william styron and joseph heller william luttrell a d
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TRAGIC AND COMIC MODES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE:
WILLIAM STYRON AND JOSEPH HELLER
William Luttrell
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
June 1969
Approved by Doctoral Committee
/Ȓ J AdviserDg$artment of English
Graduate School Representative
ABSTRACT
William Styron and Joseph Heller are important contemporary American writers who can be associated with a certain "climate of opinion" in the twentieth century. The intellectual basis for this climate of opinion is that the world we know today, metaphysically, historically, scientifically, and socially, is one that does not admit to a secure and stable interpretation. Within such a climate of opinion one hesitates to enumerate metaphysical truths about the universe; one doubts historical eschatology, except perhaps in a diabolical sense; one speaks scientifically in terms of probability and the statistics of randomness rather than absolute order; and one analyzes social problems in terms of specific values in specific situations rather than from an unchanging and absolute frame of reference. Indeed, it is because of a diminishing hope of achieving an absolute or even satisfying control over the world that many have come to live with contingency as a way of life, and have little reason to believe that their partially articulated values reverberate much beyond themselves.
Through their fictional characters William Styron and Joseph Heller are contemporary observers of this climate of opinion. Styron reveals in his novels a vision of man separated from his familiar values and unable to return to them. To live—or to survive—demands man's adjustment both to a world without a continuing order and to a world not necessarily concerned with his welfare. Heller's comic vision has a similar orientation: an individual struggles to maintain his values and aspirations in a world of mere surface order and harmony. Furthermore, the tragic and comic responses of their characters are to some degree different from the responses observed in traditional tragedy and comedy; in some instances these responses become an ironic blend of tragedy and come<y redefined under contemporary conditions.
It is because of the radical intellectual attitudes which comprise this twentieth century climate of opinion that a significant body of literary criticism suggests that a large portion of contemporary writing is neither tragic nor comic in ary genuine sense but is rather a study in victimization. It is the view of this inquiry that victimization is the central issue for many contemporary writers, but it is important to understand, first, the nature and scope of victimization and, second, the nature of a character's response to it. Victimization need not lead to total defeat. It can lead toward rebellion, a rebellion against those forces which threaten an individual with total depersonalization. William Styron and Joseph Heller offer virtual paradigms of the novel of victimization. Their central characters are subject to disintegrating forces over which they appear to have little control.But within this victimization are perception of and rebellion against
Ill
that condition. Indeed, perception of and rebellion against the forces which threaten depersonalization are the identifying marks of the tragic and comic responses in the works of these writers. Styron's work is at least nominally associated with tragedy and Heller's with comedy. Because tragedy and comedy in traditional usage are honorific terms and the terms describing contemporary fiction (and drama) are often pejorative, this study attempts to reveal how two contemporary writers contribute in a significant way to the tradition of tragedy and comeciy although their contribution somewhat alters and redefines the tradition.
IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CONTEXT ......................................................................
A TWENTIETH CENTURY TRAGIC ATTITUDE .........................................................
WILLIAM STYRON .........................................................................................................
Lie Down in Darkness...................... ........................................................
The Long March . ........................................ .... ...........................................
Set This House on Fire ...........................................................................
Confessions of Nat Turner ......................................................................
The Victim and His Rebellion . ..................................................... ....
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33
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63
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JOSEPH HELLER: ABSURD COMEDY AND CATCH-22 ................................................. 103
Absurd Comedy ......................................................................................................103
Catch-22.............................................................................................................. 108
CONCLUSION....................................................................................................................... 133
BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................1^0
I
I
INTRODUCTION
William Styron and Joseph Heller have established themselves as
important American writers of mid-century. Though each develops his
material within different forms, one comedy, the other tragedy, both are
associated with a certain "climate of opinion" in the twentieth century.
This climate of opinion can be reasonably well articulated, though one
is more accustomed to the reverberations of simple phrases (e.g., "ex
istential absurdity" or the "fragmented universe") than to meaningful
analysis. The intellectual basis for this climate of opinion is that
the world we know today, metaphysically, historically, scientifically,
and socially, is one that does not readily admit to a secure and stable
interpretation. Within such a climate of opinion one hesitates to enu
merate metaphysical truths about the universe; one doubts historical
eschatology, except perhaps in a diabolical sense; one speaks scientif
ically in terms of probability and the statistics of randomness rather
than absolute order; and one analyzes social problems in terms of spe
cific values in specific situations rather than from an unchanging and
absolute frame of reference. Indeed, it is because of a diminishing
hope of achieving an absolute or even satisfying control over the world
that many have come to live with contingency as a way of life, and have
little reason to believe that their partially articulated values rever
berate much beyond themselves.
Two important recent studies explore the nature of man—in terms
2
of how he understands himself and in terms of his relationship to fam
ily, community and universe—in this twentieth century climate of opin
ion. After defining what he calls an "existential pattern" (somewhat
similar to that outlined in the preceding remarks), Ihab Hassan, in
Radical Innocence examines three ironic modes found in the contemporaiy
novel. Each of the three modes reveals a specific understanding which
a character achieves in regard to his place in the universe and the ori
entation he makes to his family or community. This orientation and under
standing, however, are less matters of mythic trancedence or tragic in
sight and more ironic exercises in survival. They usually end in some
form of defeat. Hassan's discussion reveals, furthermore, the difficulty
of fitting the modes into the traditional framework of comedy or tragecy.
