice is less obvious because the death is metaphysical. Bellow pointed out in an essay in 1990 that George Orwell had written: “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of civilized men” (“The Distracted Public” 156).9 It is this need for repetition, a loud restatement, an active, heroic statement that has a power outside his own living, of which Sammler needs to be convinced. This is the trajectory of Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Mr. Sammler is forced by nature and against his own septuagenarian sensibility to face the need to restate the obvious not only for himself but for those around him. Orwell’s “obvious” in Bellow’s vocabulary is, as Henderson found out, grun-tu-molani or “man want to live.” This is the first step. Yes, creatureliness or “man want to live” had been slipping back into his life for years, but this was not enough for Sammler to utter a foolish cry of affirmation. Sammler may feel that spark, or that need to live rising up in him again. He may have all the trappings of a heroic character (and not the playacting heroes of the New York streets), but he is old and tired; he is brought down by the wars he has seen and the chaos he encounters everyday. Should he be a Prufrock, a Lazarus come from the dead to tell them all? And tell them what? Who would listen to an old man’s story of death in a world with such a focus on living? Sammler’s struggle is different and deeper than other of Bellow’s characters. If the failings of the other Bellovian heroes are clear enough to the reader, if not to themselves, Sammler’s failings are much more difficult to see. One of the reasons, of course, is that Sammler has led an exemplary life of a hero already. He has been the intellectual and physical hero. He has been the perfect American hero and perhaps Sammler’s readers feel, as Sammler does, that he deserves to rest and to be left alone, particularly because his seventy or more

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years are no longer valid in the youth-focus, sex-focus of the 1960s. The point for Bellow, however, is that Sammler cannot be left alone; it is, simply, impossible. One cannot be left alone from oneself, anymore than one can be left alone from society. Sammler is implicated in the society in which he lives, and he must either deny it or struggle with it. Sammler’s struggle will be harder than that of other Bellovian heroes because he struggles not only against himself but against an entire social wave, a wave that he had seen at its idealistic inception. Thus, for all his assertions of being separate and alienated, Sammler is as much implicated by the moral ambiguity as the younger generation. It was the acceptance of his ideas that had resulted in the “chaos” he now condemns. He is, in fact, a hypocrite. Charles Berryman contends he is as “touched by lunacy” (10) as any of the characters he judges, and Derek Wright concurs: “And if he [Sammler] proves to be a rather unreliable spokesman for the Bellovian idea of order, it is precisely because he himself has been a victim of, and therefore a part of, the disorder and is incurably contaminated by it” (23). Although there are many similarities between Mr. Sammler’s Planet and other of Bellow’s novels, Mr. Sammler was ultimately viewed as too foreign a character to be embraced by the political and cultural climate of the time. He was a character too conflicted, too tarnished by the society he challenges, too limited, and too earth-bound to break through the chaos that defined America in the late 1960s. Bellow himself backed away from the work after its publication. As he told Richard Stern in 1978, the novel “dealt with a new state of mind but wasn’t under control” (“Bellow’s Gift” 48). When he wrote his next novel, Humbolt’s Gift (1975), he was careful to split the long dialectical ratiocinations of Mr. Sammler into two distinct characters (Humbolt and Citrine); he added ex-wives and buxom girlfriends and couched despair in slapstick and cash. Humbolt’s Gift was well-received and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, but it is unfortunate that Bellow would never again attempt the cold despair hovering on the very lip of the grave that is the defining feature of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The novel itself remains, for many, a mere didactic blip in the wars of individualism of the late twentieth century. There is no doubt that it is complex and messy, that the novel is a misstep in form and misjudged the wants and needs of an American audience in the late 1960s. In 1977, Bellow stated: “Though my books may not make sense to many readers. Perhaps the sound of my voice communicates this sense of things” (“Common Needs” 149). But in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, even the sound of the voice was misleading. Whereas readers were always comforted by the voice of the Bellovian hero, and whereas

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the lyric song that inevitably rounded out the book was often strong enough to balance or even outweigh the difficult, confusing, or chaotic internal wanderings, Mr. Sammler’s Planet has no assurative voice, no voice of hope or comic comfort or “something, something, happiness.” Mr. Sammler co-opts the story both in the narrative voice and the perspective that is entirely his own. Even the final prayer concludes that life is “degraded clowning” (313). Sammler never escapes his planet and the reader never escapes Sammler. While other Bellovian heroes use humor or a certain detachment to give breathing space to the narrative, there is none of either in this novel. The reader is left with the very dangerous proposition of having only one viewpoint and necessarily being forced to fight against it, because to fight against Sammler is the only hope that one has at the end of the book. He is Bellow’s most conflicted character, the most flawed, and— contrary to criticism of deadness—the strongest personality, the least flexible. The reader is in the position of coaxing an old man out of bed: what possible argument is there to move?10 But Sammler is not reluctant as much as he is conflicted: he is the old man who desires to lie in the cool of a dark room, but yearns to feel the hot sun on his face. As Mr. Sammler thinks: “Petitioning for a release from God’s attention? My days are vanity. I would not live always. Let me alone. To be visited every morning, to be called upon, to be magnified. Let me alone” (251). The reader, however, needs him to be magnified. To convince Mr. Sammler to get out of bed is to believe that the heroic journey is still probable, possible, and even necessary. In a final defense of the novel, Robert Kiernan calls Bellow’s treatment modest (154). Rather, he tried too much, too soon. The reader is left to feel like a foreigner, not speaking the language, not understanding the signs, and right to the very end of the novel, trying to piece it all together. Where is the right turn to be made? Bellow’s greatest mistake in this novel is that he does not give enough indications about how it should be read, and as a result patterns are grabbed at and gaps are filled. Unfortunately, gaps are never meant to be filled in a Bellow novel. There is that nugget of affirmation underneath all of Bellow’s works, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet is the same. The hope that so many critics felt was not there is there, but the forest is darker, the signs less noticeable. It is Bellow’s challenge to convince Mr. Sammler that the impulse he feels to get out of bed, to restate the obvious, to answer his call to action, his call to “live” is the only thing that will make him human. What comfort he finds is in neither imbecile optimism nor a never-ending series of nays. The comfort comes, as Emerson found it, in that “[s]ociety is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of

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which it is composed does not” (“Self-Reliance” 51). And, in the promise and excess of the late 1960s, this conclusion might have been read as one of affirmation or not. The Hero in the Novel In his essays and lectures, one of Bellow’s most consistent complaints is about casualness of artistic effort. In a lecture in 1992, he pointed out that: “the view that the mind is not a dignified organ is modern. It is exactly what we expect. It is this casualness, irony, levity, that we seem in our time to take for granted” (“Mozart” 6). Bellow has consistently chastised writers and readers for not looking beyond what they expect as to do so degrades art to mere abstraction or social commentary. Art, Bellow suggests, should find itself in the unknown— even the unknowable—if it is to fulfill its possibilities: Thought is the common realm, imagination the unique one. Abstraction has become a communal passion and community prefers what can be talked about—translated into “concept” or discourse. Not many people willingly give themselves to what is not adaptable to their familiar discursiveness. They do not habitually live in art. They seem aware that art will alter them whereas discourse does not threaten them with alteration. They prefer their world view to any unfamiliar state of being. And yet reality, true experience, lies in “unfamiliar” states of being. (“Summations” 191)

Bellow’s artistic sensibility has often been called European because of the influence Russian literature (specifically, nineteenth-century Russian literature) has had on his work. Exposure beyond the American tradition, however, has enriched his writing, and strengthened an interest in aspects of character that are distinctly non-American. For example, Bellow writes: “It’s true that we lie a great deal—[Gore] Vidal is right about that—we lie like mad. There are no Tartuffes in our literature, no monster hypocrites, no deep cynics. What we have in their place is a great many virtuous myths that we apply to our lives with imbecile earnestness. Everything bad is done for the best reasons” (To Jerusalem and Back 103). Most of Bellow’s heroes are good examples of this “imbecile earnestness” as they contain a childlike desire to know less and act more: to accomplish, to finish, and, like the heroes of old, to bring order out of chaos. Whether writing letters or lifting statues or simply drifting across the continental United States, his heroes are defined by their ability to lie to themselves about themselves as they relentlessly act and act and act in what they think

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is an effort to know themselves. Mr. Sammler, while no less mistaken about himself, is distinctly different in sensibility; he refuses to act and judges those who do. Clayton writes: These are the egoists, the rebellious, exhibitionistic modern individualists who try to be more than human. But what else is Sammler himself trying to do? His flight from this planet is a mirror of the flight of those he condemns. As Bellow knows, Sammler, too, is guilty of a lack of humanity, of a rejection of the human contract. (Clayton’s emphasis, 244)

Clayton contends that Sammler is a much more complicated character than one might expect. He is as reluctant to get involved as other Bellovian heroes have been desirous of conquering chaos. He comes to the novel with a whole history of good, American-style heroism behind him, yet he comes to the story as a cynic about this heroism, with its physical, idealistic, larger-than-life hero who returns triumphant carrying the boon of knowledge back to humanity. Ironically, however, Sammler’s reluctance to act has itself become his action; he allows others to create him into a symbol of the past. Significantly, Feffer praises Sammler in thoroughly non-active terms: “You are the only person in the world with whom I would use a word like veneration. That’s the kind of word you write down, not say” (113). Sammler is not only a cynic but a hypocrite and a troubled one at that. There is something in him that still desires that old hero. When Feffer says to Sammler “I know that you are trying to condense what you know, your life experience. Into a Testament” (114), Sammler is surprised that he told him this since “[i]t is very private . . . I certainly never meant to mention it” (114). In describing the scene back to Sammler, Feffer remembers how they were standing “in front of the Bretton Hall Hotel, that miserable bunch of decay, and you were leaning on the umbrella” (114). Even given Feffer’s confession of love for Sammler at that moment, the whole scene of an old man in front of a decrepit hotel, leaning on his Oxonian pretensions, believing in “[maybe] just one single statement” (114) is more a misty romantic invention than a possibility. In this short scene there is a glimpse into just how complex a character Bellow has created, and how foreign a person he has introduced into the American system. Sammler is a cynic, a hypocrite, and also an American hero. Bellow introduces a man who states with strong self-assurance in the first few pages of the novel that: “Acknowledgment of social descent. Historical ruin. Transformation of society. It was beyond personal humbling.

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He had gotten over those ideas during the war in Poland—utterly gotten over all that, especially the idiotic pain of losing class privileges” (7). And yet, as the scene with Feffer shows, he has not “gotten over” anything. He is a hero who sees the impossibility and futileness of attempting to create order out of the American chaos, and yet perpetuates the possibility that it might be done. Sammler is lying to himself and, as a result, he is lying to the reader. If the reader is to understand Sammler, he or she must look harder and listen closer. In order to tease out just where the problem lies with Mr. Sammler as a heroic character, one must return to one of Bellow’s basic distinctions: light and darkness. In most of Bellow’s books, the hero grapples with the light and the dark within himself while metaphorically these extremes exist as outward entities, as different characters or situations. Most often Bellow introduces a doppelganger to confront the hero’s pretensions. In Henderson the Rain King Bellow went the furthest he ever did by separating light and dark into tribes. If Henderson had both light and darkness within him, he still physically moved between the Arnewi (the “children of light”) and the Wariri (the “children of darkness”). In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, there is only Sammler incorporating all, and the distinctions are difficult to discover. Bellow’s definitions of “light” and “dark” remain the same in each novel. They have often been layered with moral meaning by critics and readers, but although the light and the dark are in conflict with one another, and although either side may claim to be the only way to success or happiness, they are part of Bellow’s dialectic imagination and it is dangerous to give moral weight to one over the other. Bellow’s light is born out of a sense of cultural cohesion and dark out of a sense of the truth of nature. Admittedly, it is difficult to see the distinctions between light and darkness in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, but Jonathan Wilson confuses the issue when he writes: Moreover, and most important, the major difference between Sammler and Henderson—and indeed, all Bellow’s other heroes—is that where the other heroes seem either directly or at the metaphoric level to be suspicious of, scared of, or in conflict with the “dark” side of their personalities—what Sammler calls the “black” side, the “child, black, redskin” (p. 162) and we might add “female” parts of the self—Sammler, while he remains a “split” personality, seems more vitally alarmed by actual black people, actual “redskins,” and actual women. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, that part of Bellow’s hero’s character that fears “chaos” comes out in what some might say are its true colors as misogyny and racism. (146)

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Wilson is correct when he implies that Sammler is a “child of light” who is battling against the dark side of his own self, but the example he gives is incomplete. The quoted comments come during a monologue about the misinterpretation of what is dark and where its powers lie. Darkness, as Sammler understands it, has been reduced to fit a pattern wherein “child, black, redskin” and the “unspoiled Seminole” were raised against the “horrible Whiteman” (162). The result is not freedom but oppression. His statement has less to do with what is called dark (child, black, redskin) or light (whiteman) and more to do with a state of the balance between society and the natural will. A parallel to this monologue can be found in Henderson the Rain King where Dahfu, who, although he is king and has all the freedom he might want (in particular, a huge harem of beautiful women to please him in any way he desires), is, in fact, a prisoner. His luxury comes at the price that if he once falters or fails to fulfill the role of sexual magnifico, he will be put to death. Herzog deals with the same issue in more direct terms. He finds that he is reluctant to completely give himself over to Ramona who believes in the possibility that he might “renew the spirit through the flesh” (184–5). He thinks: “This—this asylum was his for the asking, he believed. Then why didn’t he ask? Because today’s asylum might be the dungeon of tomorrow” (184). In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow is not interested in the pickpocket as a black man or in Angela as a privileged white woman, but in the fact that they have chosen to embody only the dark side of the human, believing it to be a primal cure or power. He is intrigued by both their power and their self-made prisons. One might attack Bellow for his naivety in discussing such a politically charged subject, but he consistently attempts to sever the political from his argument. Given this perspective, there is little wonder that one of the prime targets of Bellow’s attacks in the novel comes in the not so covert barbs at Norman Mailer and the perspective he engenders in his hipster essays: And now all the racism, all the strange erotic persuasions, the tourism and local color, the exotics of it had broken up but the mental masses, inheriting everything in a debased state, had formed an idea of the corrupting disease of being white and of the healing power of black. (33)

The cultural emphasis that rises out of the 1960s—with its mix of power, alienation, and fear of youth, black culture, and female sexuality—is, of course, part of the foundation of the theme of paranoia in literary criticism and literature today. Timothy Melley describes it as “agency panic” based in a fear of loss of control—absolute

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control—of self (and in particular, the white, male, economically stable, American self). In his chapter on the female Melley writes: And what underwrites his [Baudrillard’s] panic-stricken story of a new postmodern subjectivity is nostalgia for both a “lost” male autonomy and the historical moment in which it supposedly flourished. In short, like so many postwar texts, Baudrillard’s version of agency panic romanticizes the old self-enclosed and “inner-directed” masculine subject by way of its apparent devastation. (36)

Significantly, although one can develop an argument along these lines in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it cannot be done through Sammler who— among his long list of sufferings—does not suffer from panic. The focus turns to Wallace and his sister Angela who have set themselves up in opposite camps of the culture wars. Rich, spoiled, and distracted, neither can find a foundation of self, and both are paranoid that what little they have might be taken away or prove incomplete. Wallace is the rationalist genius who could never commit to a use for his intellect; he dabbles in everything from math to the Peace Corps but cannot commit to anything or anyone; he cannot become great (just as Margotte and Hannah Arendt had predicted). Wallace does not want to take a role over from his father because he must distinguish himself separately, and his constant ridiculous failures are a further sign of the fear of being “committed” to any one thing. He is, in effect, the opposite of his father who, although he disliked his profession, felt it was his duty to make do for his extended family. Wallace lives in fear that such “duty” would label him, and confine him to being a certain person just like all other persons. Wallace is afraid of missing “it” (ironically, he misses his father’s death while he is out searching for “it”). Wallace’s desire to find the treasure his father has hidden in the family house in order to fund his latest scheme is a metaphor for Wallace’s misplaced direction. While his father is dying of a brain aneurysm, Wallace is taking apart the pipes in the attic of the family home, convinced that this is where his father stored the treasure. The result is merely a flood. The analogy between the burst water pipe and Elya’s burst blood vessel—the great metaphors of water and blood—is unnoticed by anyone but Sammler, and Wallace leaves the mess for someone else to clean up. The money is found, of course, but it is found in a hassock in the living room by Shula when she noted that Sammler had sat a little strangely upon it. The money, as in Henderson the Rain King where it is stored as bookmarks in old

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books, is no treasure but accoutrements, or furniture to a life, lying in a strange parallel world to the life of the mind and the family. Angela, Wallace’s sister, stands on the opposite side of the culture debates from her brother. She is stuck in a sexuality that is both her weapon and her albatross. Wallace describes her in traditional terms as a femme fatale who is the “enemy of the distinguished-male myth.” It is “[b]etween those thighs, a man’s conception of himself is just assassinated. If he thinks he’s so special she’ll show him. Nobody is so special. Angela represents the realism of the race, which is always pointing out that wisdom, beauty, glory, courage in men are just vanities and her business is to beat down the man’s legend about himself” (187).11 Wallace sees her as an invading and emptying force, the source of his agency panic, much as Melley describes it. Yet Angela is in psychoanalytic treatment and is left abandoned by her lover at the end of the novel. She is not the all-powerful entity that Wallace supposes but someone just as confused as he. Although she has the money and now the sexual freedom to do as she pleases, she is lost and in need of direction. When she engages in a ménage-à-trois, she does so to please her lover, who in turn breaks off their relationship. Angela, in opposition to Wallace, sees men as the invading force. She comes to hate Wallace, her lover, and even her father’s doctor, whom she describes as “[o]ne of those goodlooking men who don’t realize that women dislike them” (295). Both Angela and Wallace, although representative of agency panic, are interesting to Bellow only in their limitations and the comic nature of the extremes of their unlucky pursuits. As Sammler comes to suspect, they have created their own prisons of distraction. Significantly, although Sammler and Elya are concerned about Angela’s hypersexuality, it is only Wallace—a card-carrying member of the same freedom-seeking generation—who sees Angela as a threat to the established order. They threaten each other, and uselessly point fingers at one another over the abyss that separates them. Sammler’s response to Wallace is only to admit that “[t]emporarily there is an animal emphasis” (185). In fact, Sammler is drawn to Angela (and Bruch and Feffer) because of their “animal emphasis.”12 Everyone is inevitably drawn into “the Age” and where they cannot experience it in the flesh (being too old, or too “old system”), they find others who will do so for them. As Derek Wright concludes: “Sammler lives vicariously, even voyeuristically, through others, and principally through those who confess to him their various exotic excesses and sexual fetishes (Angela, Bruch)” (23). Sammler is implicated in the sexual age through his voyeuristic tendencies, but he is also removed from it through his dryness and

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old age. He is not threatened by Angela and, therefore, has enough perspective to see not only her petty trifling and failures, but her attempt at balance and purpose. What right has he to condemn her excess when he might just as easily be condemned for his lack? Marcus Klein points out this “animal” or creatureliness (or “darkness”) is indispensable for the Bellovian hero, for to deny it is to deny life itself: “The ideas of inherent baseness, of human nature sharing the bestiality of nature itself, and of love as an imperative, lurk everywhere for the hero. At some point in his adventuring each of Bellow’s heroes finds the beast within. Asa Leventhal must wrestle with his own inhumanity. Augie is rich in spirit and rowdy, and he is unable to stay with his purest feelings” (63–4). It would be a mistake to see the “bestiality of nature” as a purely negative force in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Bellow finds it hard to condemn what is, for him, an intrinsic part of the human. What he fears is the emphasis. As Sammler notes very early in the novel, he has already seen the limitations of such a sexual healing. For H.G. Wells, sex was to be a liberating force, but its effects are so temporary, so limited, that they hold no lasting impressions. It is, in fact, an isolating pleasure where one feels good toward others only because one feels good: Judging not, and recalling Wells always with respect, Sammler knew that he had been a horny man of labyrinthine extraordinary sensuality . . . And in the agony of parting with the breasts, the mouths, and the precious sexual fluids of women, poor Wells, the natural teacher, the sex emancipator, the explainer, the humane blesser of mankind, could in the end only blast and curse everyone. (28)

Sammler’s concern is not with the actions taken as much as the expectations of an ideology behind them. Too much weight is given to too small a hope. For a man who has lived through utopianisms and the Holocaust, it seems impossible to believe that current ideology was looking to base creatureliness to set them free. As Sammler sees it, “Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone” (162). If one wants to draw up teams in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it becomes apparent that it is difficult to draw them on racist or misogynist lines for the contraries will assail you. Bellow is most of all misunderstood by critical readings that assign a moral hierarchy to a permanent and unchangeable state of being. To return to Wilson’s conflation of dark

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and chaos, this is an erroneous reading of Bellow’s definitions (and one that is too easily aligned with “white is right” and black is all mother earth or “Barbary ape howling” [Mr. Sammler’s Planet 43]). In Henderson the Rain King, for example, Henderson is running from the chaos of America but where does this chaos come from? The implication is that it comes from the light with its adequate incomes, loving wives, healthy children, good manners, and smooth sailing right into the grave. Although Henderson is quite taken with the Arnewi (the children of light), it is the Wariri (the children of darkness) who must teach him. For Bellow, light and dark both contribute to the chaos of the world, and they are both inescapable and necessary to the function of the world. It is impossible to read Bellow for his surface details. Rural or urban, female or male, black or white, Jewish or gentile rarely have interest for him beyond the superficial and the often comical cultural baggage that accompany them. In a 1994 interview, still irked by the criticism of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow states: “It’s true that all you have to do is give out some clue or other of the way in which you might be heading, and then people believe that they know exactly the direction you’re coming from. In my experience, for the most part, they’re mistaken” (“Moving Quickly” 37). Bellow’s characters have consistently refused to choose the path right or left (light or dark) at the fork in the road. There cannot be one path without the other, but they are always in a teetering balance, never quite right. Although there is no distinct character separation of light and dark in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, there is the unique sight of Mr. Sammler himself with one acute eye and one dimmed. Here again, however, there is a danger in choosing your symbolic interpretation. When critics attempt to give Sammler’s crushed eye symbolic value, the meaning of his double-vision can become a confusion of competing metaphors: What does the reference to Sammler’s eyes mean? Is Sammler the “one-eyed God in the land of the blind,” as Gloria Cronin asserts (88), or is he “a seer whose perceptions are keener, more profound,” as Alan Berger proposes (102), a notion confirmed by Alvin Rosenfeld (32–33)? . . . Sammler has one good eye, which he makes ample use of to observe and interpret his present-day surrounding, and one blind eye that looks inwards and backwards in time. Only by an intricate interplay of both roles—the blind wise seer and the acutely observant critic of modern society—can Sammler try to balance and overcome the limiting and limited perspective of each. (Rosenthal 83)

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Any of these readings might have been written by Angela or Shula or Wallace who see Sammler himself as symbolic, a kind of sexual Tiresias whose credentials are based on the fact he is an old hero who survived a gun butt to the face and crawled out of his own grave, and is now old and therefore wise. However, it is more likely that Sammler’s injury took away his knowledge rather than gave him hidden insights; it showed him what he is not, rather than what he is: “He had not come through, for the connotation of coming through was that of an accomplishment and little had been accomplished” (163). As Rosenthal asserts, there is an interplay of meanings in Sammler’s sight, but more than the Janus symbol that might seem obvious. His sight is not so neatly divided between the backward-looking seer and the forwardlooking acute eye of the social critic. One must remember that it is Sammler’s good eye that shows him the symbols of buildings: “Only half-attending to real voices clamoring for his attention, he is drawn to cabalistic modes of eloquence, such as that of large white Xs painted on the windows of a vacant building marked for demolition” (Kiernan 142). One must also remember that rather than giving one a kind of mystic intensity, the loss of an eye removes depth of field. Bellow would seem to suggest that Sammler’s eyes are a physical manifestation of the limitations of human vision, a physical reminder of the dark side, but not any kind of mystic channeling of the forces of nature. Further, Sammler does not welcome the dimmed eye. He sees himself as defective and equates acute vision with acute understanding, lamenting that his one good eye tires too quickly for him to read anything at length. His lack of sight is thus equated with a loss of acuity. Sammler goes to great efforts to cover his defect (he wears dark glasses, his eyebrows are overgrown); he goes out of his way to ignore this physical reminder and great efforts to avoid the “doublevision” that would be the result of both eyes processing information at once. He is content with his limited, single-sided perspective because he is a hero in retreat. He does not desire to engage with the world. He mimics any of the non-heroes in the book: find a viewpoint and stick to it regardless of how limited it might be. In his earliest book, The Victim, Bellow uses vision as a metaphor for the difficulty in “seeing”: “What do you know?” asks Schlossberg rhetorically. “No, tell me, what do you know? You shut one eye and look at a thing, and it is one way to you. You shut the other one and it is different” (120). Mr. Sammler’s eyes are physical manifestations of this ambiguity, but an ambiguity that has been covered in an effort to force a certain, continuous vision of the world. However, Sammler’s damaged eye is not blind but dimmed. Sammler cannot be content

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because of the steadily alternating views of his eyes: the misty, indistinct eyesight and the acute, but overburdened and often tired eye. What kind of final interpretation could he give? For Sammler, his darkened eye does not give him special access to a primitive or “true” seeing; it is merely a reminder that he can see only by halves. His eyesight is indicative of his state of confusion: But sometimes Mr. Sammler felt that the way he saw things could not be right. His experiences had been too peculiar, and he feared that he projected peculiarities onto life. Life was probably not blameless, but he often thought that life was not and could not be what he was seeing. (110)

If our very seeing is unreliable, if we are always in danger of looking at the wrong things, learning the wrong lessons, giving the wrong interpretations, then a hero can be left stultified. In all of Bellow’s writing, there has always been this fear. Sammler’s dimmed eye limits his ability to interpret the world at the same time that it reminds him that he was mistaken when in his younger years he had believed that the world could be ultimately explained and interpreted. The unwanted wisdom of Sammler’s eye is a physical acknowledgment that each interpretation of the world must be limited. It is here that Sammler’s eyesight becomes important to the plot. For it is never what that dimmed eye can see that is important, it is what it cannot see. Sammler sees and sees and sees (in much the same way as previous heroes had acted and acted and acted) but what he needs to know is how to stop seeing, stop analyzing, stop interpreting. The damaged eye—hidden behind hair and glasses—is striving to balance Sammler, but only the acute eye is giving him information. The use of this eye becomes clear in the scenes between Sammler and the pickpocket. The two men never exchange a word, their encounters are purely exhibitions of rebellion, power, and, ultimately, violence. When he first sees the thief at work on the bus, Sammler tells himself that “he didn’t have much use for the romance of the outlaw” (11) and yet, he “craved a repetition” (11) of the pickpocket’s act because “horror, crime, murder, did vivify all the phenomena, the most ordinary details of experience” (11). In effect, the pickpocket draws out that side of Sammler that is excited and suspended by trespassing of conventions, his “own stable principles” (11). He concludes that “[i]n evil as in art there was illumination . . . And while Sammler, getting off the bus, intended to phone the police, he nevertheless

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received from the crime the benefit of an enlarged vision” (11–12). Even in this first encounter, however, when Sammler is pleasing himself by witnessing the “art” of the petty thief, and considering literary equivalents (Balzac, Dostoyevski) he reminds himself that there must be a limit: “It was, of course, like the tale by Charles Lamb, burning down a house to roast a pig. Was a general conflagration necessary? All you needed was a controlled fire in the right place” (11). When the pickpocket escalates the encounter and involves Sammler in a plot that extends beyond his voyeuristic meanderings on a city bus—when the pickpocket follows Sammler home—the visions change to that of remembrance of his days hiding from the Nazis. The violence of the situation has left his control, and he is no longer simply voyeuristically gazing but has, against his will, become an acting participant. In the scene in the lobby, the pickpocket removes both Sammler’s dark glasses and his own before showing his penis. In effect, Sammler’s mutilated flesh—his physical reminder of the limitations of his earlier Wellsian utopian ideas, as well as a physical reminder of death—is confronted with the pickpocket’s unblemished penis—a physical presence of power, will, and birth. But what have these extremes—death and birth—to say to one another? Sammler and the pickpocket may be bringing with them the extremes of this darkness—its evil and its power, its destructive and creative force—but they ultimately have nothing to say to one another, and the exchange is wordless. They both go their separate ways in their dark glasses; one hiding and one flaunting. The fact that the pickpocket exhilarates Sammler and is seen as a man with a certain nobleness of purpose should not overshadow the fact that the pickpocket is still tainted as much as anyone with the dishonesty of “the Age.” The pickpocket’s limitations are not merely in his nonverbal state but in his style. Notably Sammler is pleased that the pickpocket’s clothing echoes his own Oxonian sensibility: “He was a powerful Negro in a camel’s-hair coat, dressed with extraordinary elegance, as if by Mr. Fish of the West End, of Turnbull and Asser of Jermyn Street. (Mr. Sammler knew his London.)” (5). Sammler praises the look of the pickpocket because it reflects his own preferred look. However, this mirror imaging of the pickpocket and Sammler in the lobby of his apartment building gives the reader no other information than this visual repetition. The entire encounter, although intimidating and on the periphery of violence, remains hollow at the core. Bellow writes in his Jefferson Lectures, one cannot simple “borrow” another’s self: “This modern condition of emptiness suited me no more than the open road. I recognized the truth of it for

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Hemingway—as his truth, it was impressive. Borrowed, the same truth was shabby” (Bellow’s emphasis, 127). Yet, as Mr. Sammler’s Planet seems to set out to prove, there is a constant need for models. Indeed, what is the hero but an abstract model? However, Sammler’s New York City is a mishmash of random affixing of self to image: a way of playacting and imitation of style. Sammler is implicated in this world of style through his own focus on clothing choices. This does not stop him from outlining a complaint that the roles society has taken on are degraded to begin with and meant not to develop a sense of self, but to show individuality. In many ways, Sammler’s views on the matter are confused. He is both implicated in the trend toward style as life, and resistant to such a shallow reading of the self. He is faced with the difficult task of admiring the desire to be unique, and condemning the current models, methods, and outcomes of doing so: “The book seems to be, in large part, an attack on a generation in America which is trying to stay ‘alive’ in Bellow’s own sense of the word—to have a separate destiny, to be marvelous, just as his former heroes have done” (Stock 42). When this romantic idea of the heroic self is put into practice, Bellow finds it to be not what he wanted: But one notices most a peculiar play-acting, an elaborate and sometimes quite artistic manner of presenting oneself as an individual and a strange desire for originality, distinction, interest—yes, interest! A dramatic derivation from models, together with the repudiation of models. Antiquity accepted models, the Middle Ages . . . but modern man, perhaps because of collectivization, has a fever of originality. The idea of the uniqueness of the soul. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear God! (Bellow’s emphasis, 229)