At best, the modes "veer" or "hover," to use Hassan's words, toward trag
edy or come<fy. Marcus Klein, in After Alienation, explores "accommoda
tion" as a distinctive form of adaptation or orientation, where the hero
makes a "tricky" and recurring adjustment to his world. Implicit in both
studies is the view of contemporary man living under the peculiar intel
lectual conditions of his time and attempting some form of survival in a
world not sympathetic to intellectual and moral security.
Through their fictional characters Joseph Heller and William
Styron are also contemporary observers of our world. Their works could
be an answer to the question, "how does one live in a world lacking in
tellectual and moral security?" To a large extent there is a parallel
between the twentieth century's climate of opinion and their works.
Styron in his novels reveals a vision of man separated from his familiar
values and unable to return to them. To live—or to survive—demands
3
man’s adjustment both to a world without a predetermined or continuing
order and to a world not necessarily concerned with his welfare. Heller’s
comic vision has a similar orientation: an individual struggles to
maintain his values and aspirations in a world of mere surface order and
harmony. Furthermore, the tragic or comic responses? of their characters
are to some degree different from the responses associated with the tra
ditional understanding of tragedy and comedy; in some instances these
responses become an ironic blend of tragedy and comedy redefined under
contemporary conditions.
This study will begin with a brief description of the "climate
of opinion" prevailing among many perceptive observers of the world today
but with the end in mind to illuminate how such a climate influences
tragedy and comedy as they appear today in two significant contemporary
writers. William Styron and Joseph Heller will be examined separately
to reveal how tragic and comic modes, as we view them today, fashion ex
plicit modes of response to the world. Styron's work is at least nomi
nally associated with tragedy and Heller's with comedy. It is hoped that
such an analysis will reveal first the character of tragedy and comedy in
the works of these two authors and, second, how tragedy and comedy today
differ from traditional tragic and comic modes. Because "tragedy" and
"comedy" in traditional usage are honorific terms and the terms describing
contemporary fiction (and drama) are often pejorative, this study should
have value in revealing how two contemporary writers contribute in a sig
nificant way to the tradition of tragedy and comedy although their con
tributions somewhat alter and redefine the tradition.
V
I
CHAPTER I
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CONTEXT
In drama or fiction the shape and direction of a character’s
actions tell us much about the quality of his existence. A heroic or
pathetic, unified or fragmented character emerges from his manner of
adaptation to his world, and his world includes not only the immediate
social context made explicit by his actions or reactions but by his under
standing of his place in the universe as well. This adaptation begins
with a character's limited perception of himself, his world and the de
mands made upon him by that world, and grows more complex as he searches
within and beyond himself for an understanding of the problems that con
front him. In broadest terms this is the central problem of most dra
matic and fictional literature. It could be asked, then, why make a
point of so basic and broad a problem? It is important because the re
lationship between individual and world occurs in a specific time and
place, possessing its own peculiar dynamics. Generally an artist develops
this relationship as he construes it at some given time, probably his own,
though he is free to choose a point of view that is not within his own
time and place.
An historical attitude toward literature holds that an under
standing of the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of a period will con
tribute to an understanding of the literary work—not define it but con
tribute to the background that hovers about it and to some degree is as
5
much a part of the artist’s material as the strictly formal aspects oft
his craft. Hence, a knowledge of the background an artist works against
is ultimately helpful in understanding or at least appreciating the re
lationships between his characters and the world they live in. With
this in mind, before one is prepared to deal directly with contemporary
tragedy or comedy—genres which reveal quite explicit relationships be
tween individual and world—he would find it helpful to present several
cultural and literary attitudes prevailing in this century. Awareness
of these attitudes should illuminate, perhaps even indirectly, the
"problem" of tragedy and comedy today, for, indeed, many consider the
genres now either non-existent or so highly qualified as to be something
other than what could be called tragedy or comedy. A discussion of these
attitudes and beliefs should reveal, perhaps in a small but still mean
ingful measure, why tragedy and comedy are what they are today. When we
then turn directly to current specimen selections of tragedy and comedy,
an understanding of their central problems and resolutions should be more
meaningful because of the understanding of a portion of the intellectual
background of the century in which they are written.
In recent history, at least from the nineteenth century, cultural
commentators have noted a deterioration of intellectual and moral secur
ity. Philosophically, we talk no longer in absolute terms—the meta
physics of the permanent and universal—but in contextual terms, that is,
observing situations oriented to specific problems and their immediate
solutions. Nominally such pragmatic orientation might seem to suggest
an optimistic attitude regarding man's condition, but when we speak in
broader, more generalized terms about man and his place in the universe
6
discourse often takes a pessimistic turn, and creates a metaphysics of
contingency, error, and despair. The fashionable image of such a meta
physics is Sisyphus, symbolically dying each time the rock overcomes
him.
Whether or not the current point of view emerged from the devel
opment of science as a systematic method in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, or the social sciences of the nineteenth, or scientific atti
tudes in the twentieth is not relevant to this study. More relevant is
the sense of dislocation so frequently spoken of and widely sensed in
the mid-twentieth century. Insecurity, isolation, the fragmented accom
modation to the world that we now experience have their genesis in the
deterioration of unquestionable intellectual premises and indisputable
moral claims. The anti-heroic and anti-utopian novel, the confidence
man, the nihilist, the "beat," and absurd comic are symptomatic of this.
A few comments about history, science and social action should suggest
how a metaphysics of contingency, error and despair has come about.
Irving Howe describes the deterioration of faith in history as
the bearer of social salvation; he simultaneously reveals the more imme
diate problem of man and community.
To minds raised on the assumptions, whether liberal or Marxist, of 19th-Century philosophies of history—assumptions that the human enterprise has a purposive direction, or telos, and an upward rhythm, or progress—there is also the churning fear that history itself has proved to be a cheat. And a cheat not because it has turned away from our expectations, but because it betrays our hopes precisely through an inverted fulfillment of those expectations. Not progress denied but progress realized, is the nightmare haunting the anti-utopian novel. And behind this nightmare lies a crisis of thought quite as intense as that suffered by serious 19th Century minds when they discovered that far more painful than doubting the existence of
7
God was questioning the validity of his creation."’'
The irony of his remark deserves comment. Deterioration does not occur
in history because it is replete with increasing barbarism but rather
because the very idea of progress—of achieving that "transparent uni
verse in which all categories are fixed, the problematic . . . banished,o
unhappiness . . . treason, the gratuitous act beyond imagining" —con
tains the germ of destruction. Superb technological success not only
is no guarantee of heroic action but may well eliminate such action.
This is the vision of Orwell, Huxley, and Zamiatin.
Howe's vision of the threat that exists in a "transparent uni
verse" with its fixed categories has remarkable similarity to a physical
concept, entropy, recently discussed as a metaphor to explain the lack
of heroic action in contemporary fiction.
The concept of entropy, to explore further a metaphor which serves remarkably well to dramatize that process with which the novel of disintegration is concerned, may be defined as the tendency of an ordered universe to go over into a state of disorder. This is another way of saying that the behaviour of things tends to become increasingly random; and in any system tending toward the random there is a loss of direction.The universe as we have thought of it from Aristotle to Einstein was a system controlled by laws that produced a cosmos instead of a chaos—that is, the universe was highly structured; but entropy is a drift toward an unstructured state of equilibrium that is total.3
■’•Irving Howe, "The Fiction of Anti-Utopia," New Republic,April 23, 1962, pp. 13-ll|.
2Ibid., p. lit.
3Alvin Greenberg, "The Novel of Disintegration: Paradoxical Inpossibility in Contemporary Fiction," Contemporary Literature, VII (Spring, 1966), 10i+. Of course, Wylie Sypher's chapter, "Existence and Entropy," Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, 1962), is the famous precursor of Greenberg's suggestion.
8
The positions of Howe and Greenberg are not similar, of course,
in the kind of threat they suggest. Howe speaks of structured fixity
of human belief and behavior and Greenberg of a physical "unstructured
state of equilibrium"; indeed they are more like polar opposites that
ironically indicate the same end: stasis. Such an end demands of life
only endurance; insight and purposeful action are as irrelevant as they
are dangerous. In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 Chaplain Tappman, the fright
ened and ineffectual spiritual advisor to the airmen on Pianosa, senses
a cosmic degeneration similar to entropy: "There was no up or down in
a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning dazzling,
majestic sun was in a progressive decay that would eventually destroy the
earth too."^
From these observations it is but a small step to Saul Bellow's
caustic summary of the case contemporary writers make against public ac
tion.
Public life, vivid and formless turbulence, news, slogans, mysterious crises, and unreal configurations dissolve coherence in all but the most resistant minds, and even to such minds it is not always a confident certainty that resistance can ever have a positive outcome. To take narcotics has become in some circles a mark of rebellious independence, and to scorch one's personal earth is sometimes felt to be the only honorable course. Rebels have no bourgeois certainties to return to when rebellions are done. The fixed points seem to be disappearing.5
"Unreal configurations" dissolving coherence could well be a metaphor
^Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York, 1961), p. 279.
-’Saul Bellow, Recent American Fiction, A Lecture Presented Under the Auspices of the Gertrude Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund by the Library of Congress (Washington, 1963), p. 2. Bellow, however, ultimately argues against this pessimistic social thesis.
9
for entropy. But its exact opposite is in Huxley's vision of absolute
fixity, and perhaps each could imply the other as a form of action and
counteraction. It is just these frightening extremes, however, that
lead to the ironic mode that is common to much contemporary fiction. As
Ihab Hassan points out, irony magnifies arbitrariness, isolation, gro
tesque scapegoat rituals that become nightmares of self-deception.In
a world of ordered perceptions and a hierarchy of unchanging beliefs
such characteristics are at most temporary phenomena.
Ihab Hassan describes the fictional "hero" that lives in an
ironic world as living an "existential pattern." The fifth point in his
five point outline of the pattern is peculiarly relevant as a summary of
the preceding thoughts of Howe, Greenberg, and Bellow.
In a world dominated by error, even heroes do not possess the gift of complete knowledge. The hero acts or is acted upon, but his perception of the situation remains both limited and relative. . . . Because the hero seldom attains to full knowledge, he is seldom a tragic figure in the classic sense. And because his life is so rarely devoid of genuine pain, he is rarely a comic figure of harmless compromises.?
Hassan's own analysis of a great segment of contemporary American fic
tion is in three parts and is inclusive of tragedy and comedy. But his
analysis suggests not really tragedy or comedy in any traditional sense
but rather literary modes with a "hero" who is either a "victim" or one
Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence (New York, 1966), p. 121.Robert Brustein in the Theatre of Revolt (New York, 196)4), pp. 3-U, 31- 32, makes a similar point in regard to irony in the contemporary drama.
^Hassan, p. 118. The other four are (l) chance and absurdity dominate human action; (2) conduct and attitudes have no external norm to which a character may turn; (3) the character is an alien, at odds with himself or society; (I4) irony and contradiction mark human motives (pp. 116-117).