In many ways it could only be an old man who could have the overview necessary for this novel, one who has lived through the social utopianisms, the theories of “mass man,” and finally the cult of the individual. The concern Bellow has about the new individualists is that the idea of mass individuality is not better, or really different from mass man. All this struggle for uniqueness only results in a dulling down of life, a banality that is only comforted by more and different extremes, more need to challenge death and degradation. Herzog reaches much the same conclusion. For him, the unreleased public and political energies make the private life into a kind of sexual game: “What I seem to do, thought Herzog, is to inflame myself with my drama, with ridicule, failure, denunciation, distortion, to inflame

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myself voluptuously, esthetically, until I reach a sexual climax. And that climax looks like a resolution and an answer to many ‘higher’ problems” (208). Extremes in art and life (violence, love, sex, etc.) are always present and potentially positive in Bellow, but they only work if day-to-day life does not mock them. That is what Sammler is bitter about—this mocking. What he fears is that no one realizes they are mocking. Sammler (like all of Bellow’s heroes) is convinced that “[s]hocks stimulated consciousness” (55). But for this to work, one must be able to feel shock. There is a worry that “progress” has resulted in speed rather than depth. Where are we going? Whom are we following? Sammler paints a picture of a society that is more and more impressive in its work, its revolutions, its geniuses, its ideas, and “freedoms,” but one that, forever fearful of the system, is forever falling into irony. Irony keeps the system, the ideas of mass man at bay, but it too soon becomes just what it fights against, for irony, too, demands a homogenous audience that is “with it.” The result is a culture that is more like a highly trained flock of sheep than the army of heroes blazing trails as it purports to be: “It gives me a sense of the rapid ruin of any number of revolutions—egalitarian, sexual, aesthetic. They didn’t last long, did they? They were serious, they were necessary, but they were very quickly brought to the boutique level. The great enemy of progressive ideals is not the Establishment but the limitless dullness of those who take them up” (Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back 180). Society becomes an undulating wave between exhilaration and tiresomeness. For Sammler the idea of banality is the greatest threat to human life, and early in the novel he equates it with the horror of the Holocaust. When Margotte repeats Hannah Arendt’s arguments about the banality of evil, Sammler cannot suffer the idea that even after the atrocities that it created, the Nazi idea of making evil banal continues to be successful. Sammler says: The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage . . . The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. To defy that old understanding is not banality. Here was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life . . . Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. (18)

To make the world banal (“to denounce it in terms invented by Germans” [18]) is to continue the project of the Nazis. Sammler does not believe it is possible. In all the chaos of New York City, he can see the impulse to be exceptional, to be real. It is unfortunate that this

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impulse has been corrupted and co-opted by systems theories that state the more one attempts to break out (into the extremes), the more one is just like all the others doing the same: the great irony of all the individualists adding up to another form of sameness. In Henderson the Rain King, Bellow made similar statements, contending that it was not the impulse that was wrong but the interpretation of it that had become nothing more than an incomplete looping of the heroic journey. Henderson’s state is a constant, incomplete looping of his physical, Hemingway hero parts; he fights louder, longer, stronger but still there is never any conclusion. On Sammler’s planet, the Hemingway heroic model has been replaced with no models, or rather a self-model in which one is burdened with the need to become—sui generis—both leader and follower. Sammler wonders if “[p]erhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder” (233), because there is a marked distinction between personality and self, and loudness and intensification. Although it must be the starting point of any journey of the self, it is not enough to intensify. One needs direction, instruction, a model to consider and follow. (Should one go up to the moon, down to the sea, should one spread out as far as possible?) In this, Sammler is in direct contrast to the world around him. He does not believe it possible to be real. Those who claim that possibility are advocating another short-sighted fixer philosophy forcing others to conform to a “non-model” (to be “with it”) that offers no path other than rejection or rebellion, but demands (or promises) a result comprised of radical individualism and transcendence through an embracing of the real. Sammler wonders what this radical attempt has really done for civilization but kill its heroes and replace them with an abstraction of the will: And he was not so much personally offended by the event as stuck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex–excrement–militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling. (Bellow’s emphasis, 43)

Each person is on their own, defensive and paranoid, claiming to be in touch with the real—a state that Bellow cannot believe in. There is a panic to “make it on your own,” to “be your own hero,” to be “original” and “real” and “aware” that denies the inner impulse to follow models, to find self-in-community, to look beyond appearances

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and personalities. It should be the work of the hero to analyze this new narrative of reality, to challenge it, and deny the deniers. The huge, complex wave of understanding that Mr. Sammler’s Planet is dipping its toes into is much deeper and more murky than it seems at first and almost impossible to keep under artistic control. The novel is constantly in the position of hedging, of saying “yes, but not quite like this,” and Sammler is in danger of being read superficially as just another cranky old man who thinks the younger generation is destroying a great society of the past. As Sammler sees it, each person is choosing to obliterate their own self, all the while claiming to have achieved a uniqueness of self. How Sammler chooses to confront this confusion is equal and opposite to the aggressiveness and narcissism of the Age. Most fiercely and defiantly, Sammler names the need for connection—in the Age of Aquarius and Free Love—as duty. As Govinda Lal informs Sammler, this will not be well received by the public at large: “But duty is pain. Duty is hateful—misery, oppressive” (220). It is the use of the word duty that upset so many of Mr. Sammler’s Planet’s critics. However, Bellow’s previous vocabulary could not support the current conditions. If he had been supporting the nebulous connection that exists and must be nurtured between humans as “love,” then the America of the late-1960s was challenging this. So, no, not love, but what other word but duty? Critics have read Sammler’s assertion of duty through his appreciation of Elya’s ability to succumb to pressures to be a surgeon, to do right by his family in terms of stability and money and charity. Upon closer reading one sees that although Sammler is appreciative and proud of his nephew, he calls Elya “clownish,” a final member of the “old system,” and admits that he could never be like him. When Sammler uses the word “duty” it is not meant in the sense of making money or towing the line; it is akin to Bellow’s idea of love, which itself is, perhaps, best expressed as “grun-tu-molani” or “man want to live.” Richard Rupp points out that in Seize the Day, this is exactly what Tamkin recognizes in Tommy: “He teaches Tommy that some few people want to live, and he counts Tommy among them” (200). For Sammler, the hero can only be one who continues—all his life—to be bothered by this will to live. In previous novels, Bellow had opened this “channel to the soul” (Bellow, Forward 17) through physical violence or love (two states that make one vulnerable and reduce the world to easy choices). In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, however, Sammler confronts the debasement of these states through the Holocaust and the sexual revolution. Can one believe in the beneficial

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aspect of violence when millions—including his own wife—lie in unmarked graves? Similarly, the idea of love becomes confused with the actions of sex. Unfortunately, Sammler falls into the trap of all Hamlets, and his long soliloquies and metaphysical analyses will go on until some outside force causes him to act. In fact, he must be literally pushed into the position to act. Sammler and his driver, Emil, are rushing down Broadway while Sammler broods on just what significant message he might impart to the dying Elya. The car is blocked by traffic stopped to watch a fight in the street. Emil sees the participants immediately but Sammler, after futilely waving at Emil to move on, is told, “No, I think you’ll want to stop, Mr. Sammler” (285). Sammler finds himself, almost deus ex machina, descending into the crowd to analyze the characters at work and make a decision. The players are all that any symbol-hunter might like: there is Eisen—his son-in-law—the smiling madman, Vulcan cripple and forger-cum-artist with his baize bag full of medallions; there is Feffer, herald of the technological age, with his Minox camera raised above his head, having snapped a picture or two of the pickpocket at work; and, there is the pickpocket, the nobleness of the natural will, his glasses undisturbed on his nose, crushing Feffer against the side of the city bus, wordlessly demanding submission. And, finally, there is the unmoving crowd. Sammler appeals to the pickpocket to “let go of [Feffer],” to Feffer to hand over the incriminating photographs, to the crowd to get involved, but each in turn refuses. Finally, he turns to Eisen who claims to be powerlessness as a “foreigner and a cripple” (288). Sammler—impatient to get to Elya’s deathbed—futilely appeals to “someone” to do “something,” and, of course, nothing is the result. For the first time, Sammler is forced to confront what had previously only been ideas in his own head. Earlier, he and Emil had passed along Broadway, and Sammler had rejected the self-fulfilling modern nihilism: By a convergence of all minds and all movements the conviction transmitted by this crowd seemed to be that reality was a terrible thing, and that the final truth about mankind was overwhelming and crushing. This vulgar, cowardly conclusion, rejected by Sammler with all his heart, was the implicit local orthodoxy, the populace itself being metaphysical and living out this interpretation of reality and this view of truth. (280)

Later, he stands before an actual crowd appealing for help, and for a moment he sees only the gaping mouths of this orthodoxy. Here he

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draws a startling conclusion: Though there was nothing to hear, Sammler had the sense that something was barking away. Then it struck him that what united everybody was a beatitude of presence. As if it were—yes—blessed are the present. They are here and not here. They are present while absent. So they were waiting in that ecstatic state. What a supreme privilege! And there was only Eisen to break up the fight. (289)

What the crowd has achieved is the much sought after disinterestedness for which Sammler had been scouring the mystics. Here is disinterestedness in action (or, as it were, inaction). This disinterest, however, hands over the power to act to Eisen. It is with a feeling of horror that Sammler sees himself in this position: He knew what to do, but had no power to execute it. He had to turn to someone else—to an Eisen! a man himself very far out on another track, orbiting a very different foreign center. Sammler was powerless. To be so powerless was death. And suddenly he saw himself not so much standing as strangely leaning, as reclining, and peculiarly in profile, and as a past person. That was not himself. It was someone—and this struck him—poor in spirit . . . Flying, freed from gravitation, light with release and dread, doubting his destination, fearing there was nothing to receive him. (Bellow’s emphasis, 289–90)

Sammler makes the connection that to be disinterested is a form of death that, in turn, is a kind of freedom, but, like all the freedoms exemplified in the novel, it proves to be not what one expected. Playing out in some kind of dramatic mummer play in front of him was this disinterestedness as a temptation and the choice was given to him—flying, freed from gravitation—to turn away once and for all. In typical fashion he turns and yet does not turn. He does not turn away from what is happening because it must be moved off the street before he can get to Elya’s deathbed, and yet, he does not act on his own power but grants to Eisen the power to end the situation. The “handsome Eisen, shrugging, grinning making a crooked movement of the shoulders, working them free from the tight denim, stepped away from Sammler as though he were doing a very amusing thing at his special request” (290). The description itself is reminiscent of a boxer, stepping into the ring, and, again, one cannot help but see the symbolic triangle as art steps into the ring where technology and nature are caught in a locked embrace. However, like the child’s game of rock, paper, scissors all three cannot be in play at once, or the result is chaos and random destruction.

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Eisen himself is a walking challenge to the concept of the liberating powers of violence and art, which, as Bellow has considered elsewhere, are capable of causing a moment of stillness that alleviates distraction.13 Unfortunately, Eisen is a madman; both his violence and his art are indicative of society and not the unknowable; his wifebeating, his metal sculptures of Israeli tanks, his diseased life studies are representative of just what one would expect—destruction not creation. Eisen is in the crowd that expects reality to be terrible, but like them he reflects the idea, he does not create it or challenge it. He is a parrot, an imitator, an actor fulfilling the expectations of the audience, or, rather, a member of the audience fulfilling his own expectations. He is successful, then, in the society he mimics. Eisen, in his shrugging and grinning, seems to know this about himself and is bemused that Sammler, a man who seems to be against all that Eisen is, would choose to give him the power to decide the outcome of this struggle. Without hesitation, Eisen raises his bag of medallions over and over again against the pickpocket. A faceless voice in the crowd says, “He’ll kill that cocksucker!” (291). When Sammler stops the deathblow and quarrels with him, Eisen mocks the old man: “You can’t hit a man like this just once. When you hit him you must really hit him. Otherwise he’ll kill you. You know. We both fought in the war. You were a Partisan. You had a gun. So don’t you know?” His laughter, his logic, laughing and reasoning at Sammler’s absurdities, made him repeat until he stuttered. “If in—in. No? If out—out. Yes? No?? So answer.” (291–2)

Sammler had had a gun and he had a gun used against him; he had been to the Middle East and seen the bloated corpses that he mistook for bags along the side of the dirt highways. But still he could not reduce such actions to such logic. It is ironic that Sammler, a man who had believed he desired to choose “If out—out,” now finds himself refusing the choice. Disinterestedness—his out—is, for the merely human, a kind of premature death and as he had said earlier to Govinda Lal: “I saw that God was not impressed by death” (236). Therefore, Eisen’s easy, deadly reasoning “sank [his] heart completely” (292). Significantly, Sammler does not stop to argue or to choose with his son-in-law. He is eager to get to the hospital: “It was only Elya he wanted to see. To whom there was something to say. Here there was nothing to say” (292). Although there is no conclusion to this scene, Sammler is shaken loose of his passiveness, a weight held by the fear

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of the absoluteness of the chaos around him. When Eisen had demanded that Sammler choose to be either in or out of life Sammler said nothing because it became apparent that the choice was not his. One is always “in” except in death. Following the patterns of Bellow’s other books, readers expect a lyrical denouement that might even overwhelm the unended debates and distractions that preceded it. But in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, there is no walking across fields with pretty ladies, no relaxing in a garden, no galloping on a frozen tarmac with a child in one’s arms. There is a morgue, there is death, and there is a prayer that seems more honest than lyric. It may well be, however, that the honesty of this moment is more important than the charity of comfort. Eusebio Rodrigues writes that “Mr. Sammler takes upon himself the task of offering his nephew a sign, a gesture, a word of comfort that will reassure Elya about the human bond” (Quest 217). This is what Sammler implies when he rushes to the hospital after the street fight. What Sammler says is that there is nothing to say to those people on the street, but to Elya there was something to say. Given what Sammler says to the dead Elya, one wonders what he had intended as his final words to his nephew if he had been alive. Certainly not that he was “servile” or “childish” as Sammler says in his prayer over the corpse. No, it seems that Sammler is rushing to Elya’s side, not to comfort this nephew— this character who receives nothing more than a passing glance in the novel; Sammler is hoping that Elya, a man about to face death, will give him—a man who has faced death and found it wanting—some sign to live by. If the ending does not hold the weight of lyric stillness against three hundred pages of struggle, one must look a little further back to find out just what Sammler says. Sammler arrives at the hospital in a state of arousal: “he was sensitive to all the signs” (295). The violence of the street, and his involvement both in the instigation of the beating and the stopping of it have heightened his senses. When he enters Elya’s room he finds only Angela and makes detailed notes of her clothes, her smells, and her movements. He conflates Angela’s hypereroticism, the beating of the pickpocket, and his own violent past: Even the white lipstick suggested perversion. But this was curiously without prejudice. Sammler felt no prejudice about perversion, about sexual matters. Nothing. It was too late in the day for that. Too much heat was on. Much larger powers of distortion were at work. The smash of Eisen’s medallions on the pickpocket’s face was still with Sammler. His own nerves, in the elementary way of nerves connected this with

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the crushing of his eye under the rifle butt thirty years ago. The sensations of choking and falling—one could live through that again. If it was worth living through. (Bellow’s emphasis, 296)

Sammler is attuned to the power of distortion. What this distortion makes him aware of is that there is more to it all than this sex and violence. Robert Kiernan asserts that “[o]ne factor in Sammler’s ongoing salvation is that he has no wish to impose this sense of a necessary order on anyone other than himself” (145). But this is not, in fact, true. Sammler may note Angela’s distorted sexuality without prejudice, but he suddenly has a strong desire to impose not a state of order, but the knowledge of the necessity of order on others. As he talks to Angela he advises himself to “[l]et the poor creature be” but immediately refuses: “But he could not let her be—not yet” (305). He wants to assure her that there is something more than this, something beyond the fear of living a common and banal life: “And what is ‘common’ about ‘the common life’?” (146). It is important that it is Sammler and Angela together in the hospital. She is representative of both the power and the conflict of the chaos around her. As dry, old Sammler finds himself drawing power from her “superfemininity, sensuality” (297), his desire is to give her something back. For, Angela is “furious. With Dr. Cosbie, with Wallace, with Widick, Horricker. And she was bitter with Sammler, too” (297). What he wants to impart, of course, is the burgeoning lyricism that he is experiencing: “To see was delicious. Oh, of course! An extreme pleasure! The sun may shine, and be a blessing, but sometimes shows the fury of the world” (298). Sammler notes the sunlight again when he tells Angela that her “sexual kindergarten dress” (300) is provoking to her dying father who worries that she has “fucked out eyes” (178). But he feels the need to push forward: “He only wanted to persuade her of something, and didn’t know whether even that was feasible” (301). At that very moment, Sammler made the decision (as he notes, not an entirely practical one) to challenge the one person who might have power over him after Elya’s death. Notably, he makes this move even in the face of her utter incomprehension. The fact that Sammler, who has for so long been merely a symbol to his niece, has chosen to make an effort, and believes that there is a chance for this effort to work with her, is of the utmost importance in the book. As in other places, Sammler continues to note that he “did not really want to experience this” (298) but he does, and he moves forward under the experience. Of course, Angela does not understand him at all but that is beside

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the point: “She was, perhaps, only half following him, though she looked straight at him, full-face, knees apart so that he saw the pink material of her undergarment. Seeing that pink band, he thought, ‘Why argue? What is the point?’ But he replied” (303–4). The hero does not have to be responsible for the interpretations made by his audience, but he must believe that interpretation is possible. After all, Angela is not his only audience; the reader is listening. And the reader must be listening carefully because for all his expansiveness of thought and breaking-through of his passiveness, Sammler is still living vicariously through Angela as he asks her to approach her father in the moment of his dying and affirm what Sammler feels to be the truth, that there is a “something something” underneath all the degraded clowning. He needs an assurance that there is a connection between people that transcends the superficial and the cultural baggage. As Sammler struggles to find the words, he unwisely chooses “forgiveness,” which is inevitably rejected. For Sammler to tell Angela that she should ask for her father’s forgiveness not only shows his judgment of her, but makes the assumption that she feels that she has sinned. She does not feel this. She says: “But how could I—It goes against everything.” She sees more clearly than Sammler; she concludes: “Even for my father it would be too hokey” (306). Indeed, it would, and the fact that Elya removes himself from the possibility of this final charade can be read that he was fearful his dying might provoke such a scene. So Sammler, in an effort to vicariously live through Angela and put upon her the burden of final epiphanies, merely alienates her. He leaves her to answer the phone, and he learns that Shula has found the missing treasure in Elya’s house. When Sammler demands that she turn over the money to Elya’s lawyer, Shula makes the argument that if she were dressed in better clothes “maybe I’d be less of an eccentric type, and I’d have a chance with somebody” (309). She tells her father “I’ve made myself as interesting as I could within my means” (310). Thus, just at the moment that he might despair of ever getting through to Angela, he is comforted by the fact that Shula (the maddest of all the madmen on Sammler’s planet) is aware of her madness. She, in fact, cultivates it as her way of being “interesting.” As we have seen, Sammler is amazed: “Eccentric type? She was aware of herself, then. There was a degree of choice. Wig, scavenging, shopping bags, were to an extent deliberate” (Bellow’s emphasis, 310). When Sammler is told of Elya’s death, then, he has already made two very important discoveries. The fight in the street had convinced him of the impossibility of disinterestedness. This gave him the impetus to

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discuss his ideas openly with a hope for change with Angela. Although he was unsuccessful with her, his conversation with Shula convinces him that there is a hope that one might make a connection. It lies in the fact that we are self-aware. Still, as he descends into the bowels of the hospital toward the morgue he states: “Well, this famous truth for which he was so keen, he had it now, or it had him. He felt that he was being destroyed, what was left of him” (312). The truth of which Sammler speaks is, of course, that “we are not as actual as all that” (261). His truth was that of a Tiresius brought back from the grave to give some kind of short view of death. He had hoped to offer some sort of comfort to those living in fear of death (as, indeed, he sees his whole planet including himself). But “[i]n trying to realize a theoretic notion of solidarity with the dying, Sammler violates what solidarity he still has left with the living . . . He has the idea but misses the experience” (Wright 24). The fact that Elya has himself removed in order to die without any final deathbed scene is the final blow to Sammler’s misdirected self. He is thwarted in his attempt to speak to the dying. For, although Sammler might have taken it upon himself to be the one to offer words of comfort to the dying, he was really hoping to find comfort in Elya’s final words. The loss of this opportunity is a hard blow to Sammler but what could Elya have said? Elya is a “Be-er” and this status denies any interpretation. What Sammler sees on the dead man’s face is that “bitterness and an expression of obedience were combined” (313). In effect, Elya is presented not as a man destroyed but as a man stopped. The fact that Elya is so slightly written in the novel itself, that he removes himself from any death affirmation, and that Sammler himself sees him as interrupted more than decayed, all indicate that his only comment to Sammler is contained within the life that is now over. As Bellow wrote in the “The Old System” in 1967: Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When you wept them from the heart, you felt you justified something, understood something. But what did you understand? Again, nothing! It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might—might, mind you—eventually, through its gift which might—might again!—be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. (Bellow’s emphasis, 82–3)

Elya rejects his own death because it has no meaning for the Be-er. He prolongs his life as much as he might: he has a screw installed in his neck; he does business from the hospital; he chats with doctors

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and friends; but, ultimately, he withdraws himself from a final transcendent remark. His whole life was life based upon an “old system” understood to be one of community, social roles, and duty. Where is the new system?14 Sammler does not know. All he can do, all he can give as a hero is the argument. In many ways Sammler remains true to his overly burdened fixer self (much more a fixer than any other Bellovian hero). He lives up to his name as a reminder of the untouchable spark of the divine.15 He comes closer than any other Bellovian hero to defining a pattern for living in his repeated use of the word duty. However, this word is just a replacement for the overused and undervalued love of the sexual revolution. What Sammler repeats is differently worded and much more challenged than in other books but it emanates from the same spark. For Sammler cannot believe that imagination and the human are so far removed from their essence that we have convinced ourselves that there is nothing but the present tense and a search for self-satisfaction. To Bellow it seems impossible to forget that we among all living things have this connection to one another, this duty to one another. Sammler’s assertion of “we know” is not an assertion of a concrete knowable, but of a “knowing” in the same way that there is a “something, something” or how Henderson knows it is now his time to dance around a frozen tarmac. The “we know” is simply that we know that death has no meaning in it, no eureka to give. There is, however, a spark there, intermittent, faint, often disregarded but there. Even when faint, even when intermittent, we have a duty to continue with its assignment, to wait out what we do not know. Alfred Kazin in his review of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, writes that: “With his stern sense of justice, Bellow wants to right the balance after so much evil. God lives” (“Though” 177). This seems too general a remark for such a complicated novel. If one reads the novel looking for the yoking together of ideas and Jesus then one will inevitably find comfort in Sammler’s last prayer to God. Unfortunately, this is not the focus of the prayer. Sammler does not find God at the end of the novel, as he never doubted the presence. To say that God lives is a moot point. Sammler’s heroic quest is to assert that God lives through us, in our desire to live. It is this desire to live, in all its degraded clowning and poor models and forms, that defines us. As he tells Govinda Lal: “The spirit feels cheated, outraged, defiled, corrupted, fragmented, injured. Still it knows what it knows, and the knowledge cannot be gotten rid of . . . Besides mankind cannot be something else” (236). As he stands over the dead, Sammler, a tired old man, finally decides to get out of bed.

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In contrast to other Bellovian heroes that spend their time struggling against death, Sammler has held it too close. What Sammler experiences in the final scenes of the novel is both a repudiation of his disassociation, of his withdrawal from life, and a possibility that although it all ends in death, there is more to it than that. Sammler’s prayer is not a lyric overriding of his previous suffering. That stage of the hero’s journey has already ended. The prayer is merely a pause until the journey necessarily begins again, in its constant struggle and repetition. On the first page of the novel Sammler thinks: “The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge” (3). And the final line restates it: “For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know” (313). Sammler is out of bed. A hero all along, he finally convinces himself that his thinking—essentially unchanged from the first page of the novel—can become action, that he has a story to tell and a model to offer into the fray of cultural chaos, and most importantly that he has an audience that is listening.

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CH A P T ER

4

WHITE N OISE : The Hero Defended “Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?” “Do you feel heroic?” “No.” “Then you probably aren’t.” Don DeLillo, White Noise 275–6

The Novel and its Hero Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in the spring of 1985 and reviewers were quick to note that it neatly anticipated the Union Carbide disaster that killed two thousand in Bhopal, India.1 A review in The New York Review of Books also mentioned the “horrors of 1984” (Johnson 6), noting that Orwell had failed to predict the future, but, perhaps, DeLillo would have better luck. The tone of most reviews, however, did not so blatantly mimic DeLillo’s observations of magic and dread, and focused more on the publication supermarket, welcoming DeLillo to its shelves. Paul Stuewe’s short review in the Quill & Quire reads somewhat like a review of a bottle of wine as he notes that a good, experimental author of the 1970s had finally “mellowed” enough to please “book lovers,” and concludes that White Noise is “a superb novel of modern manners and mores that should earn its author much-merited fame and fortune” (77). It is likely that it was this combination of timing, topical concerns, and accessible style that moved DeLillo into the circle of “fame and fortune,” but this book also marks his introduction into the circle of academia, for underneath its pleasurable reading surface White Noise is an ideal undergraduate introduction to some of the theories of postmodernism.2

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Under the steely eye of the academy the novel proved more than accommodating to the critics who undertook its analysis. White Noise (and DeLillo himself) seems to adapt not only to current literary theories, but to any theory. One of DeLillo’s most vehement critics writes that “DeLillo’s, quite clearly, is a mind that lets itself be violated by any old idea that happens along” (Bawer, “Don DeLillo’s” 38), but as much as Bawer attempts to make this statement derogatory, it is an accurate account of the state of contemporary intellectual culture. White Noise is a dilettante novel of ideas and an affable novel of chaos; it is a novel investigating where America places its certainties and its uncertainties. It is eager to talk about what you want to talk about, and will come apart in a multitude of isolated pieces, sitting as comfortably for arguments of systems theories as for those of romanticism. Pico Iyer reads White Noise partially for its characters and writes of the novel as a realistic and sensitive portrayal of the modern domestic drama, pleasing in its aesthetic sympathies and lyrical descriptions.3 Other critics are intrigued by the lack of verisimilitude of DeLillo’s characters and delight in the architecture or structure of the novel, finding the ideas contained therein readily accessible through the lens of modern physics (fields, loops, and quantum) and systems theories.4 A brief review of the literature leaves one a little chagrined with the nature of current literary criticism in which a single author can be branded a modernist (Lentricchia, Introduction; King), a remodernist (LeClair, In the Loop), a postmodernist (Cantor), a naturalist (Civello), an imperialist (McClure, Late Imperial), and a romantic (Maltby). Like the toxic event in the novel, the nomenclature is both reassuring and obscuring: “They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” he [Heinrich] said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment. “I already knew that.” “They’re calling it the black billowing cloud.” “Good.” “Why is that good?” “It means they’re looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They’re on top of the situation.” (113)

Perhaps it is best to hang one’s thesis neatly from a single hook, but when viewed from a distance, the best adjective for the work might be “protean” (Cowart 8; McClure, “Postmodern” 338). DeLillo offers so many off-ramps to his narrative (whether in misleading details, slapstick humor, or philosophical paradox) that the reader is able to

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concentrate on one scenic outpost, or simply skip along the surface, not notice, or not take seriously any difficulty of thought, action, or image if it does not fit a certain course of thinking. To critically synthesize the ideas or method in a DeLillo novel can be daunting and frustrating, akin to synthesizing clouds on a gray sky. Some may argue the clouds are ominous, others may see the expanse of sky as sublime, and still others may dismiss the image as nothing but drifting water vapor. What connects these viewpoints and all the viewpoints criticizing a DeLillo novel is not their point of view but their point of viewing. Marion Muirhead notes that “The reading process requires a search for patterns, and a mind conditioned to search for such patterns can find them almost anywhere” (404). DeLillo’s writing, it seems, takes every opportunity to investigate, challenge, and mock this human talent, focusing on the impulse to reach for patterns rather than the patterns themselves. What is one then to make of DeLillo’s impish hinting that he is hiding some treasure of meaning? In The Names, Charles Maitland, attempting to explain the inability to explain higher mathematics, states: “It’s the inner consistencies we have to search for. The symmetries, the harmonies, the mysteries, the whisperies. Good Christ, Axton, you can’t expect the man to talk about these things” (164). White Noise both encourages and frustrates this search and explanation technique of contemporary thought. There is one short and provoking scene in which Jack pulls out a tube of detritus from the garbage compactor and finds within its mess a knotted string. As Joseph Conte writes: Although the string appears to be a “random construction” without any correlation in the loops and knots, further study reveals a “complex relationship” indicative of design or intention. One might counter, however, that the discovery of such “occult geometry” reveals nothing more than the mind’s need to recognize patterns. The indeterminacy is almost unbearable: is the string a meaningless form that may not be parsed; is it a spontaneously emergent form of complexity; or is it merely a frustrating reflection of one’s own “festoon of obsessions”? (131)

This “almost unbearable” is the defining feature of the DeLillo novel and although he might be read as a mystery writer of sorts,5 there is no guiding principle or principal to give a neat resolution to the effort of uncovering various clues and deciphering codes. DeLillo acknowledges the futility of such endeavors when in an interview for Libra (1988), a fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, he states that “[t]here is an implication that