10
who "gives the illusion of escaping from necessity." The three modes
of fiction, to use his words, "border" on tragedy or "touch" on romance;
or "veer" toward comedy. He points out that contenporary comedy is
basically different from traditional comedy because even though the hero
"enjoys considerable freedom and gives the illusion of escaping from
necessity," the "presence of death is strongly felt ... as is the
presence of disorder, and the traditional comic redemption of society
is markedly absent."®
All of the foregoing remarks suggest what could be called radi
cal intellectual conditions. They are radical, first, because they are
basic or fundamental to a point of view toward man and his world de
scribed by many writers and critics today, and, second, extreme in asserto
ing a specific kind of relationship between man and his world.
It is this existential claim with all the alienation it implies
that Marcus Klein in After Alienation argues is not characteristic of
several important contemporary writers. Hassan’s position suggests es
trangement or separation but Klein's thesis qualifies this by asserting
that a form of "accommodation" prevails today.
By "accommodation" I mean to suggest that simultaneous engagement and disengagement which is the characteristic movement of the novel in these past years. The hero begins in freedom of the self and discovers that he is isolated. The hero chooses community—he assumes racial obligations, or he declares himself a patriot, or he makes love—and he discovers that he has
^Hassan, p. 201.
9^Hassan's use of radical also involves a condition being funda
mental and extreme, but it is a condition of character: innocence. The above remarks suggest an intellectual temper of our time rather than a state of character.
11
sacrificed his identity, and his adventures begin all over again.
Yet Klein's thesis also illuminates the problem of significant action
in a world described by Howe, Greenberg, and Bellow. If the world can
be adjusted to, the adjustment is tentative.
The goal is the elimination of the distance between self and society, the perfect union of self and society, but the issue ... is at best a lesson in the perpetual necessity of killing adjustments. What is at best to be achieved in this necessary marriage is a cautionary, tentative accommodation. . .
The most essential characteristics of accommodation for a fic
tional character are (l) maintenance of a "tricky distance between the
1 ?sense of one's self in one's freedom and the sense of society";
(2) the "lesson in the perpetual necessity of killing adjustments";
(3) his awareness that he "exercise his wits and . . . live within his
dilemma" (a dilemma because accommodation is defined as "simultaneous
engagement and disengagement").-^ gut these phrases are suggestive of
exceptional measures taken to insure some mode of survival in a world
that stands as an "existential" threat. Yet certainly within Klein's
position is something similar to a comic analysis of the contemporary
novel because he believes accommodation is a mode which allows for con
tinued life and significant action.
The problem of accommodation, however, is really as old as
-J-°Marcus Klein, After Alienation (Cleveland, Ohio, 196£), p. 30.
-L1Ibid.
12"The hero begins in freedom, chooses community, discovers he has sacrificed his identity, and his adventures begin all over again" (After Alienation, p. 17).
l^Klein, p. 30.
12
literature. The real merit in Klein's position is not the argument for
accommodation but more the mode of accommodation: what form it takes.
There is, however, a case against accommodation and Hassan comes close
to stating it. He has good reason because today destruction is not
merely death but symbolic death, where frustration and absurdity render
human energies useless. Radical intellectual conditions imply such dis
orientation: human energies only appear free from destructive neces
sities. More than perhaps at any other time the question of how man can
live is important because radical intellectual conditions destroy credi
bility in a benevolent universe and a melioristic history. Hassan's re
marks emphasize the tension in orienting or adapting to the world and
this tension does not resolve itself into perfect tragic insight nor the
veiled hope in naturalistic defeat. One of Hassan's three categories
("modes" which Hassan believes describes much contemporary fiction, each
mode defining the "hero" in some special sense) suggests naturalism,
rather than any tone of tragedy, but it is more extreme—"the hero ap
pears primarily in the guise of a victim or scapegoat . . . railed by
necessity"—but the world of the scapegoat or victim "is not merely
harsh and brutal; it leaves us with no sense of how injustice may be
rectified. The characters do not simply submit to some external neces
sity; they are their own executioners."^ This obviously doesn't de
scribe accommodation in ary real sense of the word but more simply en
trapment. Hassan's second and third categories are less somber, though
they echo frustration.
■^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. lf>l.
13
In addition to these quasi-tragic and comic forms we even speak
today of an odd mixture of comedy and tragedy. In current terms this
is absurd comedy or black humor. These terms are useful for they ac
centuate "predicament," living by one's wits, but the problem is more
essential than the disproportion that predicament or quick-wittedness
implies. It is a writer's mode of perception and his character's mode
of survival.
The new comic spirit in American literature attends a special awareness of reality, a new sense of error and incongruity.It unites horror and slapstick, realism and surrealism, in the most antic manner. Writers nowadays seem anxious to respond to the incoherence of life, to its openness and absurdity.. . . The new comedy, which combines boisterousness and bitterness is really an attempt to restore sanity through madness or buffoonery. Above all, the new comedy seeks to preserve the health of the community through a qualified tolerance of disorder.-^
But absurd comedy is not quite the comic form Klein considers as accom
modation. Its stress on incongruity, madness and disproportion echoes
more tragedy than comic resolution. What accommodation it reaches is
oftentimes bizarre and "anti-heroic." But tragedy and comedy or some
combination of the two suggest some successful reckoning with the world.
Insight emerges from frustration and despair in the first and from tenta
tive and temporal maladjustments in the second. Therefore, tragedy and
comedy are honorific terms; existential tragedy and absurd comedy, the
terms often used to describe much contemporary fiction (particularly
that of the two writers in this study), are often presented as derogatory
ones in the sense they are said to portray the human condition as less
than human. It is the hope of this study to reveal how two contemporary
■^Ihab Hassan, "The Dismemberment of Orpheus," American Scholar, XXXII (Summer, 1963), U76.
Hi
writers—William Styron and Joseph Heller—are not only in the tradi
tion of tragedy and comedy but to reveal as well how their works have
shaped and directed that tradition as it appears in the twentieth cen
tury.
Because William Styron and Joseph Heller live in a period per
vaded by the intellectual temper described in the foregoing pages and
their works are often labeled existential tragedy or absurd comedy, it
does not follow that they create a world of victims who lack the admir
able basic characteristics we look for in tragic and comic figures.
Though the writings of these two authors cannot totally "define" tragedy
and comedy today, they well can serve as excellent examples of the forms
tragecfy and comedy have taken in recent years. Before discussing either
of these authors, this study will attempt to formulate a "tragic atti
tude," principally an attitude made up of man's vision of himself cut
away from absolute frames of reference—a metaphysical isolation—and a
vision of himself as a victim of many forces over which he has little
or no control. Such a tragic attitude is congruent with the themes in
the works of Styron and Heller. But it will be pointed out, however,
that man's tragic stance need not end in acceptance of his metaphysical
isolation but can continue with his rebellion against those forces which
attempt to victimize him. Furthermore this tragic attitude is as rele
vant to the absurd comedy of Joseph Heller as it is to the tragic novels
of William Styron. Both modes—absurd comedy and contemporary tragedy—
are responses to similar worlds. They are worlds formulated in radical
intellectual terms, terms which demand that a character perceive his
isolation and finitude, but worlds which demand that he must formulate
IS
some sense of rebellion against the manifold forces which threaten to
victimize him. William Styron and Joseph Heller reveal man’s isolation
and victimization yet each suggests that rebellion is essential to man
remaining man.
CHAPTER II
A TWENTIETH CENTURY TRAGIC ATTITUDE
John Gassner has noted that a dramatic work may be "non-tragic
yet more absorbing than a work we can easily certify as a tragecy.
It is also true that one might experience the tragic atmosphere of a
work before discovering (or accepting) definitions or historical ex
amples that confirm or deny its tragic character. Such attitudes as
these make incidental whether or not a work fits a classic paradigm or
basic definitions in achieving tragic stature. Yet we do retain the
idea of tragedy (and comedy) if for no other reason than it allows us
to indicate some mode of relationship a fictional or dramatic character
establishes between himself and the world. Traditional criticism, often
working from classic paradigms, attempts to discover clearly the charac
teristics of a genre and thereby develop something of an inductive gener
alization about that genre. On the other hand, rejecting paradigms and
definitions, in the instance of tragedy,.allows one to pursue broadly
what might be called a tragic temper. Gassner aptly characterizes and
approves of this, noting "tragedy should be the end-result of a writer's
struggle with his matter rather than a collection of previously assembled
■’•John Gassner, "Tragic Perspectives: A Sequence of Queries," Tulane Drama Review, II (May, 19!?8), 10. For example, he suggests that it would be difficult to compare favorably the poetic tragedies of the English Romantic and Victorian poets with The Cherry Orchard "which its author called a 'Comedy,1 or Juno and the Paycock, in which the admixture of comecy and tragic elements can be disconcerting only to purists" (p. 11).
17
fi ?attitudes, caveats, and aspirations. . . . Gassner's remark does im
pose a substantial burden, however, for each work one desires to call a
tragedy demands not only a subtle and extensive grasp of what that work
attenpts to do but also ignites the volatile judgments of the past and
each reader's sensibilities on what is tragic.
Defending tragedy in contemporary writing is particularly dif
ficult. Ihab Hassan's study very nearly destroys the idea of contempo
rary tragedy. Hassan indicates in his discussion of the ironic mode, a
mode which he feels dominates much contemporary fiction, that the "hero"
appears as a victim, a scapegoat with little or no freedom of action;
such a hero "borders" on tragedy but there is no real change in his life
and no self-renewal. Hassan follows Northrop Frye in rejecting tragedy
in the ironic mode because the ironic hero is "'inferior in power or in
telligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of bondage, frustra
tion, absurdity.' . . . Irony isolates from the tragic situation the ele
ment of arbitrariness, the sense of isolation, the demonic vision. . .
It is precisely this sense of "victimization" of a protagonist
that alienates many readers and critics when confronting much contempo
rary writing, fictional or dramatic. Such victimization has explicit
roots in the naturalistic novel because there man is a victim of political,
economic and hereditary circumstances. The "victim" does not command much
sympathy, however, and for many he precludes a discussion of a work on
serious tragic grounds; the victim degrades the human condition; he lacks
2Gassner, p. 11.
^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 121. The interior quotation is from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1937), p. 3h.