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searching for a ‘solution’ to the mysteries of the assassination, as the CIA historian Nicholas Branch does in the book, leads inevitably to a mental and spiritual dead end” (“An Outsider” 294). One may counter that art has never been in the business of offering “solutions,” as Arthur M. Saltzman notes: “Patterns attended by ambiguities—art posits the former while respecting the latter” (822). Even Saltzman’s maxim, however, is too rigid and respecting to describe DeLillo’s achievements. DeLillo has stated: “Well, strictly in theory, art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world . . . We seek pattern in art that eludes us in natural experience” (“An Outsider” 304).6 As in his writing, DeLillo’s words here are pointing in two different directions. Although he pronounces art a consolation prize, he prefaces his statements by asserting that this idea is “strictly in theory.”7 He recognizes the desire for pattern, but is just as reluctant as Bellow to package himself up for easy consumption (and consolation). DeLillo’s art (and the world of White Noise) is not pattern attended by ambiguity, but ambiguity that drops patterns like stray hairs. If one takes the time to piece together any single pattern, one finds only something partial and past tense, yet something that, perhaps, gives off the mysterious aesthetic glow that accompanies any object of singular and intense observation. DeLillo’s writing draws its energies from this carnival of frustrations, offering and then refusing the reader both patterns and aesthetic comfort. The question of patterns or theories based on patterns, as well as the refuge of aesthetics are constant themes of DeLillo’s writings and are among the threads that draw him and Saul Bellow together. Indeed, Bellow’s fear of theories, his compulsion for pattern and yearning for boundaries appear even larger in DeLillo’s work. The result is the strange critical quandary in which DeLillo can be the focus of so many different literary theories and also be read for his “anarchistic writing,” and as a sneaky author, one whose insistence that he does not “have a program” can be understood as “the prudence of a theoretically sophisticated novelist who recognizes the terrible dangers that theory may pose when it offers to become practice” (Moses 84). The theories and patterns identified (or hinted at) often shade the meaning in both Bellow and DeLillo’s writing. They are both immersed in the culture of America; however, their impulse to write comes from Henderson’s “I want!” and Gladney’s dread. It is not theory but the need of theory that is the foundation of their sensibilities. Whatever observations they might make are all in the service of investigating the

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desire for explanation. It is the point at which culture and the “I want!” as a need beyond culture meet that is the point at which DeLillo begins to write Jack Gladney as the hero in White Noise. Gladney is a man who finds comfort and assurance in the simulacra of America. He is, in many ways, the perfect American citizen: adept and comfortable; his career and his very life are fully repressed as he lives a naturalized form of playacting. The inauthentic is the only “authentic” he recognizes. He is content to believe that someone else is handling all the details that he does not know, leaving him free to drift. Gladney, however, is a hero in the old mold. Although he plays at the role of the new false hero, the drifting assumed hero, he is not natural at this because of his heroic inclinations. His playacting is not a “naturalized” repression of his fears, but an incomplete cover-up of his inability to repress his fears. In the first few chapters of the novel, Jack admits that “I am the false character that follows the name around” (17). He cannot repress, and as a result is in a constant state of fear of what he does not know.8 When the novel begins Gladney seems to be the perfect assumed hero, but as the novel continues it becomes clear that he holds an atavistic position at the event horizon between “unknowable” and “knowable” in a culture that denies the very existence of such a horizon. In White Noise, DeLillo uses death as the leitmotif of his investigations because death is the first (or last) layer of identity. Beyond it is the unknown that is also unknowable, a state beyond death that cannot be marketed, purchased, and forgotten.9 The fear of death and what it is hiding becomes the last battleground of the distinction between American and Americana culture, and Gladney unwillingly finds himself on the front lines. He is unlike Bellow’s heroes in that he is not looking to find the authentic, but is eager to find the inauthentic that will cover and console his fear. DeLillo investigates Gladney’s desire for simulacra, drifting, and forgetting through extremes of mysticism and theoretical fixer philosophies. Michael Moses, although discussing White Noise, echoes Mr. Sammler’s concerns when he writes: “The basic political question remains unanswered: How does one move beyond a critique of the Enlightenment principles of the new science without reverting to bizarre forms of mystical and antihuman violence that characterize Jack Gladney in Germantown (‘kill to live’) or the murderous cult that gives DeLillo’s novel The Names its title?” (82). Notably, DeLillo’s characters do not judge in the same way as Bellow’s because they are aware of their implication in American culture. Further, DeLillo’s judgment is not based on dialectical arguments,

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but cunning satire wherein the heroic impulse and its need for boundaries and patterns are given but then ridiculed. The explainable, Enlightenment America that believes in the eventual (even inevitable) “theory of everything” has, for DeLillo, no meaning without the paradoxical and nullifying accompaniment of a “theory of nothing.” DeLillo has written elsewhere: One’s weary temptation is to say that the truth belongs to the realm of physics. . . . All the paradoxes and illusions that scientists have found in the microsystem among electrons and other forms of quantum matter— the bizarre interactions, the sense of indeterminacy, the lack of cause and effect—these now constitute our daily bed and board . . . What do we do in the meantime? Do we lapse into mystical fatalism? (“American Blood” 24)

Mystical fatalism, however, is tainted by American paranoia. How is one to know that it is not just another marketed lifestyle? Another form of playacting? Another way to keep the masses occupied while someone, somewhere is making the hard decisions? Indeed, some of DeLillo’s critics have challenged DeLillo’s lyric and even sublime moments as just such a product: another hollow epiphany. To challenge DeLillo on his endings, however, is as spurious as reading Bellow for his final paragraphs (and back-cover blurbs). Neither of these authors build novels of logical argument culminating in a final epiphany, because both are suspicious of a culture that has been reduced to reading for final paragraphs. For Bellow, the real bulk of his novel is in the dialogues and debates, the push and pull of the arguments his characters present. For DeLillo, who, unlike Bellow, is much more suspicious of language as a tool of rational thought, the key to his novels lies in its arc and architecture, its style, and the collage of images and scenarios that are able to add complexity to his work without falling into the arms of epiphany or the humanistic “we” of character realism.10 The ability to balance architecture and character development is partly what critics mean by DeLillo’s mellowing in White Noise. Jack Gladney, his family and friends, if not the psychologically complex characters of an E.M. Forster novel—if not realism—are realistic, real enough, recognizable, and readable. Like the society they reflect, they are thinly drawn; but this society in which they are couched speaks as well as they. In his own defense DeLillo has said: “You either find yourself entering a character’s life and consciousness or you don’t, and in much modern fiction I don’t think you are required to, either as a writer or a reader” (“An Outsider” 300).

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There has been much ink spilled on DeLillo’s characters for the simple reason that they seem to defy the reader’s enjoyment of the novels: He often relies on implausible dialogue (children utter stunning aperçus, thugs engage in penetrating reflection on the ethical ambiguities of thuggery) to advance his themes; it sometimes seems as though his characters have simply become mouthpieces for authorial meditations. But he tends to give us choices about how we are to understand him. And although his world is not round or variegated or shaded, it has a certain unmistakable palpability: it’s our world as it appears, perhaps, to someone who is not quite like us. (Menand 71)

Some critics disapprove of the lack of character psychology: “Characters do not think they cogitate; they do not talk, they engage in dialectic and deliver endless monologues about the novel’s major themes” (Bawer, “Don DeLillo’s” 37).11 Other critics explain DeLillo’s characters away under the catchall of “postmodern.”12 The question of whether DeLillo’s characters are flat or round, products of postmodernism or realism, only confuses the issue of characterization as a reflection of the intrinsic reality of a narrative. Penetrating inner monologue, or omnipotent narrative guides no longer always serve to add depth to a character as much as comfort for the reader. DeLillo characters are often flat, and it is no surprise that the first-person narrator in White Noise is lacking conclusive insights. Jack Gladney simply does not know things and has no experience in knowing things. The world has drastically changed since the 1950s. Contrast Henderson the Rain King and White Noise. Henderson’s story is a first-person account of past events, the voice attempting to piece together a section of a life and draw meaning from it. Henderson’s collage is glued together with complexity and insight into his reminiscences of past false epiphanies, his loves and regrets. He falls back on centuries of history, geography, philosophy, and theology. The ability of Henderson to work and rework his thinking and motivations within these assumed patterns are the hallmarks of his “round” character. Gladney’s narrative is pieced together with first-layer responses, images, and observations all happening in the eternal present tense.13 Gladney does not want to know what is happening or might happen in the world; he wants to remain flat and safe. His collage is held together with nothing more than his presence. DeLillo’s aphoristic tendencies hint at patterns but the parasyntactic nature of his aphorisms rarely build into any resounding conclusions.

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In a world in which personality is bought and sold on the open market, the concept of writing a novel around a single character rising to an epiphanic moment of self-realization no longer carries with it the strength it once did. One may even say that personality runs up so close to celebrity that the very notion of having a character-driven novel might obscure the writer’s intentions. The overpowering personality becomes mere transference object, or, in economic terms, another marketing tool. In attempting to return to the heroic narrative as loop, DeLillo removes the hero from what has become the falseness of American identity as individuated human. DeLillo is looking for a viable heroic narrative that is real even if this strays from realism. Jack Gladney is real in his flatness and drifting, a mere cultural object; he is a hero because of his irrepressible fear of what is outside of his culture, and his impossible position on the horizon line between what is known and created (his culture) and what cannot be known and is not created (the state hidden by death). DeLillo’s hero must sidestep the trap of celebrity in order to function at all; thus, Gladney is flattened, formed only in silhouette. He is recognizable because of what surrounds him, but he is not a “personality” to be owned. DeLillo forces the idea of a hero that is not imitated but incorporated. In other words, his focus is not on an end product (or object of transference, or marketable fixer philosophy) but on the possibility of choosing identity between the boundaries of what is known and what is unknowable. Notably, the only sparkle of the authentic solitary individual in DeLillo’s novels comes from children and the insane. They are autonomous because they are pre-consumers: literally outside culture and society.14 In White Noise, Babette’s son, Wilder, directly links nonconsumerism to pre-linguistic nature. Without a desire to speak (for Wilder should be speaking at his age), without a desire to consume, Wilder takes on the characteristics of a Brahmin or a monk. His very existence becomes not a message (for the impossibility of decoding Wilder is part of his charm), but a reminder of the lack of message, or chaos, that is buried within certainty and from which “certainty” comes. DeLillo’s most sustained narrative of a child is in Ratner’s Star in which the teenage mathematical prodigy, Billy Twillig, finds autonomy a reverse process. It is something one is born with but almost as soon as one becomes aware of it, it disappears: At four, however, completely in accord with the notion of forever being this thing called “small boy,” he lived in a deep sunny silence unthreatened by a sense of his own capacity for change. There was no doubting

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the fact he was exactly what he was meant to be. He was sure he met the requirements. It was all so totally fitting. He was native to a permanent inner environment just as certain fish as a species never stray from coastal waters. His shape was carved in the very air, body and mind forever. (75)

However reminiscent of the Romantics this memory of childhood is, DeLillo is just as adamant that to persist in this autonomous state is a form of madness15 and deformity, as it is for the Micklewhite boy in Great Jones Street (1973). For this reason, DeLillo’s adult characters, even in their lyric moments, are not nostalgic. Unlike Wordsworth or even Henderson, they do not invoke their own tattered clouds of glory. Children are firmly present-tense objects. Wilder may be seen by his parents as security against their early death, but he is just another produced product, and might be replaced with a pet or a religious statue.16 Like any objects DeLillo’s autonomous children function only as mirrors to others; they give back nothing of their own; their message is only the one projected onto them.17 DeLillo is always quick to undercut the comfort of one’s own explanations. He is always quick to point out that even our most complex systems, our most soughtafter explanations come from our own imaginations. Ratner’s Star is the most darkly ironic of these observations wherein the message from the “universe” painstakingly decoded by the greatest mathematical minds on the planet turns out to be their own message bouncing back at them. If DeLillo’s adult characters have a central feature it is that they “aspire to the condition of anonymity” (Tanner, The American 211). Having failed to maintain their childhood assurance, DeLillo’s characters are suspicious of identity because it is so much playacting, consciously chosen and cultivated.18 The desire for anonymity extends even to the point of moving into crowds, groups, or families where one feels safe and, to use E.M. Forster’s terminology, flat. In my own terminology, America has become the triumph of the assumed hero. The DeLillo hero is not one who sets out with a desire to get outside of America (for it is no longer possible), or one who desires to psychoanalyze himself into a recognition of self-reliant individuality (for individuality is not authenticity to be recognized but an identity arbitrarily chosen from the chaos of endless choice). The “hero” is another marketed object temporarily fulfilling a heroic impulse but to no purpose and without any lasting form or comparative narrative. Further, to be burdened with this role of hero can be confusing and even

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destructive as it lacks any meaning and the hero himself cannot explain the boon he brings back. As Baudrillard has written, in a utopic America, where all is reduced to a pleasant sameness, it will be those small quirks or peculiarities that will be recognized as the new “heroic”: Take for example, the man who got on the wrong plane and found himself carted off to Auckland, New Zealand, instead of Oakland, near San Francisco. This even made him the hero of the day . . . In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty for everyone, then, since the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the more millions of individuals there are who are set apart by some tiny peculiarity. The slightest vibration in a statistical model, the tiniest whim of a computer are enough to bathe some piece of abnormal behavior, however banal, in a fleeting glow of fame. (America 58–9)

This, of course, is also the plotline for DeLillo’s play Valparaiso (1999) that ends quite badly for the unfortunate man who cannot withstand the pressure of being a media image. In White Noise it is clear that the position of safety is as an assumed hero who sits quietly, periodically changing personalities, personal characteristics, or lifestyle habits to suit the ebb and flow of a market that is set up to reassure each person of their heroic self-reliance. The tormented DeLillo hero, neither wise nor strong, without ethical, moral, or cultural mores to challenge or overcome, is the imperfect assumed hero, not temporarily focusing the spotlight of celebrity upon himself, but anguished by his inability to be satisfied in his American utopia. Louis Menand writes that DeLillo’s characters do not know how to repress,19 and this is the key to DeLillo’s formation of the hero and the heroic. Jack Gladney, regardless of his noteworthy attempts to insulate himself by wearing a good costume and surrounding himself with the comforting fantasies of Wilder’s talismanic pre-verbal state, cannot help but be aware that the culture he wants to seep into him and fill him up is constantly draining out one side of him. This is the nature of the constant (re)cycling of identity in a consumer marketplace. He cannot help but be mesmerized by this drain, and like Alice following that rabbit, he cannot help but follow it and fall into one of those nuisance, nonsense holes full of nothing. Several critics have noted DeLillo’s mystical tendencies, but is this not just a man watching and writing about the expended products of culture?

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The hero dives into the very bowels of created identity, past the created technology, past the mathematicians and physicists and linguists. While Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man may hide under the culture, waiting for the time he will be seen, DeLillo’s men aspire to invisibility; they would be content to stay hidden. Unfortunately, while backing away from the spotlight, they fall into the basement and there they find neither safety in withdrawal nor a modernist lost autonomy, but a hidden spring of awareness of unknowing that had been swept into the darkest corners and repressed. They stumble into the penumbra of identity. Simply put, they bump into old Mr. Sammler’s “we know, we know, we know.” Although this half-hidden spring is echoed in many different ways throughout DeLillo’s novels, the most succinct expression of it is in his understanding of language. In particular, the novel before White Noise begins to form an idea of what language is for DeLillo. Cornel Bonca writes that “[t]he novel [The Names] is a breakthrough book insofar as it articulates for the first time a virtually religious sense of awe before the very fact that language exists, as if DeLillo had discovered an extraordinary mystery in the utterly familiar act of human utterance” (28). Saltzman concurs when he notes: “In fact, he consistently suggests that individual words have a kind of lambency at the core that goes beyond their referential employment” (819). This lambency is articulated in babble or chaotic expression.20 Language, in its consistency, creates and keeps a culture together. Its patterns and repetition articulate the world; consistency and repetition create the illusion of control and connection. However, language, like the culture it creates, is arbitrary. Its only truth is in its repetition. If one looks hard enough it is nothing more than an articulation of doubt. It carries within it babble and chaos, unknowing, and the infinite choices it did not choose. As John McClure writes: “If DeLillo can insist at one moment on the importance of correct naming, then, he can suggest at another that names are most interesting, most satisfying to the ear and spirit, when we do not understand them, when they produce mystery, not enlightenment” (Late Imperial 140). DeLillo’s philosophy of language is difficult to extract; he both praises and mocks. In The Names, for example, a language cult sits on the hillsides of various small Greek villages. They wait for a person to walk by whose name has the same initials as the village, and they kill them. Arbitrary and consistent. Owen, an archaeologist, finds the nature of the cult terrifying: “These killings mock us. They mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls. They make the system equal to the terror. The means to contend

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with death has become death” (308). By pointing out the arbitrary nature of even our most “transparent” and seeming benevolent systems, DeLillo illuminates not only our need for them or the need for consistency, but our fear of the unknown from which systems spring. In the same vein as Bellow’s fixer philosophers, DeLillo’s novels are punctuated with theorists who are constantly rationalizing this fear and pushing it to the corners of thought. In White Noise, however, Murray Siskind and Winnie Richards both preface their opinions with the cautionary “in theory,” just as DeLillo himself does in interviews to signal an inability to fully commit to what is, after all, just one idea among many. DeLillo’s own inconsistency and unwillingness to commit himself to any single idea are the basis of much of the criticism he receives. DeLillo is not nihilistic, but neither is he willing to fully commit to a postmodern world of play of signifiers. Thus, Freddie is not a sane man when he speaks so lyrically in DeLillo’s play The Day Room (1987): Before Amsterdam I was an ordinary man . . . A spoon was not a painting of a spoon. All that is lost to me now . . . I talk to imaginary men, to ghosts on battlements. I accept it all. I believe it all. Dreams, facts, accidents, dizzy spells, paranoid fantasies, mirages in the desert. A mirage is water and the illusion of water . . . Everything is true. Everything can and does and will happen, maybe a million times a second. Look at me. True or false? (Act 2, p. 75)

In Henderson the Rain King, Henderson marvels at the human imagination that can dream the world and then create it. DeLillo holds much the same wonder but he recognizes a disconnect in the sane adult who has forgot (and perhaps should) that the world is created arbitrarily from chaos, leaving one with control over neither the created world nor the uncreated dream. Only children have control and only until they realize they do not. In Underworld (1997), for example, a child believes he can bring down a jet plane only by wishing it, and his loss of innocence is defined by the realization that the divide between jet plane and boy is too wide for either to interact on such an intimate level: My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events . . . But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things. (88–9)

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For DeLillo, the world is a continuum of identity from the autonomous self of the child, who is both alone and yet intimately connected, to the madman who is half-child, half-adult, constantly vacillating between belief of the world and belief in the world. And then there is the adult, having suppressed this loss, and having suppressed awareness of death in order to find at least a simulacrum of community identity through consumption. In White Noise, DeLillo struggles as a writer of narratives in a world in which narratives and the heroes who live and tell these narratives are no longer productive, and in many cases have become mere weeping women, mere chorus to the repeating tragedy of the loss of a hero. Through Jack Gladney he asks the question “If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible?” (DeLillo, “American Blood” 27). Like Bellow before him, he may not find a conclusive explanation, but he is unwilling to merely inventory another defeat. The Hero in the Novel One of DeLillo’s working titles for White Noise was the trademarked company name Panasonic (Osteen 181). Although the suggestion of omnipresence in “Panasonic” is enticing, the current title is more in keeping with the DeLillo style, its definition pointing in two different directions: white noise as both fearful entropy and calming allfrequency chatter. Abraham Moles defines white noise as the “backdrop of the universe” but one of chaos that “destroys intent” (Moles’ emphasis, qtd. in Conte 117). It can be viewed as the disorder from which order is selected, but it is a challenge to interpretation and communication for, as Conte points out, “[o]ne person’s ‘noise’ is another person’s signal” (116). If one concentrates on the definition supplied by information theory, the novel can become a showpiece of the inability to communicate or to interpret a message. Conte may be forcing the point when he writes, “DeLillo’s White Noise tells of a communications Armageddon that has swept through America, the early warnings of which were lost in the ambient roar of postmodern culture” (139). Conte’s argument is backed up with references to DeLillo’s previous novels such as Great Jones Street in which one of the characters states that “People are withdrawing from sensory overload. Technology. Whenever there’s too much technology, people return to primitive feats” (252). The argument of Armageddon, however, runs the risk of ignoring DeLillo’s original intention for the title (Panasonic) as well as the other meanings of white noise. This is not to say that

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there is not an apocalyptic feel to DeLillo’s writing, 21 but merely to caution that DeLillo is not writing novels of such single-mindedness. An alternate definition of white noise (one that is closer to the original Panasonic title) is found within the parameters of sound production: “White noise, a sound containing a blend of all the audible frequencies distributed equally over the range of the frequency band, was originally invented to soothe workers in soundproof office buildings who might be disturbed by the silence” (Keesey 146). This white noise regards the inability to interpret a message as a positive modality for relaxation. Although the noise is the same chaotic swarm that it is for Conte and other interpreters of chaos, the perspective is one not of fear but of contentment. Rather than being a holding ground for interpretation, this white noise abandons the possibility of interpretation and allows the listener to drift and relax free from the responsibility of pattern making. The term “white noise” carries within it the very basis of the novel’s doubleness: white noise is both the desired, soothing freedom from interpretation and the dread of zero content. The result is both attraction and fear, and this is the foundation of the novel itself as Jack both desires to disappear within the chaos of American life, and yet fears the ultimate disappearance of death and non-meaning. If one believes that the idea of “soul” was replaced with the idea of “self” in the age of psychoanalysis, 22 it becomes easy to see an inevitable (and continuing) confusion between self as individuality and identity. Whereas soul implies a suppression of the individual in favor of reciprocal identity within a community or crowd of believers, the self implies an expression of the individual set loose from the confining (and comforting) boundaries of community or crowd. For example, in Joshua 7:14–18, when Achan sins against God by taking spoil after the fall of Jericho, God systematically strips him of his various identities by calling him out first from the tribes of Israel as a whole, then from his family tribe, then his family, then from his own house.23 Once removed of his identities, Achan is left as an individual, without identity, either tribal or familial. He is only himself as individual, and this is merely the first layer of identity with a narrative consisting of “I am because I am not not.” The final stoning of Achan is incidental because “Achan” as a conglomeration of the individual and the identity of the community to which he belongs has already ceased to be. Without both individuality and identity, Achan teeters on the binary of his only narrated identity: individual or “I am because I am not not.” In the Hebrew narrative, then, he is merely a totem of death without salvation.

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Throughout the twentieth century, the source of these necessary identities was increasingly called into question. With the demolishment of systems of belief (in religion, in government, in economics, and society as a whole) and their complex foundational heroic narratives of community identity, there remained only belief in this primal heroic narrative structured on belief in the individual that, at best, offers a community identity only very loosely as “humanity” or “the community of Man.” This primary narrative of identity defines the modernist heroic narrative as it successively strips away belief in all other layers of social identity. Unfortunately, if the hero is able only to destroy and not (re)create identity he leaves the reader looking into the terrifying chaos of “I am not.” The non-hero relies upon these created layers of social identity as protection from chaos, and if the hero cannot create more and different layers of identity the non-hero is forced to fend for themselves for their survival. The despair inherent in the loss of community identities becomes a breeding ground for novelists who wish to chronicle destruction, but both Bellow and DeLillo do not seem much (or only) interested in despair. Both authors are intrigued by the continued assertions of various forms of identities by non-heroes that exist even in the face of their radical denial. If this at first seems like an incredible burst of creative possibility wherein each person is taken to the precipice and allowed to rebuild themselves from this authentic point, both Bellow and DeLillo balk at the possibility of such a utopia. If it can be said that a hero is one who sheds layers of identity in order to be unencumbered in his quest; if a hero is one who looks over the edge of the primal narrative of individual and finds only chaos; if a hero then searches out a fictional narrative of identity to bring back to people in a community to save them from this unbearable knowledge; if a hero is defined by the existence of such a narrative, its ability to be (re)told, and, most importantly, the inimitability of the hero or the heroic journey as the abstract boon of the narrative becomes believed as reality and thus protects the non-hero from chaos; if this is all true, then it is impossible for everyone to be a hero. Simply put, a hero is one who can withstand the knowledge that there is no authentic but merely chaos, and “reality” is nothing more than the arbitrary fictions built to control this chaos. Further, a hero cannot be a non-hero to his or her own narrative because this knowledge is either known (by the hero) or repressed by a patterned system of reality (by the nonhero); one cannot do both. Both Bellow and DeLillo seem unconvinced by the possibility of a world of heroes, if only because it is unlikely that everyone has the

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ability to create and hold the position that has normally been taken by the creating hero. Regrettably, the American imagination has so degraded the status of the non-hero that one is embarrassed by its existence. One may even go so far as to say that there is no position for non-heroes in America; there are only successful heroes or heroes in waiting. Even the idea of a failed hero cannot exist because one is expected to disregard temporary setbacks and continue to strive until success is met. Both Bellow and DeLillo pick up on the comic and tragic results of such a forced hero status upon the non-hero. They imply that the possibility of an individuality disconnected from the boundaries of community identity is simply an unattainable goal because it puts one in the position of having to create a narrative of return (hero) and incorporate it as well (non-hero). However, it is also true that this heroic self seems to be the only option available in contemporary American society. The result is, as Bellow names it, “play acting” the part of some image of hero, some image of a successful self but one that is not truly understood, incorporated, or believed. The result is a hero that is successfully marketed. Everyone is put in the position of pretending to have accomplished the impossible. The result is not the conflation of hero and non-hero because this is a paradox; the result is a playacted image of heroic success that simply disregards this paradox. This assumed hero is like a closet with a hidden compartment; it is an American heroic persona hiding both heroes and non-heroes within it. The creative pressure exerted on a society demanding millions of individualized heroes with their own created and chosen systems of identity, and the impossibility of fulfilling this demand is a huge consumer market waiting to be tapped. With the help of various media and marketing campaigns, images of unique individualism are sold to the masses. But to wear the right clothes, or to support the right lifestyle is all image, and although it implies a kind of community identity of consumption, it has no narrative. Consumerism can only sell the present tense. Its products do not come with a corresponding narrative of identity or any interpretive strategies that might interfere with the ability to market innovations or variations of the ever-changing image of heroic individuality. The market’s emphasis is always on promoting an image of the individual self as hero, and any implications of identity within a consuming community are only that: implied. Indeed, “consumerism, like other postmodern religions, does not incorporate its believers into a community” (Brown 68–9). Bellow’s work overlaps the time period in which this transformation of self becomes the basis of his society. His work, as in Mr. Sammler’s

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Planet, is filled with anxiety for a world being populated by impossible, fictional, simulated selves. DeLillo, however, begins writing when this world is already firmly in place. His novels are situated not in the time of transition but in the “utopia” of completion. DeLillo’s world is not only a world of role-playing and simulated images of heroes, but it is a world in which these simulacra of self have been so fully accepted that they have become authentic. For, who is to stop this false authentic? The true heroes have failed to return and the true non-heroes are embarrassed to be regarded as followers. They are both hiding behind this simulacrum assumed hero. Bellow worried about how a society could work on nothing more than marketing campaigns and implied narratives. DeLillo’s characters do not lament the lack of narrative because they have filled in this gap with assumption. For Jack Gladney, comfort is found not in narrative but in the assumption that what is not known as first-hand knowledge nonetheless exists and is explainable. Although almost impossible to articulate, there is a sense (again, the implication) that there is not only agency but narrative structure behind the meeting of one’s own needs. Consuming as self-reliance as well as community identity is taken for granted. As long as needs are met (even exceeded) one assumes these images and objects must come from a controlling agency and surrounding this agency is a narrative of consumption. Stories, meanings, or structures cannot be articulated, but as Jack Gladney writes in the first page of his narrative, there is the assumption that someone, somewhere knows what he does not know, creating and controlling the flow of the products that Jack is too busy consuming to consider just where the source is or what it all means. Questions, doubts, or fears that may periodically arise regarding the agency behind this “community” or identity formation, and the implied narrative it offers lead not to metaphysical moments but to political ones, 24 not to a crisis of faith but to paranoia. But paranoia is not a system of analysis; it is not a desire to push beyond or break down anything. Ironically, it does not hope to expose the void at the center of the system. It is not a crisis of faith but merely a mistrust of explanation. The paranoid look for reassurance in, if not the current system, a system nonetheless. The truth is always out there, it need only be sought. In other words, the paranoid never doubt that everything is knowable. These assumed heroes living within the penumbra of identity supplied by some outside, nameless and faceless agency of continuity (whether government or business) do not address the desire that both creates and sustains this ironic, paranoid, and paradoxical system. It

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would seem, moreover, that this simulacral structure is a natural evolution of individuals denied believable narratives of identity; it mimics the unknown godhead of previous mythical structures—replacing depth of narrative with repetition. It reassures by supplying an overload of sensory and intellectual activities that distract from what is missing. The paradox, however, remains: everyone must present an image of triumphant self-reliance—as hero—but without a narrative to tell or a community to tell it to. The lacking identity is replaced with hints and assumptions. The assumed hero exists, but only in so far as its images are not questioned or doubted. In order to create Jack Gladney as a true hero, DeLillo must make him unsuited to such a tempting narcissistic and somnambulistic system. As a hero in a world of endlessly simulated heroics, Jack is a true hero only because he cannot be a simulated one. As much as he desires to drift in his identity as university professor in a small town, showing off an image of a certain heroic individuality (wearing dark glasses and carrying around Mein Kampf ), he is troubled by the nagging feeling that there is something more of purpose and pattern. Neither drifting nor paranoia is satisfying. He desires to belong to the nebulous system of images that are his society, but once he doubts his own image, he does not have the depth of narrative to find his way back to contented repression. He cannot deny that he is alone, atavistically alone, in the tradition of old hero hunters questing for the narrative to define the self and the community they had abandoned. In Jack’s case, his community identity is taken away from him when it is exposed as a false image. But once in the position of a true hero Jack must ask what community is there to return to? What narrative could he create that has not already been created and objectified on the open market? Is it not better to simply buy-in to one of these consumable images of identity and return to his position as an assumed hero like everyone else? Unfortunately Jack finds he cannot find a replacement image. He cannot repress the knowledge that all his identities were shallow images, not narratives of being. As a result Jack lives in fear: fear of his society, its people, and its systems. DeLillo spends the first part of the novel setting up Jack as the perfect assumed hero, a perfectly happy drifter complacent in his chosen role, his chosen individuality, and his implied heroic identity. He has successfully purchased or chosen his heroic identities and now desires nothing more than to remain static, set, slowly repeating these images of himself and his life. At the same time, DeLillo is dropping hints of Jack’s lack of success in his efforts both to playact and repress his awareness of his simulated self. In particular, Jack’s obsession with