18
nobility and often insight. Such a protagonist does not die but rather
succumbs to pressures over which he has no control; he accomplishes
neither self-mastery nor understanding—in short his is an ignominious
defeat. Hassan discusses Lie Down in Darknessas an instance of the
first ironic mode, specifically the hero as victim or scapegoat, one
ruled by necessity. Such a form is "closed to any real change in the
life of the hero, any self-renewal."-’ For exanple, one of its protago
nists, Peyton Loftis, commits suicide at the conclusion of her intense
Joycean monologue at the close of the novel; her father, Milton Loftis,
tortured by frustration and alcohol, leaps at the throat of his wife,
Helen, during the chapel services for Peyton. Even this rage fails
Milton and he is last seen "bounding past wreaths and boxwood and over
tombstones, toward the highway." Helen remains leaning against the chapel
door—"'Peyton,’ she said, 'Oh God, Peyton. My child. Nothing! Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing!'" (389). Yet tragic figures are usually thought to
be those who suffer, struggle and fail but in failure come to some knowl
edge of their position in the world, a position which though not neces
sarily sublime and redemptive is neither base nor ignoble.
In a long essay on tragedy Richard Sewall discusses not only the
nature of fictional and dramatic tragedy but precisely what is not trag
edy. His remarks point up the basic problems raised by Hassan via Frye,
that tragedy is not, to use Frye's term, the "ironic mode" we experience
today. Sewall discusses tragedy under such headings as "the tragic
^William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (New York, 195>7).
-’Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 123.
19
cosmos," "tragic man," and "tragic man and society." His conception of
tragic man derives from the act of suffering and is supported by
Dostoevski's remark from Notes from the Underground, that "suffering is
the sole origin of consciousness." But this suffering ultimately must
lead to a universal stance whereby a tragic figure speaks for all men
and does not remain locked in private suffering. Furthermore, this
stance becomes an "affair with the gods. In taking arms against the
ancient cosmic evil, he transcends the human situation, mediating be
tween the human and the divine.What might appear as tragedy in
twentieth centuiy writing could well be an affair "with the social order,
or the environment, or the glands . . . certainly where it becomes so
the muse of tragecy walks out; the universe loses its mystery and its 7
grandeur." In transcending the human situation "tragedy discovers ap
principle of goodness that coexists with the evil." (my italics)
"Principle" is the key word. It implies some structured relationship
for Sewall between the individual and his world and provides the proper
tragic tension.
The relationship is not necessarily one involving perfect com
munity relationships nor a cosmic vision of the orthodox Christian God.
It is "nearer the folk sense that justice exists somewhere in the
^Tragedy: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. Laurence Michel and Richard Sewall (New Jersey, 19o3), p. 128. Sewall acknowledges an extensive indebtedness to commentators on tragic history and criticism.His position is discussed in this study not for its originality but for its general synthesis of many commonly held positions.
7Ibid., p. 122.
8Ibid., p. 121.
20
universe ... it may be a vision of some transcendent beauty and dig
nity against which the present evil may be seen as evil and the weltero
as welter." Joseph Wood Krutch suggests much the same point when he
speaks of man having a central place in the universe, "where he assumes
that each of his acts reverberates through the universe" and where out
of the "dissonances of life [man] manages nevertheless to hear them as
harmony."'*'0
Must one accept the proposition that for tragedy to exist there
must be this far-reaching or absolute principle in man's life? Albert
Camus, for example, argues quite the contrary, that the absence of such
a transcendent relationship spoken of by Sewall and Krutch creates a ten
sion which accentuates man's importance far beyond what it would be
otherwise. He points out that in traditional philosophy "it was previ
ously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning
to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be
lived all the better if it has no meaning."}'}' "No meaning" for Camus is
to be taken as having no metaphysical significance. Hence one might say,
contrary to both Sewall and Krutch, that in spite of the absence of a
divinely oriented universe and man's lack of a supra-human significance,
man's sense of his worth and his need to act significantly is as strong
as it would be in a divinely oriented one. Though metaphysical isolation
^Tragedy* Modem Essays in Criticism, pp. 121-122.
}-°Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Tragic Fallacy," The Modem Temper (New York, 1929), p. 133.
^Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York, 1938), p. 33» This quotation simply presents the conclusion of his position and of course does not point out how he reached it.
21
does indeed appear to be the dominant temper of much contemporary writ
ing, such isolation is less disturbing to the experienced reader than
the concomitant experience of victimization that seems so pervasive of
much recent literature. It is indeed victimization rather than meta
physical isolation that is the more difficult to integrate into a con
ception of tragedy because victimization suggests something less than
human. If modern tragecty- can successfully reckon with victimization it
can justifiably be called tragedy rather than an exercise in futility.«
Hassan's argument against the modem existential novel as tragic
is based upon the absence of freedom experienced by the characters—the
"hero" is a scapegoat ruled by strict necessity. When freedom does
exist and characters are not ruled by strict necessity, the novel "veers"
toward comedy, something like an accommodation without "shrill optimism
or unwarranted affirmation." It is understandable why Hassan speaks
directly to the issue of freedom, for freedom is usually thought to be
central to tragic behavior. As noted earlier, however, it is the sense
of victimization that alienates many readers and critics from many mod
em novels, because victim not only suggests passiveness, inconsequential
action, but perhaps even the absence of freedom to alter a state or con
dition. The "climate of opinion" described as radical intellectual con
ditions in the first part of this study and what Hassan calls the "ex
istential pattern" in many contemporary novels underscores this sense of
victimization.
Victimization today suggests that the individual succumbs to
forces that direct him and leave him without viable choices. In such a
condition he is unable, to use Sewall's words, to "sense that justice
22
exists in the universe" and unable, to echo Krutch, to discover harmony
amid dissonance. The victim accomplishes neither self-mastery, under
standing of his circumstance, nor significant action because little in
the world as he knows it is conducive to self-mastery, understanding or
significant action. Victimization as it appears in fictional charac
terization is strikingly concrete though it occurs in many varied forms.