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Hitler highlights both what Jack needs and what he is trying to repress. Some critics feel uneasy with DeLillo’s ahistorical handling of Hitler and interpret the name as a sign of the “proto-fascism” of American culture.25 The use of Hitler as an historical or political subject (or even a “subject”) is fraught with difficulty and dead-ends.26 DeLillo seems to have little interest in discussing the human consequences of Germany’s action in World War II. Rather, Hitler is removed from any historical, ethical, or moral encumbrances to become an image representative of power. For Jack, Hitler becomes the image he wears in order to further his career. The only course Jack teaches at College-on-the-Hill is “Advanced Nazism” on “the continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny, with special emphasis on parades, rallies and uniforms” (25). His dark glasses, his robe, and the cultivated bulkiness of his frame are patterned after the strict uniform and unvarying personal style of a man of power. Slight eccentricity of dress and repetition of the style are cultivated to give Jack the image of the self-reliant hero. Still, it is merely image. When Jack is caught “out of costume” in the mall, a colleague states: “You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy” (83). This sends Jack into a consuming frenzy in order to regain a sense of (purchasing) power, but whatever objects he buys at the mall have no more lasting narrative power of identity than Jack’s dark glasses. Hitler is used for comic effect, but there is a serious drama surrounding the impulse that drives Jack to reach for him. What drew Jack to the dictator in the first place was the sense of identity implied by Hitler’s parades and uniforms. The self-reliant “I am” that Jack takes on through his association with Hitler is integrated into the comforting “I am one of many” of Hitler’s crowds and costumes. His career is based on his ability to role-play the arch-individualist who stands above the crowd, but his real interest in Hitler is as the protective force of an explained and boundaried community identity. Again, Jack has only images not a sustained narrative; however, these simulacra are not the source of Jack’s anxiety. It is his inability to repress the fact that he has arbitrarily chosen these images, and his inability to repress what lies behind his need to choose that are the source of his sense of failure and his fear. Yehnert notes: “The factor most often ignored by DeLillo’s critics is that these characters do not want to know themselves, and thus they conspire with the image to escape the burden of existence” (Yehnert’s emphasis, 360). For DeLillo’s characters, ultimate survival is to make the arbitrary choice of an image of heroic identity and then repress (even forget) that this had been a

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choice at all. In Running Dog, Glen Selvy remarks that “[c]hoice is a subtle form of disease” (192). This theme runs through much of DeLillo’s works, for choosing always implies arbitrariness, inconsistency, and impermanency. Choice is a reminder of the lack of narrative, the inability to prove absolutely, and the empty space that underlies any community, let alone the surface community of consumers. White noise is a metaphor for these dangers of choice. In the novel, the television is always on, traveling from room to room like a sideshow barker constantly offering new and more exciting possibilities. It does not so much doubt previous messages (which would imply a certain amount of debate or dialogue and, therefore, complexity) but adds to them becoming a constant reminder of other messages left untouched. This palimpsest of chosen and unchosen messages haunts Jack. For the other members of his family they are only images or white noise in the comforting sense. Jack, however, is taunted by the possibility of meaning. He is someone who is being “forced to think and who resists the process” (LeClair, In the Loop 211). The act of resistance is situated within the structure of the novel itself. In Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King the novel is formulated as a memoir in which the hero retells his narrative to give order to past experience. In White Noise the hero writes something more akin to a diary where everything is happening in the moment. Jack presents himself as a man without interest or desire for explanation; he is merely a man relating known facts and comforting repetitions. The novel begins with the arrival of the station wagons, not just that day but eternally. They are “the” station wagons arriving at noon just as they have “every September for twenty-one years” (3). In two pages Jack sums up his comfortable and successful career, his wife, their “brass bed” (4) and their children. In an exact reversal of Henderson’s mangled heroic call to duty and desire to convince the reader and himself that something must be done, Jack presents himself as a completed product, a closed system, a perfect, formal arrangement, much like the station wagons. As Richard Kerridge points out: “Characters like this attempt to commodify themselves—that is, among other things, to construct themselves according to received cultural images that belong to the narratives they wish to become protagonists in” (310). Already, however, moments that do not fit into Jack’s eulogy taint the narrative: there is an insane asylum between the churches and his own “quiet street” (4); there is an expressway that murmurs “as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream” (4); his note about his career is concluded with the death of the chancellor who propelled him to Hitler stardom, and the final paragraph is dangling and

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inconclusive—supermarket, parking tickets, and the handwritten signs of children looking for their lost dogs and cats (pets the Gladney family does not own). It seems that Jack’s closed narrative is littered with invading disconnected signifiers, a world of unnarrated images and unfinished quests. The way DeLillo portrays the disconnection of images is echoed in his approach to language. DeLillo does not detail a distinct philosophy of language, but his approach does represent a stage beyond that of thwarted authenticity. Roland Barthes asserts, “there is no subject outside language, since language is what constitutes the subject through and through, the separation of languages is a permanent grief . . .” (Barthes’ emphasis, qtd. in King 77). For DeLillo, beginning his career in an age of simulacra, this statement is no longer shocking. He seems alternatively chagrined and amused by the argument that language is the code through which we create the fiction of ourselves. While Barthes points out that language and self are inseparable, DeLillo’s world is already so modified and artificial (where “self” is the image of self) that Barthes’ point is less an argument than a statement of accepted fact. Although language and self are intricately tied to one another, language for DeLillo is still another version of white noise. It is one of the arbitrary codes through which one reads and forms the subject. It is the necessity and absurdity of the codes through which we create ourselves—or think we create ourselves—that interests DeLillo. Further, it is not language that is the difficulty but its arbitrariness, chosen at seeming random from the great swarming chaos all around. 27 Relieved of the burden of lamenting or even investigating the lost authentic, DeLillo is at ease in the paradox that “forms mediate and falsify, yet forms provide meaning and coherence” (Yehnert 362). DeLillo’s interest in the arbitrariness of language is often taken to an extreme. In an interview he asserted that “[b]abbling can be frustrated speech or it can be a purer form, an alternate speech” (“An Interview” with LeClair 24), an idea that he has been investigating in depth since the Micklewhite boy in Great Jones Street.28 Language is both the great veil and the great comfort. It both frustrates and facilitates interaction in the world. Gilles Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: “freeing ourselves of the Platonic ontology means denying the priority of an original over the copy, of a model over the image” (qtd. in Frow 420). In DeLillo’s world, there is not even the memory of an original; there are only copies of copies. There is no original or transparent language, but neither is there a condemnation of the multitude of codes and surfaces present in the contemporary

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world. DeLillo writes of the need for and attempt to choose and control communication, whether it be through scholarship, images, or babble. There is something other than abstract language, but DeLillo seems impatient with those who define language through a spectrum from the most pure (the closest to the Platonic original) to the most tainted. Unlike Bellow, DeLillo and the characters in his world have no memory or understanding of the concept of authenticity. In White Noise, when Jack is confronted by the primal or pre-abstract levels of language in children, for example, he does not pretend to have encountered some mystical knowledge or insight. Rather, the prelinguistic level is a level of no choices; it is representative of pre-self and pre-choice. There is no insight offered by DeLillo’s children except the implication of a symbiosis with space and environment: existence and essence (individuality and identity) are inseparable because they have never been doubted. It is this symbiosis that the adult loses and replaces with insight, higher levels of understanding, language, and community identity. While this may have Romantic overtones of Wordsworth’s more “mature gifts,” it is not quite right to say that “DeLillo reveres that ultimate opaque language that is prior to all codes and grammars” (Weinstein 306). It is closer to the case to say that the opaque pre-abstract world is one without code, without possibility of interpretation. This shady area is not memory of authenticity, or a nostalgia for lost purity or innocence, but obliviousness of responsibility to the world in which one exists; it is a perfect union of individuality and identity because it has not yet been burdened with the need to choose. The pre-abstract world is perfect— without need of hero or narrative—because it is unformed. Jack and Babette’s children are spread out from toddler years to puberty and they represent the entire range of maturity in which one becomes aware first of the necessity to choose, and then the impossibility of believing in a world so arbitrarily chosen. What prompts choice is, of course, the narrative of death. Death denies a perfect symbiosis between the individual and identity or between the self and the world. Death is the betrayal of the perfect sense of belonging that defines the pre-abstract level of language. Death is half of the primal narrative of the self (“I am because I am not not”). While this narrative offers life as well as death, a recognition of this narrative creates fear because “I am not” now exists where before there was only “I am.” Further, once this narrative is discovered, it creates the need for more narratives to protect oneself from the knowledge of this terrible binary. In other words, this primal narrative of “I am because I am

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not not” is buffered with many other narratives of identity. It extends into teleological narratives such as “I am because God chooses it,” and even into outer circles of identity such as “I am because I am a father whose children need him.” Cornel Bonca is not mistaken in defining Steffie’s sleep talk (“Toyota Corolla”) and Wilder’s long crying jag as possible expressions of “death fear” (35, 36); but, Jack, as an adult, cannot use his children as guides for his own life. Indeed, he finds as much comfort in their nonsense as in watching them sleep, because here also there is a lack of intrusion, confusion, and codes. Their state is not primal or even authentic but simply without need of interpretation. One could argue that the younger the children, the more perfectly postmodern is their interaction with the world. Without the burden of memory, without a sense of future, they simply move through the ever-changing landscape without necessity to interact or interpret it through the use of codes such as language. The toddler, Wilder, is the more untouched by the world, while his older sister, Steffie, shows the first painful signs of interpretation. Steffie became upset every time something shameful or humiliating seemed about to happen to someone on the [TV] screen. She had a vast capacity for being embarrassed on other people’s behalf. Often she would leave the room until Denise signaled to her that the scene was over. Denise used these occasions to counsel the younger girl on toughness, the need to be mean in the world, thick-skinned. (16)

Denise and Heinrich, the older children, are already past the transitional stage with which Steffie struggles and have moved along the continuum from child to adult, from autonomous to repressed. Denise is the strongest character in the family because, like Wilder, she shows little doubt about her choices. She is the source of the family’s rules and their medical facts. Having only recently discovered the world of facts, Denise believes in them. She directs her mother on current theories of exercise and diet, and reads only the Physicians’ Desk Reference. She remains clear-sighted because she believes in her ability to know. She anticipates a character in Underworld who remarks: “How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process” (664). Heinrich, the teenager, is on the edge of losing this rule-bound world but shows a need for these rules even as he doubts them. Although

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only a few years older than his step-sister, he has lost all faith in facts and in his ability to know things. He is the source of the family’s misinformation and philosophical suspicions. He shows the final stage of childhood before a lifetime of adult repression: skepticism. Jack worries that Heinrich’s premature balding might be a side effect of toxins in the air, but it might just as easily be a sign of the speed with which children become adults, or are forced to repress their doubts in order to function in the world where, they discover, they do not belong. When Jack and Heinrich debate on a rainy day whether it is actually raining or not, the image is that of a fully repressed adult who has forced himself to concur with the varied reports of the functions of the world, and the teenager who still has some faith in his skepticism: “Heinrich meets each of Jack’s desires for affirmation and community with the well-known skepticism and undecidability of the postmodern theorist. In the age of deconstruction, all we can know is our inability to know” (Caton 47). However, if one concludes that “all we can know is our inability to know,” as Caton astutely puts it, one needs a narrative to hold back this unwanted knowledge of the unknowable. The need to choose is evident throughout not only DeLillo’s work but the work of his critics. In looking at Wilder’s crying, Gordon Slethaug concludes that “its meaning has to be located in its meaninglessness: this deep sobbing functions to emphasize unalleviated turbulence and uncoded noise . . . [B]ut turbulence and noise may, nevertheless, bear within them deeper and richer resources of order and information” (57–8). The implication is that Wilder’s crying is meaningless because neither Jack nor Slethaug can decode it. But this is not true. Both Slethaug and Jack do decode Wilder. Slethaug suggests that such turbulence is necessary to stir things up or draw attention to the possibility of other codes. Jack, at first alarmed by the inability to identify the pain and thus comfort the child, eventually finds some comfort himself when he decides to interpret the wailing as indicative of meditation. The comfort, however, is a result of Jack’s choice, not of any innate identifiable pattern. Wilder consistently thwarts efforts to decode him; there are no meanings in Wilder’s actions except those that are thrust upon him. To return to Bellow, there is some similarity between DeLillo’s children and Bellow’s “Be-ers,” as both are in a state that is not primal, not primitive, and most importantly, not reproducible. It is a state that cannot be cultivated and cannot be recognized from within. While enviable, it is totally unproductive as a narrative. Be-ers, like children, can never be heroes because they cannot form their happiness or sense of belonging into a narrative.

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Slethaug finds comfort in the fact that within the noise there is still possibility of order and information, but this is Slethaug’s interpretation. Wilder’s crying may just as easily be a vocal refusal of the instincts of the human to communicate through the code of language. Like his step-father, Wilder may be resisting the need for activity and thought and analysis, and his crying, like a “period of wandering in some remote and holy place” (79), may be a refusal to code and be decoded, to enter a world that functions only through these concepts. Indeed, Wilder’s crying may echo Jack’s own desire to drift. DeLillo’s explication of childhood looks as if it might be rather unchallengingly Romantic. Paul Maltby sees some correlation between Coleridge’s definitions of genius and DeLillo’s characters: “To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar. . . this is the character and privilege of genius” (Coleridge, qtd. in Maltby 49). DeLillo, however, creates childhood not as a state of wonder but as a state of familiarity. Moreover, to carry on the feelings of childhood into an adult life is a form of madness. In DeLillo’s view, as one matures the familiarity of the world becomes a world of wonder, and the world of wonder becomes an incomprehensible world of choice. The world is no longer encompassable. To function as an adult, then, one must arbitrarily choose from this wonder-full world and, if one is truly successful, suppress the failure inherent in this choosing to either encompass the world or explain it fully. The goal of the adult is fundamentally to re-achieve a kind of familiarity with the world but one that is necessarily based on suppression and repression. To continue in a state of infant familiarity, in light of the obvious strangeness of things, is not for DeLillo a sign of genius but a sign of insular madness. In novels such as Great Jones Street or Mao II (1991), DeLillo shows the impossibility of regaining this familiarity. Children fascinate DeLillo, but he never strays from his view that the loss of innocence is not the loss of wonder but the realization of wonder, and with it the fear of doubt and the infinite unknown. Further, what is considered the banal or the quotidian in the adult world is, in actuality, the finely tuned repression of an organism that is constantly at odds with the environment. To remain a child is to remain an animal.29 Or, depending where upon the ladder of childhood one is arrested, it is to be schizophrenic or paranoid or simply overcome with fear and doubt. This last state is the one that Jack moves closer toward when he loses the image of himself and searches for another

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plotline of identity. Jack needs to choose a place, an image of himself, or else be lost to doubt and fear. There is an inevitability, even a necessity, to the need to repress as an adult, but in a world devoid of heroic narrative, without the boundaries of belief and community, the small unaccountable details that briefly illustrate repression to the repressed become moments of crisis. Without a narrative to encompass these moments of doubt, the adult is forced to repress further, or find another image of individuality, another vague allusion to identity to replace the failed choice. The problem is, of course, death. It is both the lure of the heroic impulse (to encompass or control it), and part of the first heroic narrative of the individual. To come to death is to realize that death itself is a fiction used to control the chaos or white noise that is both death and everything that is not death. Another working title DeLillo considered for White Noise (besides “Panasonic”) was “The American Book of the Dead” (LeClair 228) in reference to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. White Noise, however, is not as much a narrative of death as an argument for the desire for narratives that encompass death. As Osteen remarks: “These sacred texts provide detailed prayers and rituals to protect the dying on their journey beyond the body; DeLillo’s American Book of the Dead listens to the sounds and lists the products and places that reveal the presence of the sacred in postmodern life” (165). The lists and sounds of which Osteen speaks are not those of a death narrative, but assume a death narrative. These books are guides to a teleological narrative. However, DeLillo is not writing a teleological narrative, either. He is writing a defense of the heroic narrative by furthering an argument for the need to place the unknowable in postmodern life. If there is any attempt to create a book of the dead in White Noise, it is not found in the novel itself but in the references to supermarket tabloids.30 White Noise has no answers for those hoping to find a pattern of life and within it the implication of a successful death. The novel begins and begins again. The ending itself stutters with newness: beginning and beginning and beginning with images of the possibility of community and identity, whether through humanistic, ritualistic, or mystical systems. But these possibilities are always undermined. Even the reassurances of the tabloids are undermined by a reorganization of the supermarket in which they are bought. As previously noted, the novel begins with the ritual arrival of the station wagons and the students with their “comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse” (3). These “[a]nnual cultural messages take the place of ancient seasonal rituals in confirming personal and social

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identity” (Kerridge 306). Unfortunately, the identity that is confirmed is only the appearance of identity; it is lifestyle. Jack’s account of the station wagons is smug, as if he knows the shallowness of this narrative. When he discusses the procession with Babette he scoffs: “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to [their money]” (6). Yet both Jack and Babette agree that this image, this moneyed lifestyle, is a kind of protection from death. Babette remarks: “I have trouble imagining death at that income level” (6). A moneyed lifestyle offers a kind of narrative in which death is not death at all but “[j]ust documents changing hands” (6). Babette and Jack do not have this narrative protection. Their life seems less defined, their family pieced together from several different families; their station wagon is “small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door” (6). Death is important in the world of white noise, because it is both a part of this noise and the only believed-in barrier from it. When Jack states that “all plots move deathward” (26), he at first thinks he is being profound and then he wonders if he believes it. Of course he believes it because it is true. All plots move deathward because— ironically—they begin with death as well. Death is the point at which the looping narrative begins and ends. Jack’s ability to drift is based on his repressing or forgetting the place of death within the plot (and identity) he has chosen for himself. Jack’s “plot,” then—his chosen narrative, his chosen identity—is neatly ensconced within the walls of the academy, within his place as university professor, within his pictures of Nazi crowd scenes. Once contained within these, Jack is able to drift; he is not responsible. Of course, the plot Jack chooses is not a narrative at all, simply because although there is the implication of death all around it, it cannot answer or contain his death. His plot is merely the image of plot; his safety merely the image of safety; his identity merely the image of identity. When the toxic event happens in the second part of the novel, Jack is incredulous because his plotline of liberal university professor of Hitler studies has no place for huge destructive, toxic events. He tells Heinrich: “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 out in the scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are” (115). To participate is to draw attention to the shortcomings of his chosen heroic image, to do so betrays his life as just another lifestyle, one that included his “own eventual death, nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful” (76). It simply cannot accommodate the “pulsing stars” (136) that are the result of Jack’s exposure to the toxic cloud. He has no narrative in which to

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place these warning bells of a violent, possibly sudden, death. He finds that the pulsing stars make you “feel like a stranger in your own dying” (137) and this leads him to search for safety: “I wanted my academic gown and dark glasses” (137). DeLillo reinforces the arbitrariness of choosing a plot as Jack searches for another narrative or image of narrative in order to repress the fear of this new, unexpected death. In an absurd scene, the two professors (Jack and Murray) take a “Socratic walk” (269) through the campus to discuss the issue seriously. Murray first gives Jack the possibility of encompassing death within a narrative of a brave death, one with “a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor” (271). Murray also suggests that Jack might consider surviving an assassination attempt or “a train wreck in which a hundred die” (273), because either can “counteract the effect of any number of nebulous masses” (274). Murray finally settles on the possibility that Jack should kill for “life credits”: “Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit . . . I’m talking theory. In theory, violence is a form of rebirth. The dier passively succumbs. The killer lives on. What a marvelous equation” (277). Having settled on killing in order to live (or at least to forget his own death), Jack creates various scenarios that would enable him to do just that. Not only does he decide to kill to gain life credits against his own impending death, but he decides to kill his wife’s seducer. As a bonus to this scenario, he will be able to steal Dylar pills, which claim to be able to remove his fear of death once and for all. As many critics have pointed out, the sheer redundancy factor of these multifarious plots makes the encounter with Willie Mink read like a movieof-the-week (Keesey 147–8; LeClair 222; Osteen 186). The farce is heightened by the fact that none of these plots, even if they were successful, hold out anything more than the illusion of overcoming death. Given the absurdity of his actions, it is impossible to read Jack’s reaction to these plots as an epiphany. Jack’s feeling of “heightened reality” (293) is in response to the strictness of his plot, the boundaries set, and the goal to be accomplished: Here is my plan. Drive past the scene several times, park some distance from the scene, go back on foot, locate Mr. Gray under his real name or an alias, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum pain, clear the weapon of prints, place the weapon in the victim’s staticky hand, find a crayon or lipstick tube and scrawl a cryptic suicide note on the

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full-length mirror, take the victim’s supply of Dylar tablets, slip back to the car, proceed to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, get off at the old river road, park Stover’s car in Old Man Treadwell’s garage, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and the fog. Elegant. My airy mood returned. I was advancing in consciousness. (290–1)

Lentricchia writes that “[t]he plot that Jack hatches in order to kill Willy Mink embodies his dream of existential self-determination, precisely what his culture denies him” (“Tales” 112). However, this “dream” or narrative is not denied to Jack but encouraged, demanded even. It is this expectation of a suitable heroic act that drives Jack to these extremes. Forced to find another narrative identity, Jack finds himself in the role of killer with sub-plotlines of male, biologically dictated revenge31 and criminal theft. Jack may be denied an “authentic self” by his culture, but is he looking for one? He does not pause for a moment to consider that his scenario is merely pieced together by various inauthentic clichéd movies-of-the-week. This does not concern Jack because his real hope is to find his way back into his old assumed heroic self. He is trying to find an image of a narrative that will enable him to forget his doubt and his fear. He wants to drift. He wants to forget his death. All this plotting overshadows Jack’s real focus. What Jack wants is the drug, Dylar, because this object holds out the possibility of never having to choose again, of removing the impetus to choose and worry over one’s sense of heroic self. Jack hopes that Dylar is actually able to do what Jack cannot: “Rid the fear. Clear the grid” (292). Like a wish granted in some horrendous Greek tragedy, the drug is, in fact, able to do half of what Mink had said it would do. It can “clear the grid” in the sense that it can return the subject to a state of childlike familiarity with the world. Regrettably, the drug cannot eliminate the fear of death. As Mink tells Jack, even if there is a medication that rids one of fear it will be “[f]ollowed by a greater death” (294); relief from this fear is always only temporary because death is infinitely adaptable. It “eludes our attempts to reason with it” (294). Mink, Dylar’s creator and a full-blown addict, fades in and out of a childlike state in which the world is familiar in the sense that signifier and signified are fused. The grid is clear. There are no patterns, no boundaries, no explanation: everything is. However, unlike Wilder who finds comfort in the perfect fusion of signifier and signified because he has no sense of the future, Mink retains his death fear. Thus, the world is not his. He is neither familiar of it nor the

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pattern-forming stranger. Everything is odd, possible, and terrifying. He is like an infant in his inability to distinguish signifiers from signified, but unlike a child he is aware of the endless stream of things (the wonder-fullness) and the constant insinuations of death. Jack is quick to see the possibilities of this state: “Fusillade,” I whispered. He tried to wriggle behind the [toilet] bowl, both arms over his head, his legs tight together. I loomed in the doorway, conscious of looming, seeing myself from Mink’s viewpoint, magnified, threatening. (297)

Leonard Wilcox contends that Gladney’s experience is a sign of the impossibility of signs, structure, and even narrative.32 Although DeLillo is crushing Jack’s hopes for a totalizing narrative, he is not implying that heroic narrative is impossible, only the narrative that would seek to obliterate the death fear that is, after all, the very source of it. In other words, Jack does not fail because of his plot, but because his plot sought to do the impossible: to be a plot without an incentive, a beginning, or an ending, to be a plot that did not move deathward. A plot without death would be the ultimate hope of a drifter like Jack and the perfect dream of a capitalist consumer (where death really would be merely paper changing hands). But a plot without death would be a plot without the impulse to begin or impetus to end. This is impossible. All plots move deathward. To think this is not true is only possible if one is fully repressed. And those who have the ability to repress their fears are not heroes. So, Jack is stuck. He wants to return to the repressed life of the present-tense consumer, to the false image of the hero—the assumed hero—but he is being forced by the imaging block to become truly heroic. The pulsing stars signify death and force Jack to choose a narrative in which they belong. Having rejected Murray’s “noble dying” and “assassination attempt survivor” scenarios, Jack finds himself euphorically meeting the challenges of the “killer” scenario. But his is not an epiphany. When Jack shoots Mink he “saw beyond words. I knew what red was, saw it in terms of dominant wavelength, luminance, purity. Mink’s pain was beautiful, intense” (298). Then, after placing the gun in Mink’s hand, ostensibly to set-up the ridiculous scenario of a suicide by gunshot to the stomach, Mink shoots Jack in the wrist. It is at this point that the colored dots, periodically mentioned throughout the novel again appear in Jack’s vision. The “noise” appears once again, voiding Jack’s singular vision, and “[t]he extra

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dimensions, the super perceptions, were reduced to visual clutter, a whirling miscellany, meaningless” (298). Jack’s own pain, his own injury, however, leads him not only back into his own fear of death, but into a heroic moment in which the fear of death also becomes his call to action and responsibility. He sets out with another narrative, this one less violent, in which he is “large and selfless, above resentment” (299) as he drags Mink to the hospital. At the hospital, Jack’s various euphoric “plots” (first as killer and then as savior) are summarily rejected by the nuns who work there. In a telling moment, Jack is not asked for any explanation of his arrival at the hospital; rather, the gun is tossed without question into “a desk drawer that held about ten other handguns and half a dozen knives” (301). Further, when Jack’s gaze moves upward from the drawer full of failed violent scenarios to the “picture on the wall of Jack Kennedy holding hands with Pope John XXIII in heaven” (301), the nuns also refuse him permission to continue in his vague plotline of moral humanity, forgiveness, and a polite and comfortable heaven. Regardless, he becomes more and more convinced of the idea of religious salvation (once again filling in a narrative in response to death). The picture of Kennedy and the Pope becomes more and more meaningful: “Why shouldn’t they meet somewhere, advanced in time, against a layer of fluffy cumulus, to clasp hands? Why shouldn’t we all meet, as in some epic of protean gods and ordinary people, aloft, well-formed, shining?” (302). When Jack makes the mistake of putting this new narrative into action, he finds once again that it is nothing but image: I said to my nun, “What does the Church say about heaven today? Is it still the old heaven, like that, in the sky?” She turned to glance at the picture. “Do you think we are stupid?” she said. (302)

Jack’s search for a narrative that will contain his “pulsing stars” and his own approaching death seems to have played itself out. Both killing and saving have failed to offer him any sustained narrative of being. But Jack is not naïve; he believes the nuns are naïve. In fact, he needs them to be so. He finds the nuns “a merry sight” (302) because of their homogenous presence (repetition), and he finds their belief comforting: “Nuns believe these things. When we see a nun, it cheers us up, it’s cute and amusing, being reminded that someone still believes in angels, in saints, all the traditional things” (303). Jack finds comfort in thinking that someone else knows what he does not

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know, believes what he does not. Convinced that knowing and belief are happening in the world, he thinks that he is free to drift in his own tiny, incomplete narrative of identity. Jack is attempting to fob off his responsibility to create. He thinks if he jumps right to “someone still believes,” then there is no longer a necessity for him to create a believable narrative. The nuns’ refusal to relieve Jack of his responsibility brings him to the end of his easy options. He is crushed, “frustrated and puzzled, close to shouting” (303). The nuns refuse to offer him the opportunity to repress (or displace) his death, but they do not condemn his desire. They understand their place is to simulate belief because they believe that “[t]o abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die . . . the world would collapse” (303). To prove her point Sister Hermann Marie begins to speak incomprehensible German at Jack. Although he cannot understand what it is she says, he codes it himself as “[l]itanies, hymns, catechisms. The mysteries of the rosary perhaps. Taunting me with scornful prayer” (305). Jack finds it beautiful—beautiful in his incomprehension, because he is free to encode it with a belief system that neither of them believe but both believe important that someone could. As Jack searches for the doctor to fill his prescription he feels “like someone in a movie” (305). He is no further along in achieving either a suitable image of the heroic or a true heroic narrative than when he left the house earlier with a gun in his hand. However, what the nuns open up to Jack is the possibility that it is impossible to neatly separate what exists (the need to believe) and what is created (the simulation of belief). As Dahfu tells Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, man is an amazing creator: what he imagines he can create. As both Henderson and Jack discover, however, this endless creation (whether good or bad) does not control or nullify the desire or the impulse to create; imagination and the creation that springs from it are united only in the infant (the one who believes that by thinking of it he can bring down planes). The very fact that we create is acquiescence to our need to create. The final babbling conversation Jack encounters with the nun once again reinforces this idea. Barthes writes that the subject is only language, but DeLillo wonders if one can be so sure it works only one way: “language is inseparable from the world that provokes it” (“In the Ruins” 39). DeLillo suggests a reciprocating loop of heroic narrative, one that begins from a denial of the unison of existence and essence brought on by the knowledge of the narrative of death. Knowledge of death forever separates existence from essence, forever leaves a gap between creation and the created. Language

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is provoked by a world that needs to be contained. Narrative is provoked by a language that also needs to be contained. We are only narrative, only language, and, finally, only the impulse that provokes their creation. The nuns can be comfortable in their pretence of belief in God and angels and heaven and hell because they still believe in the need for belief. They still feel the impulse that provokes, although they no longer believe in what it creates. Jack’s epiphanic chapter ends without epiphany. He abandons the killer scenario and simply leaves the Stover’s blood-soaked car in their driveway instead of in the abandoned garage. Before bed he stops to watch the children sleep, but does not find the comfort he once did. What he sees is a “fumbling through their dreams, eyes rapidly moving beneath closed lids” (305). When he finds he cannot sleep, Jack sits in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and concludes that “[t]here was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze” (305). The loop of the sunset-to-sunset temporal structure has gone unnoticed by most critics who focus in on the sunset in the final chapter. There is, however, a sunset in the opening pages of the novel, long before Jack doubts his own cultivated narrative of identity: “We crowded before the window in Steffie’s small room, watching the spectacular sunset” (61). Jack’s narrative, his novel, loops back to where he was in the beginning. The sunset at the novel’s end is just as beautiful as it was in the first few pages. DeLillo’s critics focus in on this final romantic image of the sunset that Jack, Babette, and Wilder periodically sit on the highway overpass to watch. Marion Muirhead calls it a “traditional American sunset” (412), but the sunset is a sublime moment, as Lyotard defines it: a moment where the heroic impulse dangles.33 It is understood but unexplainable; it is felt not narrated and, therefore, not viable.34 In one of DeLillo’s earliest stories, he created another such natureinspired moment but there he stated his position clearly: I opened my eyes to the sight of wind-driven clouds—clouds scudding— and a single frigate bird hung on a current of air, long wings flat and still. The world and all things in it. I wasn’t foolish enough to think I was in the lap of some primal moment . . . But if I wasn’t naïve, I wasn’t in the mood, either, to stir up doubts about the place. (DeLillo’s emphasis, “Creation” 35–6)

In this early story, DeLillo is already drawing on the format that will suit him through much of his later work: how unknowing grows out

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of knowing and, perhaps, even how inseparable they are. The sublime sunset in White Noise hovers at the horizon line of knowing and the unknowable; the people on the overpass “know it,” but at the same time they wait for it to be encoded and decoded, made into either knowledge or beauty and sold back to them. Indeed, DeLillo taunts the reader and the consumer with his triptych ending. The images hint but do not assert; they seem unfinished without a narrative, and remain, essentially, unnarrated, unexplained. He begins his final chapter with the assertion “This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle” (306). But what day is “this”? It hints at possibility, a purpose, even a purposeful change, and yet it does not deliver one. The very possibility of a child riding his tricycle across a six-lane highway without being killed is “mystically charged” (306), or is it? It seems more likely that Wilder, like his step-father, “extremely deliberate in his movements,” set out “following some numbered scheme” (307), and by some miracle he succeeds only to fall off his bike at the completion of his journey. It is only at the moment when he pragmatically “rode parallel to the traffic,” that he “seemed to lose his balance, fall away, going down the embankment in a multi-colored tumble” (307). DeLillo suggests that any numbered scheme is just as likely to be dangerous, just as likely to foolishly succeed, as to prove at the final moment both painful and ludicrous. The final chapter’s triptych of scenes (reminiscent of the triptychs of consumer jargon that echoed throughout the novel) suggests a miniaturized version of Jack’s heroic journey through the novel. If Wilder’s journey is as foolishly assured as Jack’s initial narrative as “university professor at a small liberal arts college” was, then the sunset at the end is reminiscent of Jack’s endless attempts to encode his life: “The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life. The bands of color reach so high, seem at times to separate into their constituent parts” (308). These moments are frustrating because they never move beyond mere insinuations of narrative, but it is here that there is the possibility of community. The group on the overpass waits until after dark has fallen and then “restored to our separate and defensible selves” (309), they return to their cars. The group cannot hold itself together for it has no narrative other than want; but it does want, it does desire, and as a group, they return night after night waiting for a heroic narrative to which they can attach belief. In the end, although Jack becomes aware of his responsibility as an unrepressed hero, DeLillo does not imply that Jack can deliver a boon to all the heart-weary postmoderns in the audience. Rather, DeLillo implies over and over again how lovely it is to drift, if only one can,

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whether that drift is the repressive narrative regime of forgetting and non-narrative, or the succinct remembering of a series of cradle-tograve narrative identities. Jack, unable to find a narrative of religion or rationality or repression does not, however, fail. He simply has not chosen. As Curtis Yehnert writes: Yet characters such as Billy Twillig, James Axton, Jack Gladney, and Klara Sax constitute a marked contrast to DeLillo’s modernists and postmodernists. These autonomous, existential individuals do not mark a return to modernism, for they do not win their individuality through agonistic struggle, nor have they found themselves or transcended themselves. Rather, they have accepted uncertainty and mediation, the responsibility for their own self-creation. (364)

The story of Jack is the story of death—his own (“the imaging block”) and others’ (“the men in Mylex suits are still in the area” [309]). It is also the story of realizing that one arbitrarily chooses. In the end, Jack simply refuses to choose a narrative that upsets him. He is still afraid of death and for this reason refuses to engage with that narrative (the “plot” of Jack dying). Similarly, he refuses to thrust narratives upon his readers. He refuses all narratives; he accepts all narratives. In one of these narratives he is “dying man,” in another he is not. He can say “there must be narrative” as he knows that “there is belief,” but he has yet to bring them back together.

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CH A P T ER

5

M AO II: The Hero Returned The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the core of the eddy. Samuel Beckett, qtd. in Keesey, Don DeLillo 178 I want everybody to think alike . . . Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. Andy Warhol, “Warhol in His Own Words” 458

The Novel and its Hero Given that Mao II considers the loss of power of a writer’s ideas in contemporary American society, the four pages of blurbs that accompany the trade paperback are deeply ironic. The marketing of the novel seems oblivious to the content or ideas contained therein, and, in fact, strengthen DeLillo’s thesis that the author and his creation have lost control and become nothing more than consumable images on an open market. Indicative of the postromantic world that continues to conflate artists and their creations, the blurbs indifferently refer to both DeLillo and Mao II as having “nerve,” and positive reviews are shrouded in the rather disturbing rhetoric of firearms to prove this point. The San Diego Tribune assures that the “gunfire prose sets you on edge, waiting for the next word-bullet to the brain,” while the Virginian Pilot and Star Ledger will only affirm that the ideas “pack the menacing warning of a cocked trigger.” Vanity Fair reaches new heights of non sequitur in defining DeLillo as the “Lone Ranger” who “fires his perceptions like a beltload of silver bullets.” Other emotive words (“anger,” “nightmare,” “jolts,” “fierce,” “thunderstorm,” and “frighteningly lucid”) spice the bait for the prospective reader.

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How is one to approach a novel investigating the uselessness—the undangerousness—of the novelist and his ideas in contemporary society, which is itself marketed as a place of danger, terror, anarchy, and nerve? What is one to make of Vince Passaro’s review article in The New York Times entitled “Dangerous Don DeLillo”? Is he mocking the author?1 Is he mocking the ideas in the novel? Could he be serious? Or is this nothing more than an empty (even cynical) alliteration meant to sell to a Saturday afternoon audience?2 As Bill Gray implies in Mao II, an artist is always navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of creation and promotion, and it is to his or her detriment to either ignore or attempt to reconcile them.3 In White Noise, Murray Siskind (former sports reporter, now professor of culture studies) understands the Jameson depthlessness4 that generates such a clash between the created product, the advertised product, and the theorized product. He tells Jack Gladney during a discussion of popular American movies: I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old “can-do” spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last . . . It’s a conservative wishfulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again . . . It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs . . . Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun. (207)

As Murray sees it, the violence is advertising spectacle (all loud noises, twisting bodies, and machines). The “reality” for him is not in what the director created or even the advertised product. For Murray, reality is his interpretation, his theory, which sees only a reiteration of the “can-do” spirit of American nostalgia when there was always something bigger, better, or brighter to be achieved. Roland Barthes claimed that a critic does not discover the truth about a text but layers an interpretation upon it.5 I contend that there is a difference between narratives that are layered and those that are refined or cannibalized by various interested parties when desired pieces are removed from the original to become something else in their own right. To bring this back to the theory of the hero, no society has only one hero or one story; there are hundreds even thousands that create and bind selves onto a society. Heroic narratives are meant to be layered one on top of another. Beginning from the first primal narrative of the individual (“I am because I am not not”), they form protective circles of belief ranging from foundational narratives of teleological complexity

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to the more common heroic narratives of place in society and culture. Each builds on the assumptions of previous layers of identity, but ultimately creates a new identity in its own right. As these heroic narratives move away from death as the source of their journey they become weaker. One needs a story to encompass one’s own inevitable death (“I am”): one needs to believe it. It is not as urgent that one believes in one’s place in society or culture (“I am a mother,” or “I am a teacher”). Finally, what I have come to call end narratives do not layer or create at all; they refine or cannibalize the already created to make a narrative and a narrative identity that is sharper and more simple. The end narrative is self-contained and rightfully sees as a threat any narrative outside itself. Similarly, as the blurbs for DeLillo’s book show, the novel is not layered by advertising. Rather, advertising is working at odds to DeLillo. It creates its own “DeLillo” and its own “Mao II” that it can more easily control. In the world of book selling, it might be said that the created work is shadowed by both advertising and critical theory, which serve in a glancing way to promote the created work but whose main focus is on their own promoted products. It can be said that the novel is both and neither of these interpretations. The novelist is always in danger of either losing oneself or the creation to the multiplicity of interests searching for a consumable object and a consuming audience. The chasm that exists between an advertised or theorized product and the product itself is certainly not surprising to anyone living in Western capitalist society. Why, then, does the contemporary audience continue to be willingly duped by advertisers into purchasing a product that cannot fulfill their needs? A hint may be found in DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), in which he writes that advertisers do not sell an object but a dream: a dream of identity, of achieving or winning in an already ordered universe. In Americana, Glenn Yost discusses the affective nature of television commercials with David Bell: “It moves him [the watcher] from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.” “How then does a TV commercial differ from a movie? Movies are full of people we want to be?” “Advertising is never bigger than life. It tries not to edge too far over the fantasy line . . .” (281–2)

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The product tantalizes with the image of a readymade heroic narrative—a way of fashioning oneself within an identity of a hero. Perhaps even more appealing is the fact that this “narrative” is only ever implied so one need never acknowledge its falseness. One need not understand it but merely purchase the product, wear it in public, and thereby assert one’s heroic individuality. One becomes a visual advertisement not for the product but for the possibility of a heroic narrative: the dream of depth. For example, in White Noise, Jack Gladney advertises himself as professor of Hitler studies through his dark glasses and long robe, and the copy of Mein Kampf he carries around. The consumed objects have no power or meaning of their own; they only suggest depth, meaning, and heroic narrative. As Murray points out to Jack, objects have no power but are chosen because they suggest power, and perhaps even suggest a teleological heroic narrative that offers protection against death: “On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his works . . . To use him. I can admire the attempt even as I see how totally dumb it was, although no dumber than wearing a charm or knocking wood” (DeLillo’s emphasis, 274). The selling of a novel works along the same lines as any consumable object. A novel with any power is too complicated for there to be any meeting of minds about its promotion. The advertiser works to reduce the novel to a thing to be desired and purchased; the critic works to reduce the novel to a proof for a position in a larger theory. The novelist, however, who hopes to write a heroic narrative, relies upon the complexity of the reading in order to be successful. The heroic narrative welcomes doubt and argument because the reality it hopes to become is not a surface or final answer of truth. A nine-hundred-page novel reduced to a phrase printed on a t-shirt does not become the t-shirt, nor does the t-shirt become the novel. They are different products. They spring from different views of the world, perhaps even from different ways of imagining the world. In Mao II, these exclusive positions, points of view, and imaginings of what the world is and how it is patterned through the artistic and the practical, the heroic and the end narratives, are the basis of DeLillo’s concerns. In his interview with The Paris Review, DeLillo quips: “This book is an argument about the future. Who wins the struggle for the imagination of the world?” (296). The statement, although provoking, has meaning only as the starting position to a much more complicated argument. DeLillo’s postmodern insistence on concurrent, often mutually exclusive interpretations of the world would seem to contradict an impulse to struggle given the lack of common ground on

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which one might defend oneself. If there is no longer believable opposition, how can there be a struggle, let alone a “winner”? DeLillo elaborates his position when he states: There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and maybe Beckett’s—eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These men wrote a kind of world narrative . . . Today, the world has become a book—more precisely a news story or television show or piece of film footage. (“The Art of Fiction” 296)

The idea of a three-dimensional world is a helpful starting point in understanding just how DeLillo sees reality as a site of struggle. DeLillo has suggested in all his novels that there is white noise or chaos or gray space or a “whole terrible endless hugeness” (White Noise 275) in which all things exist simultaneously and from which patterns and boundaries are (arbitrarily) chosen. Through the creation of heroic narratives, the artist seeks to keep back the mystery and dread that stems from such an imaginatively wonder-full but rationally unencompassable space. Nonheroes accept or do not accept this fiction. If they accept it and believe it, they change the heroic narrative from a flat surface (a fiction) into their own multidimensional reality. The reader moves the fiction from the present tense into all time (past, present, future) and the narrative thus becomes subject to adjustment, change, or reduction. If the three-dimensional boundaries of the world are questioned, reality becomes manifest as a repressed unknown. The world and the universe in which it is couched are seen as nothing more than flat, even arbitrary fictions pulled from the unencompassable and unknowable white noise of chaos. Time itself may be a fiction that we, as a community, have agreed to call a foundation of our reality and our identities. What are we moving toward? Where are we coming from? Without time, there is no longer a separation between reality and the artist’s heroic narrative; they are both arbitrary and flat. Without three-dimensions to assert, uphold, and move reality as space through time, the heroic narratives and indeed reality itself becomes nothing more than repeating images in the present tense.6 If even time can no longer be believed, where does this leave the artist who seeks to create a heroic narrative that only comes to exist when incorporated into time? Where does this leave the audience who is responsible for believing this narrative, for believing in reality? Hero, non-hero, time and space, fiction and reality collapse into one another.7

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Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo have spent their careers looking at what it means to be and to be in the world; the idea that the world as reality has ceased to exist is a source of both fear and amusement. The world has not become chaos, but knowledge of this chaos is much more evident. The primal narrative of the individual (“I am because I am not not”) as the last defense against chaos has been challenged but not destroyed. Its implication of time inherent in the narrative of “I am” and “I am not”8 has naturally led to teleological heroic narratives creating time as cause and effect. These narratives have suffered. The implication of space inherent in the binary of “I am” and “I am not” has withstood doubt much more readily, as a pragmatic understanding of the palpably physical. The fear and dread inherent in such a feeble and terrifying starting point of identity has been instrumental in the creation of the false assumed hero in America. Where the heroic narratives have failed to re-create a narrative of being, a false heroic narrative has replaced it. That we exist is not being challenged, but why we exist is no longer even being considered. The advertised dream supplies false narratives of “how” to exist as distraction to the gaping hole in the foundation of this reality. Images of heroic narratives, occupying the present tense through a constant fashioning and refashioning of identity as space, keep one occupied. Advertising cannot fashion a narrative of depth (and, indeed, it would be counterintuitive to a capitalist agenda to do so), so in moments of doubt it does not deliver debate or explanation but a new heroic image to replace the worn-out product. Advertising or images of heroic narrative are not troubled by their falseness, their inauthenticity, or their depthlessness, their playacting, because they do not need to be anything. They do not need to be believed, only consumed by the assumed heroes. The problem of identity formation for the assumed hero is played out in White Noise where Jack Gladney manages to repress the memory of the arbitrary choices of his identity, and the knowledge that his choices were not the self-created heroic narrative but merely readymade images that when faced with the challenge of death showed themselves to be both stagnant and fragile. Gladney had a series of identities that worked because they all repressed not only the arbitrariness of their choice but their inability to cope with death. The moment an incident occurred that did not fall within the narrow scope of his purchased identity image, however, Gladney awoke to his arbitrary choices. In this awakened state he is tormented by the knowledge of his own death because without belief in time, without belief in a teleological narrative that is built to explain time and death in

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time, he is left with only the primal narrative in which the present tense individual constantly flickers between “I am” and “I am not.” Needless to say, he yearns to return to his repressed state. In Mao II, DeLillo shifts his emphasis from those who rather desperately hope only to hide behind any false image that will distract them from their own death, to those who actively seek among other things to reclaim the individual as a being in time. From behind the false mask of the assumed hero there is a reassertion of both the true non-hero and the true hero (the creating hero). DeLillo’s most sustained argument comes in the form of Bill Gray, the successful modernist author who finds himself unable to either control or escape his work and image.9 Bill was once a creator of heroic narratives but now finds himself a victim of them. He is trapped in the fictional image of the true heroic narrative he created a quarter century before. His mistake is not in creating it but in believing his creation. He came to believe along with his audience in his heroic narrative; he became his own hero. He forgot that the artist’s creation of one hero is always just a prelude to the creation of another hero and another heroic narrative. This is the responsibility of the artist. Bill, having staked his life on one heroic narrative, is trapped when the world loses its dimensions and became surface image. He, once his own hero, becomes the image of this hero. Now he is trapped, repeating his image over and over in the eternal present tense. At first it seems that Gray is the victim of a society that has appropriated him as an image of the arch-individualist hero he created in his writing, but after Gray leaves for London, it is discovered that Bill Gray is himself a created image. It is a pseudonym created by Willard Skansey Jr.10 “Bill Gray” was originally meant only as an image of “published author” that would protect the artist Willard Skansey. However, “Bill Gray” and the heroes in the novels of Bill Gray became conflated not only in the artist’s own mind but in the minds of his readers. Bill and the hero became interchangeable. Bill’s life became the heroic narrative. Even when he realized that the image was gaining power over his written narrative, Bill continued to play to his image. Willard Skansey had given himself up to a pseudonym “Bill Gray,” which became the heroic narrative of Bill Gray and finally became the Bill Gray image. There is now only an assumed hero with the false narrative image of the self-reliant hero of a “Bill Gray” novel and the false image of the forgotten artist Willard Skansey. Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death (1973; one of the few influences that DeLillo has publicly acknowledged), argues that the creative artist is the only non-repressed individual because of the ability

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to create (and not simply hide) from death. Drawing on Rank’s work, Becker asks why the artist is not psychotic being both isolated from the cultural worldview and open to experience: “The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the ‘artist-manqué,’ as Rank so aptly called him” (184). In other words, artists willingly and willfully take on the responsibility for the creation of the heroic narrative because they alone are able to face the narrative of their individuality and the chaos beyond it. In Mao II, Willard Skansey gives away his status as a true artist and, becomes, like Jack Gladney in White Noise, a consumer of the heroic image, the “artist-manqué” or the assumed hero. It is no surprise then, that “Bill Gray” writes an inferior novel in Mao II because he is only a dusty image of an author; it is Willard Skansey who is—or was—the artist. DeLillo is coy about introducing Bill Gray to the reader, and it is not until Scott discovers Willard Skansey’s birth certificate that it becomes clear that Bill Gray is an adopted persona. However, DeLillo signals this schizophrenic amalgam right from the beginning of the novel. For the first thirty pages, Bill Gray is discussed only as an object through books, gossip, letters, and files. In fact, in Scott’s references to Bill it is difficult to determine whether he is speaking of ideas, books, or the author himself. When Scott looks through a bookstore in the opening paragraphs because he “liked to check the shelves for Bill” (20), it is unclear whether he means he is looking at books written by Bill, or about Bill, or looking at books at the request of Bill. When Bill/Willard is finally introduced, the reader is not given a name but a description of “the man who stood at the window” (28). The syntax of this scene suggests that the man at the window is not entirely sure of his identity either. The drawn-out sentence argues within itself and seems unable to come to even the temporary conclusion of a period. The man at the window waits for Scott’s car to arrive, and seems confused or angry by a desire to create that is thwarted by some loosely defined fear of failure: He counted to ten and when no lights showed he began to count to ten once more, slower now, standing in the dark, making an agreement with himself that this time he would really go to the desk and turn on the lamp if the car did not appear at the top of the hill by the time he reached ten, the mud-spattered compact, and settle down to work because it was only children who thought they could make things happen by counting, and he went to ten one more time and then one more

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time and then just stood watching until the headlights finally showed, splashy white, the car dipping off the rim of the hill and the lights sweeping briefly across the scrub, and strange children at that, the squinters and crappers, the ones who ball up their fists when they cry. (28–9)11

The rambling sentence shifts through third- and first-person in a kind of dramatic dialogue. “The man” recognizes his impotence, his lack of magic, and the ridiculous childishness of attempting to randomly pattern the world. He passes off his counting as a way to avoid writing, but the fact is that the man does count and continues to count bringing into play a muted belief that he might cause the car to appear, or that some controlling order will command the car to appear within the allotted time frame and force the artist to sit down and write. Willard and Bill form a confusion of desires. Bill is afraid of change, of losing himself, and this fear is valid given that “he” is not a “self” at all but an image. “Bill Gray” is a celebrity, and in a world with no time and no memory, he exists only by his constant repetition. He understands the world and himself only in terms of success (i.e., “he is seen”) or failure (i.e., “he is unseen”). He knows how well he is “seen” because of how well his books sell, and knows that the publication of a new novel might change this, and this change might result in him becoming “unseen.” As Scott says to Brita: Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn’t published in years and years and years . . . We could make a king’s whatever, multimillions, with the new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a myth, a force. Bill gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens. (52)

Willard Skansey, on the other hand, still has some faint desire to be an artist, to “keep it simple” (161) and create, but he has so long abdicated his role as artist that it might be said that, like Scott, he is a full-time consumer of the celebrity image of “Bill Gray.” Fear of death and the chaos beyond it is not challenged and patterned but repressed. It is only when Brita arrives that Willard Skansey is shaken a little loose from his celebrity image. It is acknowledged that Brita’s photograph of him will likely replace the publication of his novel. The photograph is like an advertisement for the death, not of the author, but of the artist: it would seem to be the triumph of “Bill Gray.” The impetus for the photograph, however, is not (entirely) to serve the fame of “Bill Gray.” The image will be placed in Brita’s ongoing collection of archival images of the endangered species of writer. The fact that the photograph is intended “just for storing” (26) to end up in

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an archive as just one in a series—a list—refutes both the celebrity of Bill, and the imagized heroic narrative of the self-reliant individual that he sells. Even the arch-individualist is destined to be lost in the crowd, unseen in a dusty basement archive, or, perhaps even worse, seen as only one of many images. DeLillo does not give any overt examples of Bill Gray’s writing in Mao II, but the comparisons to J. D. Salinger are inevitable. He portrays Bill Gray and his “two lean novels” (20) as champions of individual self-creation. The very fact that Gray withdraws himself as a voice of narrative authority from his readers (by refusing to publish new works), as well as casual comparisons to the photographs of Garry Winogrand and Eve Arnold suggest a writer of the mid-1950s, middle-class, middle-American, and from a generation of existentialist writers who champion the self of self-reliance, and the authority of the individual against faceless bureaucracies and the organization man. The existentialist quest through the empty prairies seems to have been Gray’s theme. Scott meets Karen because: “[i]t was something out of Bill Gray and he should have seen it earlier. The funny girl on the tumbledown street with an undecidable threat in the air, stormlit skies or just some alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence” (77). Gray, as a proponent of the necessity for the self-reliant creation of an “authentic” identity, creates a paradox wherein his heroic narrative of community identity is based upon the individual creating his or her own heroic narrative for a community of one. His narratives were, of course, believed, accepted, and incorporated into the three-dimensional world. Later, when belief in threedimensional reality failed, the belief in the self-hero results in widespread aesthetic panic, not because Gray’s ideas are inherently dangerous but because they relied upon an unstated, stable world image. In other words, Bill Gray could espouse anarchic ideas of total self-reliance—“everyone his own hero”—within the firm and unchallenged boundaries of three-dimensional reality and the assumed systems of American identity. Self-reliance in Gray’s narrative relies upon, as it did for Emerson, a belief in certain assumed teleological narratives. These narratives protected one from truly facing primal narratives of individuality or identity or having to narrate against chaos. Instead, this “self-reliance,” while championing the self, dipped toward the metaphysical but still believed in a certain reality based upon its assumptions of, if nothing else, a community of Man moving in space and time toward some unknown goal. When these foundational narratives were challenged and lost, an individual could no longer claim self-reliance by studiously accepting or rejecting within the

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boundaries of reality, but had to create all the world, the universe and time and space itself. Ironically, as belief faded, Gray’s power grew. The audience for whom he wrote could no longer simply assert their individual selves, but needed to create all the layers of identity from and against nothing. They were pushed into a paradox of not only believing it all but needing to create it all first. Unable to write their own heroic identities, the non-heroes reduced and commodified Bill Gray’s image. He became a product and they wore him like a hat. Gray became the product that “proved” an “authentic self,” and he is worn by the assumed heroes (such as Scott) as a badge of their own false, self-fashioned selves of heroic self-reliance without the trouble of actually enacting an existentialist quest.12 The narrative reality in the author’s books is outshone by the ownership of the books themselves “in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere umbers and rusts” (20). Not the words or ideas or depth of consideration within the novels, but the Bill Gray aesthetic addresses the heroic impulse. In other words, the image of Bill Gray is an advertised object promising the dream of the self-reliant heroic narrative, and as long as the author himself remains unchanged and unseen, the dream is unchallenged and can be perpetually repackaged, re-advertised, sold, and consumed by the assumed hero.13 Bill Gray’s position is tangled. His original intention was the creation of a heroic narrative that asserted the abandonment of authority by the non-hero and the self-creation of a unique identity that would join a community of Man. Now there is a hunger for uniqueness but no sense of a community of any sort moving toward a goal in the future. Further, Gray finds that he must encourage the non-thinking consumption of his image in order to maintain the image of himself as a man of depth, self-reliance, self-awareness, and authenticity. Here, as in his earlier novel Great Jones Street (1973), DeLillo sees power and celebrity as artistic poisons that paralyze the artist’s creative ability. Bill Gray as “author” continues to believe his own lies about himself as “artist” because he is isolated in his country house with the sycophant Scott. Although even here he doubts. The house, a shrine to his creative endeavors, is more like a garbage heap, a sepulcher, and the new novel is monstrous “a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth” (55). The arrival of Karen finally challenges the tight rein the reclusive author keeps upon himself. Bill says that she is “from the future” (85) because he believes she lives without purpose or direction or a

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need for a self-reliant self. In fact, she seems to desire obliteration. This is the future Bill fears for himself, but he is wrong about Karen. She is not seeking obliteration of the self but is looking for a way to be a non-hero. She is looking for a heroic narrative to give her life boundaries, but failing to find this she does not seek to cover up her embarrassment by becoming a false hero herself. She has no desire to be an assumed hero. Instead, she continues to search for a heroic narrative, but finds only unbelievable narratives and consumable but shallow images. Sun Myung Moon offers her a narrative identity— one that may even seem teleological—that is really an advertised image of nostalgia for a childish state of belonging. He accommodates history in the present tense as “hurry-up time” (9), and promises his followers that “to become children again” (80) will ultimately free them from the confusion and fear of a false adulthood with its burden of constantly choosing identity and repressing its fictionality. He gives a narrative of sorts, but one that is not heroic. It is a refashioning of a once believed Christian teleological reality. It is reworked and simplified until it is almost a single idea, making it easy for his followers to believe or at least consume. Through such a simple idea he offers to return his followers to a childish state in which individuality and identity were one. In this case, the state will be through a single, obliterating identity as Moonie.14 As DeLillo explains in an interview, the abandonment of all layers of complex identities can be compelling: The need is not only to abandon responsibility, but to abandon one’s self, to escape the weight of being and to exist within a collective chorus—to lose not only one’s own identity but one’s own language, to be in the midst of a million people who are screaming the same word, always the same word forever. For some it amounts to a sort of ecstasy. What is it? A path of escape from pain, from regret, from sadness and from other things. (“An Interview” Nadotti 91)

Bill does not understand the needs of the non-hero (indeed, his own heroic narrative does not acknowledge they exist). He sees Karen’s desires, then, as a death wish, or a wish for obliteration of the self; he can understand only the self-heroic individual or the crushing crowd of uncountable bodies. His one defense against the crowd is the reassertion of the individual. However, contrary to John McClure’s thesis in Late Imperial Romance (1994), DeLillo is not making a case for American individualism as the new imperialism. Although Bill does seem to be following Irving Howe’s pattern of moving out into

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foreign space in hopes of reattempting the American myth of a utopic anarchistic society, DeLillo is constantly undermining Bill and his thinking. Most tellingly, Bill dies long before the novel ends. Bill Gray gets plenty of time in the novel, but he has neither the first nor the last word. It is Karen who introduces the novel with her Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium, and it is Brita who finishes the novel witnessing a wedding party in the streets of Beirut. In the opening scene, Karen, so desperate to believe, finds herself within the tight boundaries of Moon’s end narrative. She is a physical manifestation of it as one of his “children” in the wedding couples who are repeated and repeated in rows throughout the field. She waits to achieve Moon’s simplicity; she waits to be both individual and identity in a single narrative. However, she cannot achieve it. She finds herself reminiscing about baseball, about her own family, and silly personal habits she has. She says that she knows “who God is” (8), and she believes in Moon in his “three dimensions” (6), but she seems strident in her opinions as if she is trying to convince herself to believe this is true. As hard as she tries, she cannot see herself only as a Moonie; perhaps being able to see herself at all means that she could never really be only a Moonie. Karen begins the novel because she has something to tell about the struggle of the non-hero to be unembarrassed in their desire to believe. Brita ends the novel because, like Karen, she is not comfortable as the false hero or the assumed hero. Karen needs to believe while Brita, as creative artist and creative hero, needs to believe in belief. At the wedding in Beirut, there is only a single couple and its small party. Brita watches but does not participate. What she sees is a group celebrating chosen identities—husband and wife—and she finds them, ironically, “transcendent, free of limits and unsurprised to be here” (240). As they pass she sees flashes in the distance. She thinks first that they are automatic weapon fire, but is surprised to discover that they are flashes from a camera. The camera is not her own but it serves as a reminder that the world is patterned, if not through her heroic narrative then by the end narratives that reduce it. The dead city seeks life—it needs boundaries in which to believe— and it is Brita’s responsibility as a creator of heroic narratives to create. She realizes her mistake had been to wait for a message to be made manifest to her; she was waiting to believe in something. The flashes thrown into the darkness reflect her one and only duty as a creator: creation.