It can be absolute and encompassing, such as the condition of the literal
slave or the condition of man in terms of strict psychological determin
ism; it can be of a lesser degree than either of these, such as the con
dition of the alcoholic who functions normally and freely on many occa
sions and yet succumbs to the compulsion of prolonged alcoholic states
on other occasions. Though victimization can be total or in some measure
less than total, it is an injustice to the problem of man and freedom to
oversimplify the forces that threaten domination of him. And it appears
evident as civilization grows more complex that additional forces are
discovered which make of man a victim rather than a free agent, one who
has little capacity or freedom to alter his condition. Therefore, a dis
cussion of "types" of victimization will illuminate the problem. First,
a discussion of its meaning in a total sense and, second, a discussion
of it as a matter of degree, where genuine individuality and victimiza
tion intermingle.
I
Absolute and total victimization for fictional characters ap
pears as metaphysical determinism, in which human freedom is as unreal
as the "freedom" of cosmic forces. Such determinism understands the
23
entire cosmos as a predetermined order and man as subservient to that
order. In such a cosmic order man is neither responsible for his actions
nor capable of changing his circumstance. Yet in an entirely different
way, death has functioned for many artists as a metaphysical determinant,
not one that controls actions but one controlling the end to which all
action arrives. It is the reaper waiting only for time and place. So
much is the presence of death felt as a master no man escapes that it
functions as the central force to be reckoned with in many artistic
works.
A total sense of victimization also appears, however, when man
is viewed as a product of social or economic forces, as in Marxist de
terminism, and his actions are explained in terms of the historical evo
lution of institutions rather than personal volition. In anti-utopian
literature, as it was for the black American in substantial areas of nine
teenth century America, the state, as an absolute master, victimizes the
individual by virtue of its complete control. The anti-utopian nightmare
of history, as Irving Howe noted, is a perfectly controlled society from
which all uncertainty and human idiosyncrasy have been removed. Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell's 198U are just such fixed
entities and its people total slaves to the state. The scope of servi
tude in I98I1 is readily apparent in the concluding chapters. The "Inner
^2The "reaper" image is highly suggestive of man subordinate to a higher power. In Shakespeare's sixtieth sonnet
Time doth transfix the fourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty's brow Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth *And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
In yet another image Ingmar Bergman's acclaimed film, The Seventh Seal, is a stunning presentation of death the master chess player, who captures pawn and king no matter how shrewd and calculated their moves.
2h
Party” of Oceania cannot be satisfied with control over a party member's
actions; it must have control of the interior life as well. As O'Brien,
the interrogator for the Inner Party tells Winston Smith, it is not
enough that one fear Big Brother, one must also love Big Brother.
O'Brien methodically proceeds to "reconstruct" Winston so that this last
area of freedom, the interior life of reflection and self-consciousness,
is surrendered to Big Brother. The last pages of the novel portray the
pathetically enslaved "new" Winston Smith. Huxley's Brave New World
accomplishes much the same purpose but through a biochemical means. The
range of possible personalities is prefabricated biochemically before
birth and is indicated as letter groups—Alphas, Betas, etc. The end
is the same as the one achieved in 198U: total servitude of the indi
vidual to the social organism. And within that servitude is his victim
ization.
A conception of the individual as victim can originate in man's
understanding of those forces which are responsible for his actions.
Twentieth century investigations by psychologists in areas of personality
structure, behavioral patterns, hereditary characteristics suggest a
psychological determinism which explains man's actions not as a result
of volition but as a product of deeply recessed internal forces that he
is permanently incapable of understanding or altering. William Styron
has spoken of psychological determinants:
depression doesn't arise so much from political conditions, or the threat of war, or the atom bomb as from the terrific increase of scientific knowledge which has come to us about the human self—Freud, that is, abnormal psychology, and all the psychiatric wisdom. My God, think of how morbid and depressing Dostoevski would have been if he could have gotten hold of some
2i>
of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, say Sadism and Masochism.13
Indeed literature and the psychoanalytic traditions have taught us that
man can become a victim to forces within himself which he is unconscious
of and could never control without adequate therapy—if then.
II
Victimization in the foregoing senses is all-embracing and total.
It is similar to the servitude of the literal slave held in bondage: vo
lition is hardly a practical reality and actions are controlled by forces
beyond choice. But victimization has roots, however, in places other
than determinism and its encompassing control. Anything that diminishes
a man, that retards his efforts to act freely and significantly or seri
ously compromises his condition creates a degree of victimization. A
metaphysics of chance or whim rather than one of determinism can con
tribute to the victim's condition by asserting that the universe at un
disclosed times plays havoc with aspiration and action, destroying
through indifference or chance expectation and fulfillment. Thomas
Hardy's poem "Hap" suggests this experience when the speaker observes
that "purblind Doomsters had as readily strown / Blisses about my pil
grimage as pain." Gloucester in King Lear makes a similar observation—
"As flies to wanton beys are we to the gods. / They kill us for their
sport."—that suggests not determinism but man subjected to "sportive"
pleasures that arise when the gods are at play. Neither image, Hardy or
’~3writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York, 19^8), p. 201.
26
Shakespeare's, suggests an absolute force controlling man's actions on
all occasions, but both indicate, however, that attendant upon man's ac
tions are fragmentation and destruction which he is unable to control or
alter. Though man may be free in his actions, he still can become vic
tim of whim and circumstance. It is difficult not to believe that all
men have experienced this sense of victimization at some time in their
lives.