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The Hero in the Novel DeLillo opens Mao II with a frontal attack not on the heroic narrative, but on the end narrative. Karen is the most raw of the characters in the book. She is a traitor to the American myth of the heroic selfmade, self-aware individual; she is a traitor to the false hero—the assumed hero—who is the current incarnation of the self-reliant. She is described as a believer but this belief is raw energy that cannot find a focus. She is looking for boundaries, and when she does not find a heroic narrative to satisfy her she turns to the end narrative offered by Sun Myung Moon. It is a narrative that reduces the world to a single identity, offering the impossibility of a return to a childish state wherein the individual and the identity are merged as one. DeLillo has noted in other novels such as Great Jones Street and White Noise that this absolute state of being is achievable only by the infant and the lunatic.15 However, although the achievement is impossible, the desire is understandable as it represents the possibility of forgetting oneself and being removed from the burden of existence. Karen’s move toward this state of madness is an indication of how desperate and how lost she really is. Only the lunatic can achieve this state of one-ness, and it is only the hero who has the abilities to undertake the journey leading toward this absolute and create a way out of disappointment. The hero removes layers of identity until there is only the individual and at this point—the point of life or death— discovers that there is no oneness beyond the identity of the individual, there is only chaos. The hero is the only one with the talent to arbitrarily create a narrative to protect against this knowledge. The hero, however, must continue to live with the knowledge while the non-hero is protected by belief. Karen is not a hero, and her misdirected desires can never lead to an active discovery. She is a true nonhero and must continue to seek her hero instead. Karen willingly chooses the Moonie doctrines. She follows the Moonie end narrative (a reworking, refining, and simplifying of the teleological Christian narrative). Moon removes the issue of the lost depth of time by giving a narrative of the present tense with only an implication of the future in his “hurry up end time.” He says he will take on the burdens of his followers, leaving them like children, free within his rigidly imposed boundaries. They are expected to become one with him—not followers so much as simultaneous with him as an infant with a mother. Karen’s desire is a significant threat to her parents as they watch her from the stands in Yankee Stadium. They not only lose a sense of

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her as their daughter, but her blatant desire to reduce herself is a betrayal of the American utopia of self-creation that they have purchased. Her father, Rodge, finds he cannot incorporate Karen’s choice into his self-image even though he is “not unequipped for the rude turns of normal fraught experience. He’s got a degree and a business and a tax attorney and a cardiologist and a mutual fund and whole life and major medical” (3–4). DeLillo puts Karen at the very start of the novel because she represents the frustration of the assumed hero who faces the paradox of purchasing mass-produced images of unique identity to keep up a surface protection of the individual. She rejects the simulacral selves of her parents, and yet she foolishly follows Moon’s end narrative with its easy, one word chanting in an effort to return to an impossible absolute state. She is the raw heroic impulse looking for a true heroic narrative to encompass her desires. Karen’s parents are referred to as “Karen’s daddy” and “Wife Maureen” (3), which suggests the kind of titular roles they play in Karen’s life. The family is made up of players. The very lack of naming in the Moon cult is meant to relieve Karen of this role-playing while providing a place within something larger than one’s own particular self. As Karen is told by an ex-member during her deprogramming: “The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the fate of mankind” (82). Karen fails in her efforts with Moon. She is unable to fully abandon herself to him and wonders if she is “inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith” (78). The more she desires to become “one” with Moon and his doctrines, the more it becomes apparent that she cannot. Notably, while in the cult she had head pains, “an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brainmade, the eerie gleam of who you are” (78), and this pain appears again in her deprogramming sessions. It seems that either in or out of the cult, Karen must playact certain roles. She can never fully abandon herself; she can never fully be under the tutelage of one end narrative of identity (Moon) or the series of images of identity (daughter to Karen’s daddy and Wife Maureen). Yet, she still desires to do so.16 James Bloom notes that Karen is a “partly deprogrammed Moonie” (505), but she is also a party deprogrammed assumed hero. Karen is a member of the audience to the lost heroic narrative; she is a non-hero who does not have heroic aspirations. She has no ability or desire to create or even explain. She can only wait and be ready to believe. In Brita’s apartment she watches crowds on television with the sound off, she sees them as beautiful images but they offer no narrative or pattern or explanation. She is always only watching and

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believing: “thin boundaried. She took it all in, she believed it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air” (119). She is affected by everything; she is raw and her desire is sincere, but because she cannot create she must rely upon the direction of others. She needs to find or be given a system or a pattern that will offer protection, explanation, and belief in reality to relieve her of the constant reminder of her individual self. When she sees the Khommenhi funeral, the view of death renews her anxiety: “If others saw these pictures, why is nothing changed, where are the local crowds, why do we still have names and addresses and car keys?” (191). She has no narrative in which to place these events and the TV images supply her with none. This moment of crisis leads her back to the only narrative she had come close to believing. She reverts to her Moonie incarnation and descends on Tompkins Square Park proselytizing. She is looking for people to listen: “She had Master’s total voice ready in her head” (194). But she has obviously not incorporated Moon’s beliefs so much as taken bits and pieces of them. Tellingly, her patter is the patter of her Korean master. She mimics but she cannot be: “She said, ‘For there is single vision now. Man come to us from far away. God all minute every day. Hurry-up time come soon’” (193). The people she approaches in the park, however, are not, even in their abject state, willing to give themselves up to her or Moon. They are living the American Dream. They guard their uniqueness in a grotesque image of the assumed hero. Omar, the fourteen-year-old drug dealer, tells Karen on her first day at the park: “Once you live in the street, there’s nothing but the street . . . The littler the shithole, the more it takes up your life . . . Live in a shithole, it takes up your day. They cut the shithole in half, you got to go twice as hard to keep it so it’s liveable” (152). These people, living in tents and cardboard boxes, do not see themselves as masses of the homeless. They have nothing in common but a desire to protect their own cultivated space. Karen’s betrayal of the American Dream as well as her desire to be part of a community as a non-hero is seen in her reaction to the demonstration in Tiannamen Square, which she watches on Brita’s television. Karen’s affinity is not for the “motley crowd” demonstrating for democracy, but the “crowd where everyone dresses alike” (177). With the sound off and only the images to read, the motley crowd on the television seems to be much like the homeless at the park. They are trapped in jealous protection of their right to self-definition; they are solitary, untouching, even dangerous to one another as they defensively guard their own little space.17 The crowd where everyone dresses

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alike is the crowd of identity: identical, undifferentiated, one. Significantly, Karen keeps changing channels to see the troops. It reminds her of Moon: We are protected by the total power of our true father. We are the total children. All doubt will vanish in the arms of total control. (179)

Karen wants to be in the troops, but as much as she wants the image, the image is not a narrative. It advertises a dream; it allows her nothing but the chance to dream. She watches, she believes, she dreams but there are no boundaries by which she may live, no narrative structure to incorporate and make a reality. DeLillo’s relationship with the commodified world and the image is complex for as much as the commodified world offers only a playacted image of identity, it is all the identity that, seemingly, is on offer. Like Saul Bellow, DeLillo follows a history of pragmatic American authors whose imagination is both in awe of and in revolt against the commodified world that so blatantly manipulates the impulse to the heroic narrative. It would seem that there is no space, no time, no image that could any longer represent “authenticity” in America. The American self in this crisis has held together only through shallow end narratives or voiceless images offering a dream of authenticity. In Mao II, George Haddad calls this “inertia-hysteria” (157); the result of a cycle of dreaming and rude awakenings. In his play, Valparaiso (1999), DeLillo’s main character, Michael Majeski, embraces the media machine that first reports and then endlessly repeats his trivial anecdote of getting on the wrong plane. As the play progresses it becomes increasingly clear that Michael mistakes the activity, the repetition of his story, for a controlling force, for an agency with meaning and pattern to answer his needs. He feels that he has achieved a kind of pinnacle of American heroism because a moment of his life is told and retold. He is mistaken. He is merely a celebrity. The repeating story does not offer a depth of narrative to either him or the audience. The story itself becomes merely an image, an image of Michael, and when he is no longer seen, the story is no longer important to anyone because there is no lingering meaning to it. And what happens to Michael? In the end, it becomes clear that Michael is using the endless, numbing repetition of his media image to hide from certain personal tragedies that he does not know how to address. In a world of repeating images, it should come as no surprise that Andy Warhol is a touchstone in Mao II. Warhol was a mastermind at

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commodification, serialization, and hiding in a crowd.18 One may even be convinced, as Jeffrey Karnicky is, that Warhol was successful in his desire to immure himself within the image: “No Warholian surface can be considered an original for seriality itself creates Andy Warhol” (341). In DeLillo’s novel, Scott is the first of the characters to encounter Warhol. He drops by what is most likely the 1989 retrospective of Warhol’s works at The Museum of Modern Art before he meets Brita in the first chapter. Scott’s initial impression seems to be negative. He has “never seen work that was so indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it” (20–1). The images were irregular with “deep streaks marking the canvas.” Warhol is the herald for the artist abandoning the audience and their need for narrative to accommodate their own heroic impulses. The artist who no longer believes that art has access to three-dimensional reality folds in upon himself. Warhol’s work has no interest in an audience, there is only the art, the repeating image in an eternal present tense. However, Scott, having come of age as an assumed hero, is not disturbed by Warhol’s abandonment because he is not looking for narratives. He is only ever shopping for images. He finds that “[w]ork that was unwitting of history appealed” to him (21). Appropriately, Scott purchases a handy postcard image of Mao to carry away with him. In its travel from East to West, the ideas of Mao have been replaced by his image. In China, Mao is the Little Red Book, while in America he is an Andy Warhol postcard. Warhol appears in a very different context when Brita attends a gallery opening later in the novel. Brita does not enjoy her experience and finds that Warhol, contrary to his own assertion of being “nutty” (qtd. in Osteen 200), is not “funny” (134). She crosses the room to look at the lurid portrait of Russian president Michal Gorbachev titled “Gorby I.” Instead of feeling “a curious calm,” as Scott had as he abandoned himself to the overwhelming visual repetition of Mao, Brita is angry as she attempts to understand the idea of it. She sees repetition not in the work itself but in the “six thousand Warhol experts living within a few square miles of this gallery” who had made every possible argument. The work is a parody of itself, and rather than seeing it as opening into something new, Brita sees it as exhausted and terminal: “[S]he could detect a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure” (134). Warhol is someone who “steal[s] auras” (134); he is not nutty at all but dangerous and macabre with his aesthetic of “death glamour” (134). It is what Warhol does not address, indeed, does not acknowledge, that Brita fears. The suggestion is that Warhol cannot

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create at all: his Gorbachev like Karen’s Tiannamen Square crowds are merely repeating colors. The desire to be enveloped by the repeating image is strong because it implies some statement, but it is not a narrative. Like Henderson’s “I want” there is a sincere desire but the images only prove death, only prove the need to have something more than this death, some way to narrate it or build a wall of protection against it. Ironically, although their ideas would seem opposite Bill has much in common with Warhol. Warhol desired to completely fold up into his work. He desired to become pure surface and, in his death, he may have succeeded. As Brita remarks: “He was all here now, reprocessed through painted chains of being” (135). Like Karen, Warhol’s lack of a heroic narrative to give boundaries to his existence leaves him only with the desire to be relieved of the desire to explain himself. Bill does not agree. He could never accept surface as “being”; he espouses the unique individual, the self-reliant hero that, in turn, demands a belief in three-dimensional space with a purposeful movement through time. Warhol, however, was always very clear about the achievability of disappearance, and the unconquerable difference between Andrew Warhola and “Andy Warhol.” “Warhol cunningly exploited the culture of simulacra by constructing a silkscreen to hide behind; unlike Bill Gray, he never entirely believed his own self-dramatizations” (Osteen 200). Warhol was aware of the narcissistic gesture of his work folding not into a three-dimensional reality but into the created identity of Andy Warhol. His unachievable goal was to be merged with his creation. Warhol’s statement that “the more the meaning goes away, the better and emptier you feel” (457) is echoed in Scott’s account of the exhibit. But for all this desire for obliteration by the surface, Warhol knew that he could never hope actually to accomplish his goal. In fact, he always assiduously protected himself from merging with Andy Warhol or what this persona created. He said: “You should always have a product that has nothing to do with who you are . . . you [should] never start thinking that your product is you, or your fame, or your aura” (459). Unlike Gray, Warhol never failed to understand the difference between the Warhol that is sold and the Warhol that sells. To force their combination is not to disappear but to destroy, or as DeLillo has consistently written, it is the difference between “nuttiness” and madness. Willard Skansey may be mad then as he withdraws completely into his own created self-heroic image of “Bill Gray.” Bill Gray’s downfall is almost tragic in that he is destroyed because of his seriousness; his creative instinct is not playful like Warhol’s and he believes his own false image of himself. It is the fact that he cannot

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truly become his image that haunts him. Beneath “Bill,” Willard still hopes to create and give to an audience. This search for, as Bellow calls it, “real reality” precludes any sort of irony or play. It is terrible, then, for Gray to be destroyed by irony. When he emerges from hiding and faces his old friend and editor, he is greeted not as the young artist he once was but with an acknowledgment of the image he has become. Charlie tells him: “You look like a writer. You never used to. Took all these years” (95). Bill’s failure to come to terms—even ironic terms—with himself is the source of his stagnation. He thought he was avoiding brash consumerism by creating a pseudonym. Unfortunately, the pseudonym “Bill Gray” behind which the artist could remain free, replaced the artist. When the novel begins, the melding of image and artist is almost complete; to abandon the image at this point is to face abandoning the self. However, Willard still exists as a muted desire to destroy the Bill image. When Bill walks out of his editor’s office and joins “the surge of the noontime crowd” (103), there are two simultaneous moods. There is a sense of triumph as Bill abandons the sycophant Scott and reaches back into the world, back toward an audience. There is also a sense of Bill’s own fear of crowds as an obliterating force and, perhaps as Bill himself predicted, the photographs Brita had taken of him “are the announcement of my dying” (43). It is a heroic gesture for Willard to attempt to break free from “Bill Gray” but he needs more than a gesture. He must create a narrative of return. Instead, he falls hopelessly into nostalgia for a time before Bill Gray. In the end, he is able to physically destroy “Bill Gray” but his recapture of Willard, Jr. remains hopelessly immersed in the golden memories of childhood family life. As Keesey points out, the memories of Willard signal a hope for change, but Bill’s physical destruction precludes any further insight or artistic creation from his awakened sensibility: Bill recognizes himself and his family in sentences that preserve individuality even as they bring people together, like the nostalgically hopeful line, “Measure your head before ordering” (216). This is the kind of sentence that Bill has always wanted to find a way to include in his writing . . . As he dies, Bill is still trying to wake up and write a sentence like this. (193)

For Bill, his childhood and the family of his childhood are representative of the perfect union of the individual and the identities that protect one from the raw individual. It is an understanding that is far

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from the mature Willard who would create Bill Gray’s heroic narrative of solitary self-reliance where one was alone “on the tumbledown street with an undecidable threat in the air” (77). In his childhood, Willard’s world was not a monologue but a dialogue. He remembers his father’s insistence that “[w]e need to have a confab, Junior” (216). Even his naming as “Junior” places him in a historical time line and a defined, boundaried space. Willard/Bill never gets beyond the gesture and the dream. He never pushes hard enough or in the right direction. Even his death is not violent but a kind of mistake. His sense of direction is vague, and his movement does not clarify but (as it did for E.M. Forster’s Mrs. Moore) creates more of a muddle.19 He cannot create a pattern and withdraws instead into a happier, well-structured past. There is little expectation that Bill could get to Beirut either physically or imaginatively. He does not go toward the future, but back toward the past, repeating the narrative of “individual consciousness” he has always written, dreaming of a time when he was sure it existed. In many ways, Bill ends his life stuck in the modernist failure of the heroic return; his death has a striking visual similarity to Fitzgerald’s use of the dash that brings on the ending of The Great Gatsby (1925): —tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (189)

Bill never makes it out of that long dash, the incomplete sentence.20 When the boat docks, Bill Gray’s body is found by thieves who steal his documents and, one would think, his identity. Perhaps one might say that Willard Skansey has simply taken on one more pseudonym: John Doe. Who has actually died? Willard Skansey for all practical purposes, died years before when he abandoned his name and became Bill Gray. “Bill Gray” does not die because death for a celebrity can only be through ceasing to be seen and Bill’s books are all still in print. In fact, with his identity papers stolen, there will never be closure to the disappearance of “Bill Gray” and this mystery will only add to his mystique. “Bill Gray” as image is made even stronger, even more complete, through the physical death of its carrier. In the same way that Andy Warhol was never really complete until he finally (in death) relinquished his claims on the complicating and confusing self that was not an easy, flat, serialized image, so, too, does Bill Gray finally become pure.

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It is a mistake, perhaps, to give, as Bizzini has done, the title of “hero” to Bill Gray. His lack of action or self-realization, not to mention the fact that he neither begins nor ends the narrative, would indicate that if a heroic character is to be found, it will not be in the confusing amalgam that is Bill Gray. His narcissism is not artistic, and he consistently fails to seek either his individual self, or an audience for whatever narrative he might create. As Willard/Bill fades in the final scene, one wonders if he should be categorized as just one of those people on the street with one good book in him. As he told George Haddad: “Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it” (159). On this long journey to the East, there is one person who actually lands in Beirut and that is Brita, the world traveler and photographer who adopted New York as her “state religion” (24). She is similar to Bill Gray in many ways: she is the image of self-reliance. She is divorced, has no children or family. When Scott first meets her, she is upset at having to be escorted to Bill’s hideout and says, “I would prefer to get there on my own” (23). Her instincts as a photographer seem sincere but a little outdated, as she hopes to capture pure authenticity by photographing the deranged and the derelict. Mark Osteen sees her as “a weathervane . . . but also a potential healer who can diagnose if not treat the contagion” (210). Brita has the talent and the desire to create a heroic narrative, but she is working only from an image. She, like Bill, is a false hero, an assumed hero who has an image of herself as a serious artist. It becomes a question of whether she can assert herself as an artist, a creator of heroes, and become the hero of DeLillo’s novel, or whether she will fall into a muddle as Bill does. She begins her career in New York City where she surreptitiously photographs the destitute on the streets. She is looking for them to give her some “truth” or authentic narrative but her aversion to their pain is not creative. The photographs themselves tell her nothing. In fact, when she looks at the developed pictures, she finds that the photographs are always about her. She cannot stop arranging them into shapes and design. Somewhere between what she thinks to be the source of an authentic narrative spontaneously delivered up to her and the images that develop, there enters inauthenticity. Her inauthenticity. Everywhere is her own viewpoint, her own self. Everything she makes is “so fucking pretty” (24), she says; she is not realizing these strangers but creating them. In effect, the authentic brutality is not creative in itself; she is creative.

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She is still fighting against the creative when she explains to Scott her motivation behind photographing writers. She is working toward an anti-authentic. She tells Scott: “I don’t want to do pictures that make a revelation” (26). This raises the question that if she is attempting to create an image that is neither pretty nor a revelation, what is her intention? Brita’s reaction to Warhol’s work is telling. Brita by her own account is working with lists and serializations in her creation of a “species count” (26) of authors. Warhol’s work is also anti-authentic, antirevelation. When she sees his work, however, it reminds her of death. It is, in fact, a reminder of the need to create against death. Warhol’s repetitions and serializations are like a wound prematurely scabbed over. She feels a negative reaction not only to Warhol’s “death glamour” (134) but to the “Warhol experts” because “all the things had been said and all the arguments made” (134). In effect, Brita will not accept Warhol’s soft nihilism, but neither can she believe the experts in whatever narrative they may espouse. The wound, the death itself, remains. The “play-death cosmetics, the caked face-powder and lemon-yellow hair color” (134) of Gorbachev’s image do not dissolve either Gorbachev or Warhol, but vividly portray the point at which creative abilities have failed. Politics, celebrity, and theory all fail to answer anything. Warhol may mock death but he cannot create against it; he cannot encompass the fear of it within a heroic narrative. Brita realizes that a list or image, even endlessly repeated, carries only the illusion of narrative. Her photographs of writers can never replace the published books. As she herself says “what’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work?” (26). What do images do then but hint at a pattern and add confusion. Her confusion. She tells Scott that she has been told her series of writer’s images could later be used as “conceptual art,” but Brita says “I don’t see the point myself” (26). There is no intrinsic narrative hidden in a series or repetition. She betrays a fear of creation even while fumbling to create. She backs away from it by cataloguing authors for archival purposes, or randomly photographing the destitute. Like “the man at the window” that is Bill Gray, she is hoping some outside force will give her direction, give her a narrative, or at the very least give her an assurance there is a reason to risk and write such a narrative. Brita and Bill are aligned in their narcissism and loneliness. They are both heroes who have allowed themselves to be assumed heroes consuming an image of their own unique artistic selves. Bill, however, is famous. Brita is not burdened by celebrity or the need to market her own image; unlike Gray, she does not believe in any of it.

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She is more suspicious, more careful and, finally, more apathetic than Gray. She gives priority to a self-reliant image of her self, but does not quite believe in it; she is haunted by something beyond it. She is hoping to find some kind of community and community identity. Thus, when Bill fails to reach the terrorist leader and walk “into a place and [tell] them who he is” (215), it is important that Brita will do so. By the time Brita arrives in Beirut she has given up her writer’s project: “She doesn’t know how it happened but they came to a quiet end. They stopped being the project she would follow forever” (229–30). She has abdicated her role as artist and taken a job as a magazine photographer. Notably, Brita arrives separately from the journalist whose article she is illustrating. She no longer has any interest in the ideas behind or in front of her images. She has, in a sense, completely withdrawn into her camera. This final section of the novel is deceptively ambiguous, and McClure’s accusation that Brita’s meeting with Rashid is successful demands certain assumptions: DeLillo deserves credit for struggling in work after work to represent the world that is being forged by Western capitalism and its adversaries. But this makes his capitulation to imperial rhetoric—to an updated version of the familiar Cold War romance that casts America’s adversaries as the villains in a romance of Western resistance to rationalization, and America as the leader of a global crusade for democracy—doubly disappointing. (McClure’s emphasis, Late Imperial 150)

I would argue that DeLillo has carefully avoided McClure’s charge by having Bill Gray die before he lands in Beirut. American supremacy is held only tentatively by the globe-trotting Brita, and the confrontation between Brita and Abu Rashid reaches no conclusion. Certainly, when Brita arrives at Abu Rashid’s squalid headquarters, she has already withdrawn so far into a protective narcissistic shell that one might believe this to be an example of her (American) strength. However, as the British rock star Watney tells Bucky in Great Jones Street, the artist does not have power in any physical sense: “The presidents and the prime ministers are the ones who make the underground deals and speak the true underground idiom . . . Your audience is not the relevant audience. It doesn’t make anything. It doesn’t sell to others. Your life consumes itself. Chomp” (232). The artist does not sell to its audience, it is not looking for followers or consumers but believers. There is a difference between believers and followers; a believer incorporates, a follower imitates. An audience of

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followers is an audience of consumers; it is an audience for cults, politics, and other end narratives. If the artist withdraws (as Bill does) or abdicates the role (as Brita does) because there is no more belief in a three-dimensional world and no way for a fiction to become reality in time, the end narrative is not similarly paralyzed. This narrative is relieved when rid of the burden of the confounding artistic confrontation. Without the harassment of the created as challenge to the established, the end narrative is free to shuffle what is already available. It is free to manipulate the world with impunity, and condense old ideas into simple actions, a single belief, an individual’s single identity. 21 With no memory and no past, the end narrative is free to be illogical or change an argument at random as long as the current narrative remains a uniting force. In a world where the artist no longer challenges or creates, the politician gains power because, even in light of illogic or violence or absurdity, the political end narrative offers some respite from doubt and chaos. The artist and the politician have never, and should never find a platform on which to meet. The artist writes a heroic narrative of identity, and another, and another. There is never a single, definable, absolute identity that will do all the work of protecting and explaining the complex human self. The heroic narratives build up layers of identity; they do not seek a single answer. The hero is defined not only by the loop of destruction, creation, and return, but by the need to continually raise a voice even in self-contradiction. The political end narrative has no such hero as movement. It seeks not to complicate or challenge but to refine the world into a single, consumable narrative idea. When Abu Rashid and Brita meet, the politician simply dismisses complexities or questions that are outside the narrow parameters of the identity he sells. Abu tells Brita: “Don’t bring your problems to Beirut” (232). The struggle for the imagination of the world cannot be fought between the hero and the politician; it must be fought through the non-hero, through the audience, through the believers and the followers. When Brita arrives she discovers that Beirut itself is an end narrative. It has one narrative of identity: “Beirut.” Unlike New York where tragedy and disintegration are described rather breezily as “just like Beirut” (146), Beirut is. American place (simile) has given way to European idea (metaphor). Beirut’s is-ness is akin to Baudrillard’s third-level simulacra.22 There is no authentic or “inauthentic” here. Brita sees “a human skull nailed to a stucco wall and then there are pictures of skulls, there is skull writing, there are boys wearing T-shirts

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with illustrated skulls, serial grids of blue skulls” (229). The posters of the leaders are attacked just as the leaders are attacked. John Frow’s analysis of White Noise works just as well in DeLillo’s Beirut: “The world is so saturated with representations that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate primary actions from imitations of actions” (421). Rashid gives his children an “identity outside . . . the helpless forgotten lives of their parents and grandparents” (233) who had fallen under the spell of the American dreaming without the ability to purchase and consume. He gives them not a heroic narrative of being but a tight end narrative with which to move about the world. Beirut shows all the signs of a third-level simulacrum because it has been stripped of competing narratives or veneers of narrative. Beirut does not have the luxury of dreaming its way through a consumer culture. It has been pushed down and forced to face the only identity left available—“individual”—with its story of life and death (“I am because I am not not”). What Brita sees, however, is a city that has found a way to protect itself, not with heroic narratives of complex community identities, but with an end narrative with its simple, single focus. How is one to condemn the terrorist who steps in where the artist fears to tread? The false hero, the assumed hero with the inauthentic self-reliant image, prideful of a unique individualism meets in Beirut the truth of this individualism. Here, a city that has lost its heroic narratives has been forced to face its own death and create what it can. It, like America, has failed. But unlike America it has not replaced failure with paradox and purchased false images of unique individualism. Beirut does not have this luxury. It has turned to the only leader it can find and the only narrative of being it can find: the terrorist with the political end narrative. When Brita arrives she is not only hated because she lives under a false image of herself as hero, but because she, as an artist and thus one capable of creating a heroic narrative, has abandoned her duty. One cannot glorify her as indicative of a great imperialism as McClure implies. She does not triumph here. The artist must challenge and create or else the world is left to the salesmen and the politicians who need not create but only gather and cull. In America there are the salesmen, in Beirut there are the terrorists. Brita senses this and is both guilty and defensive upon her arrival in Beirut and at Rashid’s headquarters. She is aware of Rashid’s shortcomings: he is not an artist and he has not been able to imagine Beirut outside of Beirut. He is not Marx; he is not even Mao; he is Mao II. He is a salesman who needs Brita to promote his work, and he is a politician offering an identity to those facing nothing but their

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own death. His very existence mocks Brita’s tightly held image of selfreliant heroic individuality. His is not a creative act but a controlling act; he does not seek to unite individual and community in a heroic narrative. He writes the political end narrative that, if not eliminating, at least ignores the individual in order to create a singular, simple identity. He narrows and flattens Beirut into a chanting phrase but one that retakes pattern from an old heroic narrative. He allows the audience to become followers, abandoning themselves, but with purpose and direction. Brita and Rashid cannot really meet because they have no common ground. Brita’s initial position is dismissive: “Look, I know that everybody who comes to Lebanon wants to get in on the fun but they all end up confused and disgraced and maimed, so I would just like to take a few pictures and leave, thank you very much” (232). Rashid can be much more generous because he is impermeable to Brita’s point of view: He looks into the camera and says, “Tell me, do you think I’m a madman living in this hellish slum and I talk to these people about world revolution?” “You wouldn’t be the first who started this way.” “Just so. This is exactly just so.” He seems genuinely gratified, confirmed in his mission. (233)

Although (or perhaps because) Rashid’s ideas are not unique, he sees them very clearly. Because he is a politician, Brita’s accusation of his lack of creativity is taken as a compliment and not the insult she intends. Rashid’s obliviousness to Brita’s point of view runs alongside his repeated calls for her engagement: “Tell me if you think I’m mad” (233, 234). Brita has no way to win this power struggle. She silently takes his picture. Rashid’s final comment to Brita that “[t]his room is the first minute of the new nation” is met with Brita’s continued silence, although to herself she calls it “[e]loquent macho bullshit” (236). This may be true, but rather than engaging in a dialogue with Rashid, she hides within her camera. As in all her previous attempts to let her camera (and the image) alone become a kind of argument, she is mistaken: On an impulse she walks over to the boy at the door and removes his hood. Lifts it off his head and drops it on the floor. Doesn’t lift it very gently either. She is smiling all the time. And takes two steps back and snaps the picture. She does this because it seems important. (236)

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Brita’s impulse to engage not with Rashid but with the audience (the boy) is intuitively astute, but she has no idea why she is doing it. Brita’s assault on the boy might be a statement of priority of the individual over the communal identity but she has no plan and no idea what she really means. Perhaps, like her sneaky pictures of the destitute on New York streets, she thinks that shooting someone without their consent captures an authenticity or a hidden and unique individuality that disappears when looked at directly. It may be that Brita thinks that the snapshot will prove her unspoken point to Rashid. Perhaps, she means to prove that beneath Rashid’s spurious identity there remains the boy’s individuality that a hood cannot erase. The boy’s action and Brita’s reaction add a level of complexity to the situation. Whatever Brita may have intuitively been feeling as she snapped his picture, she was unprepared to engage in a dialogue. Although she removes the child’s hood, she evidently saw the boy only as a hood. The boy, however, clearly sees and thinks about Brita. He is “calm and completely aware” and he knows why he acts: He knows her. He wants her to think she is someone he has thought about and decided to hate. His hair is matted and sweaty from the hood and he hates her not because she has humiliated him but because he knows who she is, there is pleasure in his knowing, a violence in the eye that shows how hate and rage repair the soul. (237)

Brita is surprised to be seen by the boy, and even more surprised to be engaged with in a violent way. Even as the boy attacks her, Brita “thinks it is only seconds before the interpreter will step between them” (237). No one does step between them and Brita, in a moment of bathetic violence “slaps him across the face” (237). She waits “for the boy to look at his father for an explanation, but he stares at her evenly with new contempt, new indulgence in his hatred, and she sees him get ready to come at her once more” (237). The boy must be told twice to leave the room, but finally he “picks up his hood and leaves” (237). Brita’s final action is to do what Bill could not: “Feeling detached, almost out-of-body, she walks over to Rashid and shakes his hand, actually introduces herself, pronouncing her name slowly” (237). The handshake that accompanies Brita’s reassertion of her individual self, seems to acknowledge the power of Rashid and, perhaps, her envy at his clear ability to win his audience. If Brita has proved anything to anyone in this scene, it is only to herself and only what she had already felt when she had walked into the room.

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It is difficult to read Rashid’s intentions or understanding in this scene because he is so thinly drawn. Mark Osteen is correct when he writes that Rashid “could be replaced by somebody else with a stronger image or more memorable slogans . . . He is not Mao but Mao II—a simulacrum, a circulating image soon to be supplanted by another” (211–12). Rashid, however, seems to be aware of his disposability, as evidenced by his asking for Brita’s input on whether he is mad. His indifference to the plagiarism of his cause and the production of hostages would also support this idea. Rashid (like Brita) has not succumbed to his celebrity status. Like Warhol, he is aware that he is not the same as the photograph on the boy’s shirts. And he, like the photograph, can be easily replaced. Rashid is both a savior and a dictator with his singular vision. To Brita, the artist, he a source of both terror and envy. The young age of his followers is representative not only of the limits of his authority but also of the limits of his idea. If Moon offered the opportunity or the dream of a return to a childhood state where the responsibility of managing chaos is removed, and where individuality and identity are the same, Rashid’s children are arrested in this state. Like Beirut itself, the boys are reduced to a single wholeness, one that is wrapped around “hate and rage” (237). As terrifying (and, perhaps, foolhardy) as this effort may seem, Rashid is compelling to the American imagination because of his anarchy and his fraternity of brothers. The anarchic utopia where “state” and self are organic and compatible has been achieved. But this utopia is also a dystopia. The scene between Brita, the boy, and Rashid is not won by anyone. However, Brita is forced to take the camera away from her face in order to engage. Her answer to Rashid (the stating of her name) is not an idea, of course, but merely a gesture. It is a small but significant movement in Brita’s position as an artist. Osteen writes that Brita’s “skeptical gesture of defiance sketches some hope for oppositional authorship” (212). At this stage there is little authorship, rather something more nascent. Indeed, it may be the very minuteness of her gesture that actually allows Brita to think it possible. The final few pages are tentative. DeLillo’s tendency to push for the transcendent ending is always tempered by the practical reality of the situation. Brita’s vision of Beirut has not substantially changed since her first impressions. Prompted by the discovery in her borrowed apartment of a bottle of melon liqueur she has only ever seen advertised in “airports and convention centers, the walk-through places of the world,” she concludes that “everybody’s nowhere” (239).

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She is, in fact, somewhat shocked to see a product she had assumed to be pure advertisement (i.e., a simulacrum) as the only available drink in her abandoned apartment. Indeed, this discovery, as well as the discovery that the graffiti artist “Ali 21” has made it into the Christian quarter, undermine her assumption that Beirut is “that lunar part of us that dreams of wasted terrain” (239). Beirut is, perhaps, not only about Beirut (or death). The graffiti artist, like herself, begins with only his name, slowly repeating it in Arabic, French, and English, holding his place and changing it at the same time. Brita is pulled toward the simplicity of the narrowed space of Beirut with its one narrative (war), its one emotion (hate), and its one name (Beirut). Indeed, it may be that the voices “calling across the leveled city” have reduced language itself to one word: “Our only language is Beirut” (239). She thinks that “war is so fucking simple” (239) and repeats that she “wants to step inside it” (238). Again, Brita is seduced by the idea of destruction as a possibility for baseline reality, or authenticity. Again, the movement toward destruction is not enough for her to write a narrative of return. She drinks her liqueur and goes to bed. She is woken in the middle of the night. Like the non sequitur liqueur, like the small insistence of “Ali 21 Against the World,” there appears at 4 a.m. a wedding party under escort by a heavily graffitied tank. The party is well-dressed and, Brita notes, “unsurprised to be here” (240). It is DeLillo’s choice of the word “unsurprised” that gives this moment its greatest weight. Elsewhere, DeLillo has suggested that the state of being unsurprised is the state of childhood. It is a state in which one feels correct in the circumstances one may find oneself. The wedding party has managed to incorporate the stifling “is-ness” of Beirut and its single end narrative into something else. The objects that upon Brita’s arrival signaled a lack of correlation between signifier and signified, which seemed to have reduced the world to a single image of death, have been co-opted by the wedding party. Here is a tank, an “old Soviet T-34” (239) and alongside it are “girls in pretty dresses and white knee-stockings” (240). The signifier of war and death is co-opted to become an escort for a party that is “surpassingly alive” (240). A new identity has been chosen, not to the obliteration of the old but as part of the palimpsest that is the complexity of being. To be alive is contained in the same narrative as to not be alive; it is always swinging like a pendulum from one to the other. One must build upon it in order to live and not merely survive. The narrative may be a simple political one where one ends in the “family” of Rashid, or the family of Mao, or one may find a more

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complicated narrative of family with bride and groom, children, and guests building upon the individual and expecting that it, too, will be built upon. The wedding works well as the location for the heroic and the end narrative to fight for their audience. It represents a choosing of identity as well as a willing suppression of the individual for a role of “husband” or “wife.” The ceremony itself is the creation of a new identity around one’s individuality. It is for this reason that Moon and Rashid’s insistence that their followers be or become children makes no sense. It is an attempt to move backward, closer to death. But one cannot obliterate the self. If one is aware of life and death then it is already too late to return to a childhood oneness of being. If Beirut is the microcosm of white noise where everybody is nowhere, and if Beirut is forming a single end narrative identity of hate to protect against individual death and the white noise beyond the individual, the marriage refutes the supremacy of either chaos or the singular. It also refutes Brita’s insistence of a spontaneous authentic narrative that exists where the individual faces death. The wedding is a performance: husband and wife are roles to be played. Indeed, the scene itself is pageant-like as it moves below Brita’s window. It is a melding of the image and the narrative behind it. It presents itself as image, but guarantees a narrative of community and identity for one’s engagement with it and belief in it. The moment of celebration is, however, “over too soon” (240). It may be, as Baudrillard writes, that: “[i]f one reflects upon it, we exist only in the brief instant when we are seduced—by whatever moves us: an object, a face, an idea, a word, a passion” (Ecstasy 69). Unfortunately, you cannot live in that moment. There must be a created world that, if not ecstatic, is narrated, complex, open to belief as well as doubt. Outside of these moments of seduction there must be places to hide and not one place but several, allowing one to move in and through the hundreds of layers of identity that create a state of being. A ceremony is not a narrative but the signifier of a narrative. The ceremony does not protect one or give a narrative of identity. It does not even create community. It is a sign that belief in this belief of this narrative of identity already exists. The wedding party passes. There is a flash in the distance. Brita mistakes the light for gun fire “but all the bursts are in one spot and there is no sound” (240). It is a camera. This image—this silent image of an image maker—seems to mock Brita’s moment of transcendence. Or, perhaps, it mocks the length of time it has taken her to realize that it was never her point of view that needed analysis, but her point

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of viewing. Her starting point, the point at which she could truly become creative, was endlessly deferred by her point of view. She was looking for a point of authenticity, an authentic individual on the point of death, to show her a true narrative. She was searching for a blank spot in the American territories where the anarchic self would be fulfilled. When she allows her view to shift she finds that there is no true narrative and no single narrative. Is it true that Beirut is a city of death and hate, or is Beirut a city of joyful transcendence? Both exist and both are willfully created. The camera in the distance as it remains fixed (and, notably, without sound) is merely shooting at the “dead city . . . one more time” (241). It is reiterating what it thinks is there: death. But death itself is a creation. It is the primal narrative of “I am because I am not not.” It is the narrative the Rashid uses to build his identity of hate. Rashid and the camera, however, are only reiterating old stories. They believe in death and they believe in life, and this is the reason they act at all. What is really out there, however, is chaos. Everything is out there; everything is happening all at once. “Everybody is nowhere” (240). But everyone looks to be somewhere. The artist has a responsibility to face this chaos and create (even arbitrarily) against it. An artist is responsible for the heroic narrative (the fiction), but not for its reception. It is the audience who desires to believe and they decide what to believe. The wedding offers a moment of hope not only because it has chosen life instead of death, but because it believes there is choice. Surely the role of wife or husband is fictional, but the celebration is a celebration of a fiction becoming reality. Something that is nothing more than idea becomes manifest as a physical truth. “Love” (like hero) is not real in any tangible way. It only becomes real within certain patterns and boundaries of identity. The camera (mistaken for a gun) reminds one that if the artist refuses to create the heroic narratives, the world will continue to find patterns and boundaries even in paradox or simulacra. As Bill Gray felt, “a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness” but also to “increase the flow of meaning . . . [b]y extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility” (200). An artist is not responsible for the success or failure of the narrative itself. Henderson himself could still hear the nagging voice “I want” even after his heroic journey. In other words, an artist has the possibility of creating the heroic narrative because he or she has the talent to face unboundaried chaos and build a fiction against it. The artist does not have to believe (and, indeed, DeLillo suggests it is dangerous for artists to believe their own fictions), but must believe in belief. The artist must believe in the power of the

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non-hero, the audience, the reader. To draw attention to the artist’s own fiction or own lack of belief is a narcissistic gesture in which the artist takes away from the heroic narrative by focusing upon the impulse alone. The non-hero audience knows the impulse, but they need the pattern to contain it. In effect, the artist must engage with the non-hero and believe in the belief of the non-hero. Thus, it is only when Brita toasts the wedding couple, and joins, as Bill Gray did, the “surge of the noontime crowd” (103) that she recognizes her responsibility and duty to create a narrative in which someone might believe and that will allow the hero to, finally, return.

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C onclusion

Any investigation into the impulse toward the heroic narrative in the contemporary American novel must necessarily end with more questions than answers. Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo do not hold the key to a final and complete formulation of the hero. I chose these authors not because they had answers but because they seemed to be asking the question I myself had asked as a literary scholar in an age when certain questions or even categories of questions no longer seem to be asked. It seemed to me rhetorical studies, culture studies, and postcolonial theories, while analyzing valuable “how” concerns had back-benched the “why.” Had all literature really become nothing more than something one tells? Were all readers silently nodding their heads in agreement with “just so” on their lips, or else putting the book down having gleaned from their favorite storytellers a handful of facts about seventeenth-century pirate routes or the joual of northern Quebec lumberjacks? Can we read literature now only as a curiosity closet? My question was no less than “what do we expect to find when we read?” An impractical question, that. My first attempt to find a more manageable topic led to a specific question about the “hero” and what that could possibly mean in America as a society that prides itself on its individualism and its extremes. I moved toward ideas of community and community identity that the heroic narrative creates, and this, in turn, led me to the idea that belief might be the defining key to a true heroic narrative. Any story may tell, but a heroic narrative is one that is believed and made (a new) part of one’s reality. As it turned out, this deduction only sent me back to the beginning. For do we really believe—let alone believe in—anything anymore? Is there faith, or is there only an assumption that all will be proven in the end? This question leads back to Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo who, in many of their novels, have framed the question “where do we put belief when there is no more belief?” What the preceding pages have been is a long look at just how belief lost its attachments in America. When there is no fully repressed narrative of purpose and pattern that one has never not known, how does one make it through the day?

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Ironically, both Bellow and DeLillo finally suggest that the question itself has no basis. There is belief, but it is a kind of fluid or freefloating belief waiting to attach to some narrative of self and community identity. In other words, belief exists before there is narrative or argument. There is belief before proof; further, it is the impetus for proof, for argument, for narrative. In Benjamin Franklin’s speech in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he asked the members to sign the Constitution not because they agreed, but because they knew that their constituents needed something to believe in. For Franklin, whether there was “real or apparent unanimity” (1141) did not concern him. They had written the narrative of America and it was not up to the creators to either believe in it or agree to it. He went so far as to suggest they need not even administer it. They were only a small part of the way of the world. They created it, the audience believed it as reality, and opinion would eventually take over its inner workings. Is this not how we create ourselves? Is it through heroic narratives, gone to the brink of destruction only to return with a fictional—even arbitrary—narrative to give community identity to those who will never make such a journey? Slowly we build from the primal narrative that asserts only existence and nonexistence in time and space (“I am because I am not not”). This agreed upon, there is the complex teleological foundational narrative to protect us from our own solitary deaths. Through explanation and pattern we see even our deaths as part of an identifiable movement: we are a community aware of death. With this assumption of reality, this foundation, there are then the common heroic narratives giving identities within smaller and smaller communities: “American,” “democrat,” “wife,” “mother,” “physician,” and so on. All these community identities become the basis of one’s “reality.” As Franklin noted, once these heroic narratives—these created narratives—become agreed upon as reality, then the hero and the artist who created the hero have completed their loop journey. Reality may be created with the help of the hero but it is controlled by the politician, the priest, and the media mogul. They are in charge of the end narratives that tease and poke, cannibalize and refine until they find one point of one heroic narrative to make their own. In the same speech Franklin concluded that any constitution “could only end in despotism” (1140). There is no success larger for an end narrative than when identity and individuality are one, when a crowd is chanting one idea, one thought, one purpose. To him it seemed inevitable that this complex narrative of a new nation would end in a destructive chant. But how his creation ended was not his concern.

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Similarly, the hero is not there to bicker with end narratives; the hero cannot administer the world but only set out again, to reconsider, re-challenge, destroy, and re-create, knowing that if the heroic narrative is believed it will inevitably be reduced to a single point again and again. There is no doubt that literary authors of the modernist period became less and less able to create a heroic narrative. They became less and less able to believe that their narratives were valid or that there was a homogenous audience to fold them into a reality. Eventually, even reality was challenged. It is a commonplace absurdity today to question whether reality is not just some arbitrary fiction. Of course it is a fiction, but one that we have chosen to believe in absolutely. Once again, this brings us back to belief and back to Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo who throw themselves into this muddle. Both men consider why the world continues. On what basis does it? As they ask this question their focus comes down not (or not only) to the hero but also to the non-heroes who are the audience to the fictional narratives and who are responsible for folding fiction into reality. If the hero refuses to move or create, the audience is thrown into an absurd position of either living without narrative or creating their own. But they cannot create new narratives and, in America, have resorted to purchasing various re-hashed stories sold on the open market as markers of self-reliance and heroic individuality. The narrative is replaced by image. Certain sunglasses, certain cars, boots reminiscent of a Cuban revolutionary or a basketball star, all project a heroic image to the world. But, then, who is watching? It all is just a kind of busy-ness, a need to “do something.” Why this something, then? Why not nothing? Because belief must attach itself even if that attachment is nothing more than a surface, an insinuation, a simulacrum, or a slogan. Both Bellow and DeLillo discover that there is belief floating freely in the air. There is, if nothing else, the impulse to the heroic and belief in its possibility. Once removed from the childish bliss of knowing only oneself as the world (Bellow’s “clouds of glory” or DeLillo’s children who think they may bring down a jet plane by only willing it), the aware human must find ways to explain this awareness. The non-heroes who have no capacity for creation will live in the paradox of a false heroic if they must. It is not the falseness that so upsets characters such as Mr. Sammler in Mr. Sammler’s Planet as there has always been a certain amount of “playacting.” There is a certain amount of Stanislavski method-acting to identity, of performing the role until it becomes believable and natural. The old system, however, was not so arbitrary,

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so solitary, so desperate. It did not have such a desire to be unique, and to be uniquely heroic to one’s own self. Heroes without community? Heroes without narrative identity and depth? What is it that these false heroes—these assumed heroes—hope to accomplish? DeLillo does not ask these questions because, for him, the assumed heroes seem to have succeeded. Jack Gladney in White Noise is terrified to find that his playacting, which he had so repressed (repressed to the point of almost being a “true” representation of himself), is only a fiction. Once he is aware of its fiction, he does not seek some authentic or some creation of a community narrative. He desires nothing more than to find another surface image so that he may begin to repress its fictionality and return to his previous state. Gladney is recognizable as a hero only because he is not able to find another image, and not able to repress his doubts and fears. He comes to the brink of his own destruction, and finds only chaos and white noise beyond it. At the end of the novel he is considering his return. He may not find a way back, but as he and his wife and child watch the spectacular sunset there is the realization that humming under these fictions is an impulse to create and a belief in the possibility of the imagination. As Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King notes, “Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual.” (271). Mao II ends this study because it is the most complex of the novels. DeLillo puts out a group of players as if he will create a chess game to determine who will win the “imagination of the world” (DeLillo, “The Art of Fiction” 296). Who will get to say, once and for all, what the next move will be? Of course, it is a muddle. People lose but only a little or win but not quite. The rescue happens only at the last minute (as it did in Mr. Sammler’s Planet) by a voice accepting the duty of the hero to challenge, destroy, and create. Brita seems tired of trying to believe in a narrative herself; she seems tired of waiting for one to come to her as absolute truth out of the chaos and death all around her. Is it not enough that there is belief? That there is the impulse? That Henderson’s “I want” echoes? It is not for Brita as the creator to believe, but to create. It is for others—the “surge of the noontide crowd” (Mao II 103) or the wedding guests on the street—to believe. The world is a fiction—is that not apparent now to everyone? It is time for there to be a return from the brink of despair. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the world was always a fiction, but one that we agreed to call our own. The hero has no reason not to return. The hero takes the impulse to create boundaries and patterns, to establish identities of community, and the hero returns knowing that this

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narrative is fiction. It is left to the non-hero to decide upon it. If the narrative is believed then the world may change; if it is not then the hero must try again. The hero need not believe the narrative boon; the hero need only believe in belief, need only know that through the swirling chaos of the universe there is a sense of belief, and need only hope that someday a new narrative will attach itself to it. This is reason enough for a hero to return and reason enough for the novelist to give the hero the chance.

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No tes

Chapter 1 1. Joseph Campbell writes that “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation–initiation–return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth” (30). On a more abstract level it may be said that the heroic act is one that casts off the world in order to discover or create it aright or anew or again. 2. And it is for this reason that it separates into the visceral impulse and the narrated fulfillment. The visceral impulse has no closure and, left alone, it may relieve feelings of dread or insecurity temporarily through sheer emotional exhaustion, but without a patterned narrative it does not “fulfill” the reader. 3. As Jonathan Rée succinctly states: “We may, of course, find some comfort in this conception of temporality: if our lives are strings of separate experiences then we can imagine them continuing for ever. But we must also be aware, if only obscurely, that it is inauthentic: ontologically, we know that to live our lives in terms of now-time is to be ‘in flight’ from finitude or ‘looking away’ from it. Living in the ‘now,’ we transform ourselves into they-selves” (323). 4. This is not to say that failure cannot be a constructive narrative. The glorification of an inability to return is the essence of a tragic narrative. Heroic narrative and tragic narrative differ only in the point of returning. Each narrative is an assertion of community identity. The heroic creates it, and the tragic proves a cautionary tale for its necessity. Both heroes and tragedians must face their own obliteration, but only the hero returns with a pattern. 5. Allan Bloom is neither the first nor the last to use this phrase, but his definition may speak for many: “The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know” (381). 6. Joseph Campbell writes: “How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent

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on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void?” (218). 7. Something may be said as to how this concept interacts with previous, particularly Romantic, attempts at artistic stasis, as in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Here Keats laments the “real” passing of time and is happy to see the lovers on the urn remain eternally young in artistic stasis. The urn and its story remain forever in the present tense because its beauty makes it permanent and timeless. What may seem a radical shift in artistic direction is a result in the loss of belief in both perfection and time. DeLillo’s and Warhol’s repeating images are not a glorification of beauty taken by the artist out of real time to preserve them from destruction and death. Rather, their images are arbitrary repetitions, repeated only because they must constantly reassert themselves in the eternal present tense or cease to exist at all. 8. Saul Bellow’s 1965 essay examines his frustration with the rising tide of distracting and repetitive social fiction: “The old unitary personality which still appears in popular magazine stories, in conventional best-sellers, in newspaper cartoons, and in the movies, is a figure descended from well-worn patterns, and popular art forms (like the mystery novel or the western) continue to exploit endlessly the badly faded ideas of motives and drama or love and hate. The old figures move ritualistically through the paces, finding, now and then, variations in setting and costume, but they are increasingly remote from real reality . . . But the writer brought up in a great literary tradition not only sees these conventional stories as narcotic or brain-washing entertainments, at worst breeding strange vices, at best performing a therapeutic function. He also fears that the narrative art, which we call the novel, may have come to an end, its conception of the self exhausted and with this conception our interest in the fate of that self so conceived” (“Where Do We Go” 212–13). 9. DeLillo has a delightful ironic moment in which Pammy in Players bemoans the freedom to choose identity that America now offers in light of its lack of totalizing narratives. However, as DeLillo repeats and repeats “whatever,” it becomes apparent that this non-narrative has become totalizing as well: For years she’d heard people saying, all sorts, really, here and there: “Do whatever you want as long as nobody gets hurt.” They said: “As long as both parties agree, do it, whatever.” They said: “Whatever feels right, as long as you both want to do it and nobody gets hurt, there’s no reason not to.” They said: “As long as there’s mutual agreement and the right feeling, no matter who

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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or what.” “Whatever feels right,” they said. They said: “Follow your instincts, be yourself, act out your fantasies.” (143) The choice of the word “dangle” is significant here because it draws attention not only to various violent images of hanged men and their dangling feet, or even the dangling sword of Damocles, but it is a word used to describe small, even insignificant things that are annoying but not life-threatening: dangling participles, shoelaces, sycophants. Earl Rovit eloquently states the point: “Some have interpreted his thematic preoccupation with the sufferer as a device of compromise, a ‘making do,’ or accommodation—an argument which implies that Bellow is gratuitously surrendering the heroic ideal of a fully instinctual life to the expediency of flabby survival within the status quo. But this, it seems to me, is precisely to miss the moral point and to misread Bellow’s deliberate irony” (13). In a recent interview with Lawrence Grobel, Bellow remarked: “Hemingway was a very marvelous and beautiful writer who was constricting, he produced novels with a very highly polished surface. You didn’t want to mar the surface of his beautifully constructed and polished stories or novels. But then it was too narrowing because there were all kinds of experience which would never fit into that. Hemingway’s personal attitudes intending to redefine American manhood were too constricting and too exclusive” (“Saul Bellow: Treading” 32). Bernard Smith draws much the same conclusion in his consideration of the artist hero: “Yet the desperate character of the lives of so many of these early Bohemian artists, the personal insecurity of their social situation, reveals to us a paradox at the heart of the humanist myth of the artist as hero. Such heroic individualism could only be entertained by the most exceptionally endowed” (18–19). The loss of a believable metaphysical catch-all for the unknown sets up the foundations of paranoia. The unknown is no longer allowed to be unknowable (or knowable only by God). Rather, everything is knowable but not by any single person. Thus, not only is one not in control of what one does not know, but someone with no more right to divine status than oneself does know it. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson’s astronomer in Rasselas who through intense, solitary study comes to believe that he controls the weather. The title of the chapter is “The dangerous prevalence of imagination.” The imagination is dangerous because it can convince one of knowing things only God can know. DeLillo’s characters are, of course, not halted by this Truth, and are, therefore, free from Imlac’s judgment: “In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention, all other intellectual gratifications are rejected, the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth” (1059).

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16. Ernest Becker writes that the artist “takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create . . .” (184). 17. Elias Canetti gives some insight into Karen’s kind of thinking: “In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries. He wants what is happening to him to happen to others too; and he expects it to happen to them” (21). Karen simultaneously turns to Moon for boundaries and the mechanism to safely be released from these boundaries.

Chapter 2 1. As William Whyte explains, organization men are not those who merely work for The Organization but the ones who “belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions” (Whyte’s emphasis, 76). The fear of such a man is a direct result of the acceptance of the American hero as an individual set against society in order to return and rise above it. 2. In an interview in Salmagundi Bellow states that “Of course, people are very odd; on the one hand they pay lip service to the accepted beliefs of their society. That’s what I would call head culture. On the other hand there are internal beliefs (I know this about myself): if you asked me any civilized question I would give you the civilized answer, because I know what the civilized answer is; if you asked me what I really feel in my heart, that’s something else again. You can depend upon educated people to tell you that of course they are agnostic rationalists, but what they really are is their own very wellkept secret. And the reason is that there’s really no language for these secrets at the moment, and very few people whom you can take into your confidence” (“Literature and Culture” 368). 3. As Leslie Fiedler asserted, the antiwar novels of Mailer and Heller “carry to the world the comic–pathetic news it is still reluctant to hear: the Hero is dead” (qtd. in S. Smith 5–6). This is a position that echoes beyond antiwar novels and into American literary fiction as a whole. 4. Pifer points out that “To Bellow, ‘the void’ is not the inescapable condition of existence; rather, it is a state of spiritual emptiness, the terror of nonbeing, which overtakes the individual who has surrendered the ‘primordial person’ and, in the novelist’s words, ‘lost his soul’ ” (Saul Bellow 113). In a 1991 essay Bellow’s wording is more hopeful when

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6.

7.

8.

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he writes: “We have concentrated with immense determination on what forms us externally but that need not actually govern us internally. It can do that only if we grant it the right” (“Mozart” 14). “In 1955, Life ran an editorial titled ‘WANTED: AN AMERICAN NOVEL,’ which attacked novelists who ‘are still writing as if we were back in the Depression years.’ The editorial suggested that American writers aspire to the ‘redeeming quality’ of Edmund Hillary’s recent The Conquest of Everest. ‘In every healthy man,’ the editorial informed its audience, ‘there is a wisdom deeper than his conscious mind, reaching beyond memory to the primeval rivers, a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life’ ” (qtd. in Schaub 48). Even in his last novel Ravelstein (2000), Bellow finds he cannot defend himself against an interpretation of the world that demands either metaphysics or mankind: “In children this impression—real reality—is tolerated by adults. Up to a certain age nothing can be done about it. In well-to-do families it lasts longer, perhaps. But Ravelstein might have argued that there was a danger of selfindulgence in it. Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopts rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics” (97–8). Henderson is thinking of the third stanza of Shelley’s introduction to Laon and Cythna (also known as The Revolt of Islam): Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit’s sleep . . . (l. 19–22) Bellow writes: “One would have to be optimistic to the point of imbecility to raise the standard of pure affirmation and cry ‘Yea, Yea,’ shrilly against the deep background of ‘Nay’s’ ” (“The Sealed Treasure” 62). But as he says in his Library of Congress address, “One would like to ask [Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, Burroughs, Ginsberg] ‘After nakedness, what?’ ‘After absurdity, what?’ ” (“Recent American Fiction” 7). Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. (Tennyson, “Flower in the Crannied Wall”) When Henderson thinks that he might die in Baventai, he asks Romilayu: “Is it promised? Between the beginning and the end, is it promised? . . . Romilayu, I suppose I mean the reason—the reason. It may be postponed until the last breath. But there is justice. I believe there is justice, and that much is promised.” (328)

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11. See Hughes 82. 12. See also Hassan, Radical Innocence 31–3. 13. Lily has the same reaction when Henderson breaks into tears at their picnic in the meadow: Under her breath, pale with terror but consumed also with her damned exalted glory, she mumbled as I was sobbing at the wheel about pride and strength and soul and love, and all of that. I told her, “Curse you, you’re nuts!” (18) 14. One of the few memories of his children that Henderson shares with his readers illustrates this grotesque. Henderson plays with his children as if he and they were fairly matched as equals in knowledge and experience, but his childish desire to win at all costs seems ridiculous given his superior skills and experience. Henderson himself cannot understand his need to crush an enemy that is all too easy to crush and hardly an enemy at all: “Even playing checkers with my little children, regardless how I manoeuvred to let them win and even while their lips trembled with disappointment (oh, the little kids would be sure to hate me), I would jump all over the board and say rudely, ‘King me!’ though all the while I would be saying to myself, ‘Oh, you fool, you fool, you fool!’ ” (69). 15. In Seize the Day Tamkin warns Wilhelm against such a preoccupation: “ ‘Now, Wilhelm, I’m trying to do you some good. I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery’ . . . Yes, thought Wilhelm, suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they’re afraid they’ll have nothing” (98). 16. Lily remarks, “ ‘Gene, when you suffer you suffer harder than any person I ever saw.’ She had to smile, and not at my suffering, of course, but at the way I went about suffering” (33). 17. Henderson’s emotionality is what separates him from the traditional American heroes before him. In fact, as Bellow predicted in his first novel, the “hard-boiled” American hero was one who would eventually find himself wanting as a hero: “For this is an era of hardboiled-dom. Today, the code of the athlete, of the tough boy—an American inheritance, I believe, from the English gentleman—that curious mixture of striving, asceticism, and rigor, the origins of which some trace back to Alexander the Great—is stronger than ever. Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them . . . Most serious matters are closed to the hard-boiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring” (Dangling Man 9).

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18. As Henderson begins to suspect, Dahfu’s relationship with the lion is not one of science but one of love: But why lions? Because, Mr. Henderson, I replied to myself, you don’t know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that’s all. A natural force. Irresistible. He fell in love with his lioness at first sight—coup de foudre. (258) 19. In typical fashion, after Henderson has sent Romilayu with these conditional words of “true feeling” to Lily, Henderson realizes, “I love her. By God! I goofed again” (289). 20. Ironically, one is put into the same position as Henderson when he memorized the quotation about forgiveness but lost the book that contained it. For his insight about love to have any meaning at all one must be willing to take the final lines and disregard the context of the letter. Although Bellow might allow that a reader could have an inspirational reaction to these final lines and close the book at this point, the muddled nature of the realization (so much like Henderson’s previous intellectualized but unincorporated realizations) suggests that neither Bellow nor Henderson feels that the journey is over. 21. The possibility of God is always present in the novel: Romilayu prays each night before bed and Henderson periodically prays to “Oh, you . . . Something . . . you Something because of whom there is not Nothing” (253), but Henderson does not see any correlation between religion and his quest. 22. Henderson’s inner voice is not so judgmental, however, and it rises to a crescendo as Henderson ascends the stairs to Lily’s cold-water flat “I want, I want, I want, oh, I want—yes, go on, I said to myself, Strike, strike, strike, strike!” (12). 23. Early on in the book, Henderson remarks that his brother was “a regular lion” (34). 24. Henderson wonders if “maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn’t last forever?” (314). 25. Henderson tells Romilayu that “it’s likely” that “they should strangle me after a few weeks” (320). 26. Henderson receives Lily’s love many times and although he recognizes his good luck, he fails to believe it. For example, while waiting on the street in New York City he explains how the voice crying “I want, I want!” “was not stopped by any face I saw” (14) and in the next moment Lily arrives with “a good face, a clear, pure face, hot and white” (15). Henderson realizes “She loved me” (15), but refuses to let go of his suffering long enough to love her in return. 27. This line reflects T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”: Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future

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What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. (l. 44–48) In his Nobel lecture Bellow restates this line, clarifying his meaning: “Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too much abuse of the truth” (95). 28. “I was growing black curls, thicker than usual, like a Merino sheep, very black, and they were unseating my helmet” (272). 29. Note that Henderson returns too late in the year to enrol at medical school.

Chapter 3 1. The novel leaves readers either frustrated—“Lively-odd figures, brilliantly managed incidents—but what does it all come to? That, until the very last paragraph, is the question one keeps asking about Mr. Sammler’s Planet” (Howe, “Mr. Sammler’s” 172)—or intrigued by Sammler’s (and the novel’s) truculence: “Mr. Sammler succeeds by being partial and incomplete, by rejecting the modern novel’s paradigm of totality in the act of consciousness” (Bayley 94). 2. See Bellow, “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” 1, 34. 3. In fact, one of the most convincing critical analyses of the novel is not based on the idea that Jesus is representative of an affirmative message. Amos Oz argues that Sammler’s “I know” is a direct echo of the crucifixion of Jesus: “It is not to Margotte-Arendt but to Jesus and his ‘forgive them, for they know not,’ that Mr. Sammler, in the most honorable Jewish manner, answers at the very end of the novel: ‘For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, we know, we know’ [316]” (25). 4. In a recent interview, Bellow details just such an encounter: “There was a Mexican guy [at San Francisco State College in 1970] who had written a book and he stood up and denounced me. He said, ‘What do you want to listen to this old man for? His balls are dried up, he can’t come he’s absolutely of no interest.’ I didn’t know what to say, except, ‘I didn’t thrust myself upon you, I came here because I was invited to speak to you.’ They booed me” (“Saul Bellow: Treading” 57–8). 5. Jonathan Wilson writes: “It is no wonder that Sammler feels himself to be a ‘visiting consciousness’ (p. 73) who is ‘very nearly out of it’ (p. 134). For in Bellow’s novels, not to have trouble with women and money does not leave you very much to do” (153). 6. Bellow would return to the question of Israel in his nonfiction work To Jerusalem and Back in 1976 and in the fiction The Bellarosa Connection in 1989, but the distance he places between himself, his narrator, and the people/characters never reaches the intimacy of

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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Mr. Sammler who seems to be unable to brush the dirt of the grave from his Augustus John hat. Several critics have noted this confusion. Walter Bigler says much the same thing: “In repeatedly using animal imagery to characterize his fellow figures, Sammler tragically elevates himself above his environment and disqualifies himself as reliable judge of his contemporaries. However, the heterodiegetic narrator’s indications that Sammler’s point of view is in itself relative are too subtle, and the references that ‘he himself was far from normal’ (239) too scarce” (138). Brigitte Scheer-Schazler concurs, writing that critics “have attacked his [Sammler’s] personality for betraying a feeling of superiority toward all figures except Elya Gruner. This impression is partly the result of technique: it arises through Sammler’s almost uninterrupted flow of mental comments, by which he tries to achieve perspective” (125). As Sammler says to Angela, “Oh yes, I know I may be out of order, with bad puritanical attitudes from the sick past which have damaged civilization so much. I did read your books” (300). Similarly, Judie Newman notes a parallel between Bellow’s thinking and Ortega’s: “Ortega found his morality on the assertion that human nobility involves, not the passive enjoyment of rights, but the active attempt to meet one’s obligations to civilisation” (139). Sammler says as much when he states: “The famous Oblomov? He couldn’t get out of bed” (221). In a comic parallel to this, Sammler remembers how girls in mod dress arrived at the Israeli front and how a Swiss correspondent complained: “His war was being ruined by these stupid girls in costume” (165). “And possibly Elya, with the screw in his throat, had not wished to be left behind either, and had relegated Angela to experience the Age for him” (162). In his Paris Review interview of 1966, he observes: “I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the story. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction” (qtd. in Manning 216). Sammler tells Angela: “On the surface, I don’t have much in common with Elya. He’s a sentimental person. He makes a point, too much of a point, of treasuring certain old feelings. He’s on an old system. I’ve always been skeptical of that myself. One might ask, where is the new system? But we don’t have to get into that” (302). “Sammler” in German means “spark.” This may imply a connection to Eckhart who describes the divine spark within each person.

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Chapter 4 1. Jayne Anne Phillips in her front page review of White Noise in The New York Times Book Review sees the coincidence between the Union Carbide disaster and the novel “timely and frightening” (1). 2. Diane Johnson in The New York Review of Books writes: “A novel whose plot contains a plot might be the postmodern novel” (Johnson’s emphasis, 6). Cornel Bonca considers that the popularity of the novel in academic circles “may have something to do with the fact that White Noise was published in 1985, seemingly in the wake of a number of exciting, much-Xeroxed and much-discussed theoretical essays, among them Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication,’ Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ and Lyotard’s ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ ” (26). 3. As much as Bawer, Iyer brings his own ideas to his reading of the novel. He is quite charmed by Jack and Babette’s family and is so convinced by what he sees are realistic portrayals of the modern family unit that he notes that “[i]t is a shock to learn after reading his book that DeLillo has no children” (297). 4. See Conte, Cowart, Slethaug, and LeClair. 5. See Daniel Aaron (p. 282). 6. DeLillo repeats himself almost word for word in an interview with Kevin Connolly: “In a theoretical sense I think fiction can be a refuge and a consolation . . . [F]iction offers patterns and symmetry that we don’t find in the experience of ordinary living. Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world” (“An Interview” 264). 7. Like Bellow, when DeLillo or any of his characters use the word “theory,” it is a sign that what is being said is not necessarily a trustworthy or well-thought-out argument. 8. Jack’s description of himself is as a man who “[w]hen I go walking, joggers come up soundlessly behind me, appearing at my side, making me jump in idiotic fright” (15). 9. Note that Jack is not afraid of dying but of death. DeLillo notes the difference in the visit by Babette’s father, Vernon, who is dying. His listing of his ailments and the consolation of these ailments becomes a humorous, cyclical accounting of naming one’s fears and thus naturalizing them. Vernon is no less in pain and no less dying at the end of the account, but he seems satisfied that everything is falling apart in an explainable and predictable way: “The mind goes before the body. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. So don’t worry about the mind. The mind is all right. Worry about the car” (243–4). Death, on the other hand, has no explanation. 10. Like many critics Arthur M. Saltzman recognizes the looping nature of DeLillo’s structure: “Thus the novel is filled with disappointed verges—DeLillo builds to the point of revelation, only to resubmerge into the usual blather” (811).

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11. Bawer also finds problems with Bellow for many of the same reasons. His 1987 review article on Bellow was entitled “Talking Heads.” 12. See Yehnert, Daniel Aaron, and Mark Edmundson for their conclusion that DeLillo’s characters are postmodern. 13. For example, DeLillo’s triptychs of words and phrases that randomly punctuate the novel might be Gladney’s thoughts, random words in the environment, or have no source at all. 14. In a conversation with Jack, Murray tells of warning his university class that they have already lost their primacy of place as young consumers: “But you’re well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you’re out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.” Then I tap my pencil on the table to indicate time passing ominously. (50) 15. This fits into Jameson’s idea that where past and present are removed, language becomes nothing but a system of signifiers. Jameson reminds us that if “personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past with one’s present” and if “such active temporal unification is itself a function of language,” then “with the breakdown of the signifying chain . . . the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words a series of pure unrelated presents in time” (27) (qtd. in Duvall, “The (Super) Marketplace” 144). 16. Arnold Weinstein observes that “DeLillo’s cumulative project resembles at times that of Roland Barthes, especially the Barthes of Mythologies, for he is scrupulously attentive to the ways in which belief and passion are displaced, renamed, formatted, and commodified in a materialist age . . . DeLillo’s modernity lies in his sense that our myths are on the surface rather than in the depths, recorded in the print of our newspapers rather than in dark, oneiric scripts” (290). 17. In this way, DeLillo’s children are metaphors for his concept of language. 18. Gladney often expresses a fear that Babette is not acting like Babette. He fears a change in her character because it is a reminder that all character is chosen and can easily be replaced: “You’ve been depressed lately. I’ve never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She’s a joyous person. She doesn’t succumb to gloom or self-pity” (182). 19. “What most people worry about only at three o’clock in the morning, or after a very bad day at the races, Don DeLillo’s characters worry about all the time. DeLillo invents people who don’t know the luxury of having a psychology: they can’t repress anything. And it’s not just that they fear death, or stare hopelessly into the hollow drum

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

NOTES

of selfhood, or dread the stupefying materiality of the universe. They also never stop talking about it. They must be the most purely selfconscious characters in fiction” (Menand 70). In Great Jones Street, the title character, rock star Bucky Wunderlick, takes the possibility of lambency to a literal extreme and moves from writing political songs in protest against the war on his first album to a ridiculous self-conscious babbling on his final album entitled “PeePee-Maw-Maw.” Anthony DeCurtis asked DeLillo about the “apocalyptic feel” of his books where there is “an intimation that our world is moving toward greater randomness and dissolution, or maybe even cataclysm.” DeLillo replied: “This is the shape my books take because this is the reality I see. This reality has become part of all our lives over the past twenty-five years. I don’t know how we can deny it” (“An Outsider” 304). One of the few influences that DeLillo has claimed on his writing is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (see LeClair). The change from “soul” to “self” is discussed within this book: “[Otto] Rank saw that this hyper-self-consciousness had left modern man to his own resources, and he called him aptly ‘psychological man.’ It is a fitting epithet in more than one sense. Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself . . . [and science] wanted to make the inner life of man an area free of mystery and subject to the laws of causality. They gradually abandoned the word ‘soul’ and began to talk about the ‘self’ and to study how it develops in the child’s early relationship with his mother. The great miracles of language, thought, and morality could now be studied as social products and not divine interventions” (Becker 191). “In the morning therefore ye shall be brought according to your tribes: and it shall be, that the tribe which the Lord taketh shall come according to the families thereof; and the family which the Lord shall take shall come by households; and the household which the LORD shall take shall come man by man” (Joshua 7:14–18). “Identity becomes a role-play constructed from a ‘series of images whose continuity may be imposed by some other agency,’ writes John Johnston; in the postmodern age, the important questions about subjectivity are not metaphysical but political: ‘what agencies [. . .] are responsible for our perceptions and the images that ultimately constitute our identity?’ (“Post-Cinematic” 92–3)” (Yehnert 357–8). See Duvall, “The (Super)Marketplace” 128. See Cantor. In Great Jones Street, Bucky Wunderlick believes that “I was born with all languages in my mouth . . . Undreamed grammars float in my spittle” (204–5).

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28. The Micklewhite boy is a twenty-year-old invalid who is both soft in the head and has a soft head. He has terrible dreams that can be heard throughout the apartment building. When Wunderlick sees him for the first time, he feels both fear and awe at a being so fully enclosed within himself, a nation of one: “With my left hand I raised his head, finding nothing in the eyes beyond a rhythmic blink. I must have seemed a shadow to him, thin liquid, incidental to the block of light he lived in. For the first time I began to note his embryonic beauty” (161). 29. In Ratner’s Star Billy thinks: “If only I could remember what the light was like in that space before I had eyes to see it with. When I had mush for eyes. When I was dripping tissue. There is something in the space between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for” (370). 30. “In fact, DeLillo has stated that tabloids, which syncretically blend a myriad of pseudo-religious beliefs into a curious species of postmodern faith, lie ‘closest to the spirit of the book’ (quoted in James 31)” (Osteen 166). 31. As Babette tells Jack, “You’re a male. A male follows the path of homicidal rage. It is the biological path. The path of plain dumb blind male biology . . . Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride” (256). 32. “The encounter with Mink suggests the untenability of heroic selffashioning, as Gladney’s epiphany collapses into postmodern schizophrenia. Rather than a moment of pure, unfettered subjectivity, Gladney’s experience implies the evacuation of the self, as the deep structures of modern experience—as well as modern narrative— succumb to a postmodern crisis of the sign and representation, to ‘networks of influence,’ to a discontinuous schizoid world, and to white noise” (Wilcox 357). 33. “The sublime is a different feeling. It occurs when the imagination in fact fails to present any object that could accord with a concept, even if only in principle. We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but not the capacity to show an example of it” (Lyotard 10). 34. The sublime can be either dangerous or liberating for the assumed hero because its refusal to be interpreted draws attention to the holes in explainable reality, but because it has no easily discernable meaning, one is free to arbitrarily encode and interpret it as Jack does to Wilder during the long crying jag.

Chapter 5 1. James Bloom points out that DeLillo’s own title for the novel also challenges the ability to interpret intentions easily as Mao II, and the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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“Andy Warhol silkscreen that gives the novel its title may mock or reinforce the iconization of the legendary Chinese revolutionary” (505). Gerald Howard’s article “Slouching towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of Publicity” gives the following anecdote to highlight the disconnect between the novel and the selling of an author: “Michael Korda’s amusingly chilling memoir of his time served as Jacqueline Susann’s editor contains this tidbit: ‘When we had expressed anxiety about the unwritten manuscript, Irving [Mansfield, her husband and agent] told us it was Jackie (and the example of Valley of the Dolls, then approaching ten million copies sold) that he was selling and not as he put it indignantly, “a goddman pile of paper.” Some would say we live in a post-Jacqueline Susann universe’ ” (52). Richard Levesque contends that the published book is connected to the published author (one might say the author as advertised) and not the writer in the act of imagining and creating: “That is, the physical book produced (and mass-produced in the case of a best-seller) by the publisher becomes a signifier not for the act of writing but rather for the act of publishing; it signifies the money paid to the writer by the publisher and to the publisher by the reader; it signifies the phenomenon of the published author rather than the writer writing. In this sense, the writer who is assumed to be at the center of the book is actually the referent that is no longer present in the signifying chain” (82–3). “DeLillo’s characterization of the celebrity author in Mao II can be linked to anxieties about the rise of what Fredric Jameson calls ‘a new depthlessness’ in society and culture created by the replacement of the ‘real’ with surface image” (Moran, “Don DeLillo” 138). “According to the early Roland Barthes as a central figure of the structuralist movement, the task of the literary critic is not to discover some truth in the analyzed text, but to cover this text with his/her own text to the utmost possible degree: “ ‘la “preuve” critique, si elle existe, dépend d’une aptitude, non à découvrir l’oeuvre interrogée, mais au contraire la couvrir le plus complètement possible par son propre langage’ (1963, 256)” (Schulenberg 34–5). “And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction; it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream” (Baudrillard, Simulations 151–2). The collapse of dimensions has arguably both liberated and nullified art. Art can claim power as a “reality.” As Gerhard Richter writes: “painting no longer represents reality but is itself reality (produced by itself)” (124). However, as Mark Osteen points out, a view that everything is

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

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now reality and everything is now “art” eliminates the platform on which “power” can be assessed: “As Arthur Danto suggests, Warhol and pop art demonstrated that ‘Art was no longer possible in terms of a progressive historical narrative. The narrative had come to an end. But this . . . liberated artists from . . . having to follow the ‘correct historical line.’ It really did mean that anything could be art’ ” (qtd. in Osteen 199). This narrative always begins in medias res as “I am” looks back to the time when “I was not” and forward to a time when “I will be not.” Wilcox (348), Keesey, and Barrett (791), all make a case for Bill Gray as the quintessential modern artist. When Scott discovers both the Army discharge papers and a birth certificate that record Bill as Willard Skansey Jr., his disbelief is recorded in terms of the name being improper for the image of a novelist: “A bank robber’s name. Or a tough welterweight of the 1930s with his hair parted in the middle. A bank robber lying low between jobs” (144). DeLillo has written before about the seeming childish need to organize that also seems to give a sense of power to the one who can control events through something as simple as counting: Upper body propped by an elbow, he reclines on his side, facing the telephone. Instinct tells him it will shortly ring. He decides to organize his waiting. This will help pull things into a systematic pattern or the illusion of a systematic pattern. Numbers are best for this. He decides to count to one hundred. If the phone doesn’t ring at one hundred, his instinct has deceived him, the pattern has cracked, his waiting has opened out to magnitudes of gray space. He will pack and leave. One hundred is the outer margin of his passive assent. When nothing happens, he lowers the count to fifty. (Players 211–12) Curtis Yehnert suggests the same idea in his discussion of the barn in White Noise: “The popularity of this most photographed image reveals the characters’ desperation to avoid the self: the image is powerful enough to make the (original, real) barn disappear and to leave in its place a sign, a nonthreatening substitute for, and thus a protection against, existential experience” (359–60). As Scott notes: “Reprint after reprint. We make a nice steady income . . .” (52). Ironically, Karen refers to anything outside of Moon as “gray space” (14). Notably, while Brita is taking Bill’s picture, he reminisces about a time in his childhood when he set up imaginary baseball games in which he played all the characters: “And I’ve been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There’s

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

NOTES

no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it’s completely spontaneous. It’s the lost game of self, without doubt or fear.” To which Brita responds: “It sounds like mental illness to me” (46). The desire for abandonment and the simultaneous fear of it also occurs in DeLillo’s short story, “The Ivory Acrobat” (1988). The lead character “realized she wanted him to think she was slightly foolish, controlled by mass emotion. There was some comfort in believing the worst as long as this was the reigning persuasion. But she didn’t want to submit completely” (206–7). DeLillo is playing with the reader here, as the motley crowd would, of course, embody the American revolutionary ideal, but only to those who can listen. With the sound off, the riot becomes coloured patterns, much as the Sheffield disaster, which Karen’s sees as a “fresco in a tourist church” (33). Thierry de Duve writes: “[T]o desire fame—not the glory of the hero but the glamour of the star—with the intensity and awareness Warhol did, is to desire to be nothing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profound. It is to want to be nothing but image, surface, a bit of light on a screen, a mirror for the fantasies and a magnet for the desires of others—a thing of absolute narcissism” (qtd. in Keesey 180). Mrs. Moore also dies on a boat between East and West, having much the same struggle as Gray: Heaven, Hell, Annihilation . . . All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity. (Passage to India 212) As Silvia Bizzini notes: “The hero, in spite of his desperate quest, and in betrayal of the American tradition, is incapable of finding a new identity—let alone his old one—and ends up dying on a boat where nobody knows him . . .” (105). An end narrative can be any narrative that seeks to restrict or simplify, or one that in its ultimate manifestation would be a single identity of the individual. Extremes of such narratives come (as DeLillo suggests in this novel) as battle cries and chanting cults. The world and the self are reduced to a single self that is also a single action. “The simulacra have passed from the second order to the third, from the dialectic of alienation to the giddiness of transparency” (Baudrillard, Ecstasy 79).

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advertising, xi, 9, 11, 147 affirmation, 72, 74, 84 Jesus, 71–2, 107, 192n3 agency panic, 88–90 Aldridge, John, 72 American Dream, 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 40, 160 apocalyptic feeling, 122, 196n21 Arendt, Hannah, 80, 97 art see image, art as artist, 5, 10, 151–2, 157, 173 assumed hero, 8–9, 10, 20–1, 25, 113, 117–18, 124–6, 137, 159, 160, 166, 167, 181 definition, 8 see also image, as identity; presentation self authenticity, 12, 22, 23, 32, 33, 98, 123, 130, 166, 174, 176 violence as, 98, 166, 174 see also childhood, autonomy in; simulacra author see artist Bailey, Jennifer M., 74 banality, 97 Barthes, Roland, 129, 146, 195n16 Baudrillard, Jean, 2, 118, 169, 175 Bawer, Bruce, 110, 115 Becker, Ernest, 151, 188n16, 196n22 belief, 11, 139, 168, 179–80, 181, 182 belief in, 26–7, 140, 141, 157, 175, 176–7, 183 loss of, 15, 26, 33

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need for, 26, 139, 157, 159–60 Bellow, Saul Interviews “Bellow’s Gift” (Stern), 83 “Common Needs, Common Preoccupations: An Interview with Saul Bellow” (Brans), 80, 83 “Conversation with Saul Bellow, A” (Kulshrestha), 78 “Interview with Saul Bellow, An” (Roudané), 60 “Literature and Culture: An Interview with Saul Bellow” (Boyers), 188n2 “Moving Quickly: An Interview with Saul Bellow” (Boyers), 74, 92 “Mr. Bellow Considers his Planet” (Howard), 71 “Saul Bellow” (Harper), 76–7 “Successor to Faulkner?” (Steers), 53 Works Adventures of Augie March, The, 18–19, 34, 37, 69 “Crab and the Butterfly, The”, 34 Dangling Man, 16–18, 22, 44 “Distracted Public, The”, 82 Henderson the Rain King, 19–20, 31–70, 87, 88, 92, 98, 115, 120, 128, 140, 182 Herzog, 19, 24, 35, 41, 88, 96 Humbolt’s Gift, 32, 83 “Jefferson Lectures, The”, 95–6

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“Mozart: An Overture”, 85, 188n4 Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 20–2, 71–108 “Old System, The”, 106 Ravelstein, 189n6 “Recent American Fiction”, 49, 189n8 “Sealed Treasure, The”, 189n8 Seize the Day, 38, 99 “Summations”, 67, 85 To Jerusalem and Back, 85, 97 Victim, The, 35–6, 68, 93 “Where Do We Go From Here: The Future of Fiction”, 9, 36, 38, 78 “Writer as Moralist, The”, 31, 35 Berryman, Charles, 71, 83 Bigler, Walter, 193n7 Blake, William, 4 Bloom, James, 159 Bloomberg, Edward, 55–6 Bonca, Cornel, 119, 131 boon see pattern for living Bradbury, Malcolm, 39, 73 Braham, Jeanne, 40, 53 Brown, Michael F., 124 Buchloh, Benjamin, 14 Campbell, Joseph, 5, 14, 18 Canetti, Elias, 188n17 Caton, Lou F., 132 Cecil, L. Moffitt, 47 celebrity, 153, 165, 198n2 see also image, artist as chaos, 12, 13, 26, 44–5, 72, 92, 104, 120, 123, 129, 149, 176 see also death, creation and; language; white noise Chavkin, Allan, 76, 77 childhood, 55, 57–8, 69–70 autonomy in, 116–17, 120, 130, 152, 164–5, 172, 173, 174 “be-ers”, 132 Dylar and, 137 insanity and, 133, 158

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language and, 131–2 Moonies, 156, 173, 175 terrorists, 172, 173, 175 see also insanity choice and choosing, 128, 130, 132, 133, 136, 143, 150, 176 Clayton, John Jacob, 73, 81–2, 86 code hero, 37, 39, 61, 98, 190n17 Cohen, Sarah, 31, 76 community of man, 12, 13, 155 conformity, 17, 80, 96, 98, 200n16 consumer, xi, xii, 124, 125, 127, 155 Conte, Joseph, 111, 121 creativity see death, creation and Cronin, Gloria L., 48, 49, 50 crowds, 27, 127, 142, 156, 159, 161, 164 death, 25, 26, 29, 35, 52, 55, 62, 82, 106, 108, 143, 176, 180 birth and, 95 creation and, 113, 130, 134, 135, 136, 167, 176 disinterestedness and, 101, 102 Elya, 103, 106 suppression of, 121, 136 see also chaos Deleuze, Gilles, 129 DeLillo, Don Interviews “Art of Fiction CXXXV, The”, 14, 148, 182 “Interview with Don DeLillo, An” (LeClair), 129 “Interview with Don DeLillo, An” (Nadotti), 156 “Outsider in This Society, An” (DeCurtis), 114, 196n21 Works Americana, 22–3, 147 “American Blood”, 114, 121 “Creation”, 141 Day Room, The, 120 End Zone, 2 Great Jones Street, 121, 155, 168

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INDEX

“In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September”, 140 “Ivory Acrobat, The”, 200n16 Libra, 111 Mao II, 27–9, 145–77, 182 Names, The, 24, 111, 119 Players, 186n9, 199n11 Ratner’s Star, 24, 116–17 Running Dog, 128 Underworld, 120, 131 Valparaiso, 118, 161 White Noise, 25–7, 109–43, 146, 148, 150, 182 DeMott, Benjamin, 73 disinterestedness, 80–1 death and, 101, 102 divertissement, 55–6 Dutton, Robert, 77 duty, 82, 89, 99, 107, 182, 193n9 Eckhart, Johannes (Meister), 81 Ellison, Ralph, 52 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3–4, 84–5, 154 end narrative, 147, 156, 157, 158, 169, 171, 174, 180 definition of, 147, 169 epiphany, 36, 42 see also violence Fiedler, Leslie, 63, 188n3 Field, Leslie, 46 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 165 fixer philosophy, 72 forgiveness, 59, 66, 68, 70 Forster, E. M., 165 Franklin, Benjamin, 180 Franzen, Jonathan, 16 Frow, John, 170 Galloway, David, 74 Gerson, Steven M., 37 Glenday, Michael, 77 Gross, Theodore, 1, 49

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221

Harper, Howard, 45 Heidegger, Martin, 13 Hemingway, Ernest, 19, 187n12 see also code hero hero “becomers”, 19, 51 American, ix–x, 2–3, 9, 41, 47–8 character as, 6, 11 code hero, x, 37, 39, 61, 98, 190n17 definition, xi, 5, 11, 123 Hollywood, x suffering and, 58–9, 66, 68, 190nn15–16 television, xi see also artist; assumed hero; childhood; myth; non-hero heroic impulse, xi, 12, 23, 26, 41, 84, 134, 181, 185n2 heroic journey, 5–6, 12, 18, 40, 41, 43, 44, 52–3, 158 justification of, xi, 72, 77, 79, 82, 84, 105, 108, 142, 143, 175 loss of, x, 3 physical, 1–2, 3, 53, 54–6 heroic narrative, 6, 8, 13, 43–4, 146–7, 180 death and, 134, 138, 139 failure of, 14 return of, 26, 182–3 space and time in, 15, 149–50 teleological, 4, 7, 12, 13, 14, 123, 131, 148, 156, 180 Hitler, Adolf, 127, 148 Holocaust, 75, 97, 192n6 Howe, Irving, 1–2, 16, 156 Hughes, Daniel, 40 identity, 12, 122 individuality as, 13, 14, 96, 122 ideology, 2, 11 image art as, 148–9 artist as, 27, 28, 145–7, 151–3, 155, 162–4, 165, 166

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INDEX

as identity, 27, 28, 96, 105, 126–7, 135, 148, 159, 181 see also assumed hero; presentation self insanity, 116 Iyer, Pico, 110 Johnson, Samuel, 5–6, 187n15 Joyce, James, 12 Kazin, Alfred, 39, 75, 107 Keesey, Douglas, 164 Kerridge, Richard, 128, 134–5 Kiernan, Robert F., 45, 73, 84, 104 Klein, Marcus, 91 language, 24–5, 119, 129, 140 LeClair, Tom, 128 Lentricchia, Frank, 137 light and darkness, 87–8, 91–2, 95 love, 62, 65, 67–8, 99, 107 Lyotard, Jean-François, 141 Mailer, Norman, ix, 39, 51 Maltby, Paul, 133 mass man see conformity McClure, John, 119, 156, 168 Melley, Timothy, 88–9 Menand, Louis, 115, 118 Milton, John, 4 modernist literature, xi, 48, 49, 151, 154, 165, 181 Moles, Abraham, 121 money, 60, 89, 105, 135 mono-myth, 5, 185n1 Moon, Sun Myung, 156, 158 Moonies see childhood Moses, Michael, 112, 113 Muirhead, Marion, 111, 141 myth, 39, 47–8, 50–1 American heroic, ix–x, 3–4, 7, 9, 32, 47–8 narrative tragic, 31, 185n4 voice of, 75, 77–8, 84, 193n7

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see also heroic narrative; end narrative Newman, Judie, 45, 193n9 non-hero, 5, 7, 81, 149, 157, 176–7, 181 “be-ers”, 18–19, 51, 60–1, 106, 132 condemnation of, 4 consumer as, xi, xii, 124, 125, 127, 155 empty space of, 4, 7 good man as, 8 victim as, xi, 27, 35–6 novelist see artist Opdahl, Keith Michael, 38 organization man, 32, 154 see also conformity Ortega y Gasset, José, 52, 193n9 Osteen, Mark, 28, 134, 163, 166, 173 Oz, Amos, 192n3 paranoia, 88, 98, 125 Parini, Jay, 74 parody, 39–40, 50–1 Pascal, Blaise, 55 pattern for living, 44, 46, 59–60, 63–4, 86–7, 98, 104, 106, 107, 134, 142, 157 see also reality, rational systems; fixer philosophy patterns and ambiguity, 110–12, 115, 152–3, 194n6, 199n11 Pearce, Richard, 37 persona see presentation self photograph, 153, 157, 166–7, 171, 175–6 Pifer, Ellen, 21–2, 75, 188n4 Podhoretz, Norman, 32, 33, 46–7 politician see terrorist postmodernism, 16, 109, 194n2 presentation self, 10, 17, 37, 38 see also assumed hero; image, as identity Pritchard, William, 73

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INDEX

Pynchon, Thomas, ix quest see heroic journey reader see non-hero reality, 14, 15, 51, 180 art as, 198n7 nature of, 53, 56, 67, 76, 85, 100, 134, 146, 181 rational systems, 24, 34, 113, 114 realism and, 116 religion, 4, 5, 7, 10, 107, 139, 191n21 repetition, 126, 127, 151, 161, 162 repression, 132, 134, 135 inability, 127 Rodrigues, Eusebio L., 47, 103 role-playing see presentation self Rosenthal, Regine, 92 Rovit, Earl, 33–4, 62, 187n11 Rupp, Richard H., 17, 76, 99 Salter, D. P. M., 73 Saltzman, Arthur M., 112, 119 Samuels, Charles T., 73, 75 Scheer-Schazler, Brigitte, 50–1, 52, 193n7 seeing see vision self soul and, 122, 196n22 surrender of, 35, 60, 188n4 self-reliance, 3, 21, 36, 154, 166 sexuality, 90–1 Shakespeare, William, 6 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 189n7 simulacra, 113, 137, 161, 169–70, 174

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Slethaug, Gordon, 132 Smith, Bernard, 187n13 Smith, Stan, 23, 39, 48 soul, 36–7, 63, 108, 122, 196n22 Stock, Irvin, 96 sublime, 141, 197nn33–34 submission, 18 see also self, surrender of Tanner, Tony, 10, 18, 62, 117 Tennyson, Alfred, 46, 189n9 terrorist, 170–1 theory see patterns and ambiguity Trilling, Lionel, 33 victim see non-hero violence, 52, 64, 100, 102 as authenticity, 98, 166, 174 as epiphany, 94–5, 97 vision, 92–5, 138–9 Warhol, Andy, 14, 161–3, 165 Warren, Robert Penn, 37 wasteland, 48, 49 wedding, 157, 174–6 Weinstein, Arnold, 130, 195n16 Wells, H. G., 91 white noise, 121–2 Whyte, William, 188n1 Wilcox, Leonard, 138 Wilson, Jonathan, 42, 74, 79, 87 Wright, Derek, 83, 90, 106 Yehnert, Curtis A., 127, 129, 143, 199n12 Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud, 74

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