Yet man's perception of himself as a victim also occurs in his
relationship to his institutions, not in the sense that he is a product
of their historical development nor an entity totally controlled by them
but more in that sense of the specific demands made upon him in their
quest for stability and their own private goals. Much social commentary
today (e.g., The Organization Man; The Hidden Persuaders) describes the
demands and the goals of institutions: some degree of control over the
individual, a control often to no one's benefit save the institution ini.
tiating it. Motivational psychologists in conjunction with corporate ad
vertising agencies are excellent examples of institutions which attempt
and often succeed in controlling large numbers of people by reducing
their viable choices to actions motivated by powerful unconscious ener
gies. Indeed, much social commentary is directed toward the problem of
man remaining free in spite of institutional demands. It is not that
institutions are necessarily unjust but rather that their power makes
them quite capable of extending demands to the point where legitimate
compromise becomes a thinly disguised servitude of man to institution.
Such servitude is nothing more than victimization.
A third though not necessarily total sense of victimization is
27
that which man experiences when he is consumed by a passion or an idea
that "unbalances" his state of being (e.g., Chillingsworth's obsession
with the torture of Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter) or that
experience of disengagement when he is without significant purpose or
direction. This sense of victimization can lead to the "bondage" Paul
Tillich describes:
If man's freedom ... is a series of contingent acts of arbitrariness, it falls under the control of forces which move against one another without a deciding center. What seems to be free proves to be conditioned by internal convulsions. . . .Parts of the self overtake the center and determine it without being united with the other parts. . . . This is the ontological character of the state described in classical theology as the "bondage of the will."-^-
Tillich's statement resembles Aristotle's analysis of hamartia, the basis
for much commentary on tragic behavior. This form of victimization
"springs from within," such that the protagonist appears to create his
own tragic downfall rather than having it imposed from without. Whether
or not it is the only source of tragic action is a point frequently de
bated. But as a source of victimization, the lack of a "deciding center"
is as important to understanding victimized man as the other sources that
have been discussed.
It should be evident, however, why the victim and the possibility
of his tragic status arouse hostility in many commentators on tragecfcr:
too many things "happen" to the victim, some of which are not of his own
choosing and oftentimes beyond his power to control. Oscar Mandel's re
jection of the victim as potential tragic hero is based upon this point.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, II (Chicago, 19f?7), 63.
28
Tragedy deals with an action harmful or fatal in its nature.The fatality which reaches us "out of the blue" is one thing; that which we call upon ourselves by our will and our deed is quite another. . . . That is why we eliminate . . . the serious work of art which concerns itself with a victim.15
It is impossible as well as unnecessarily limiting, however, not to con
sider those forces that originate beyond will but which influence man's
condition.^ Ultimately, the origins of the forces acting on man are
less important than how he reacts to them. But victimization is indeed
an apt word for the state of contemporary man because the sources for
such a condition are manifold. And the opposing issue is not man pos
sessing absolute freedom—freedom from all control—but rather possess
ing that reasonable freedom that allows for a genuine human condition.
Total or absolute freedom is a fiction; total or absolute bondage is a
hell. Somewhere between the two exists meaningful human action. But
it has become increasingly difficult today to locate that "reasonable"
freedom.
This brief outline of victimization is intended to suggest no .
more than the kind of world within which many contemporary protagonists
find themselves. It is oftentimes a "world of degradation, enervation
and defeat. But most of them [contemporaiy novelists] do not drag us
into the depths simply for the sake of the dragging or the depths; nor
do they leave us there.Many of them believe
that somewhere, somehow, there exists a transcendent set of values which the individual can discover and achieve, if he
3-^A Definition of Tragedy (New York, l?6l), p. 103.
3-^To remove chance or accident from Othello, for example, would be to alter seriously the very structure of the play.
3-7joseph J. Waldmeir, "Quest Without Faith," Recent American Fiction, ed. Joseph J. Waldmeir (Boston, 1963), p.
29
suffers long and hard enough, and is very lucky in his search for them. The message is almost medieval, though of course defrocked, for there is no fixed religious system to impose order and control . . . and no God to whom the individual can appeal for guidance or aid in identifying true values from false.
It is the view of this study that perception of and rebellion against
those forces directed against man, those forces that retard, degrade
and limit his fulfillment, are the identifying marks of a portion of
contemporary writing and are man's "transcendent" values.
William Styron and Joseph Heller offer virtual paradigms of the
novel of victimization. Their central characters are subject to disin
tegrating forces over which they appear to have little control. Both
authors portray the contemporary condition in such a way as to pointedly
reveal man the victim. But within this victimization are perception of
and rebellion against that condition. William Styron's characters are
vividly aware that something has gone askew and they are losing viable
choices and significant action. Joseph Heller's central character,
Yossarian, is equally vividly aware that his society is bent on making
him a total victim, that is, enslaving him to insane means in order to
reach equally insane goals. Rebellion in Styron's Lie Down in Darkness
culminates in a rejection of an existence which has passed beyond redemp
tion; in The Long March develops into a determination to endure an op
pressor that very nearly seems unendurable; in Set This House on Fire
becomes a determination to live significantly in spite of personal
limitation and metaphysical isolation; in Confessions of Nat Turner
culminates in the violent rejection of that total experience of
l^Waldmeir, p. $6.
30
victimization, man as property. Joseph Heller's Yossarian perceives
that much of his world, though thought by many to be sane and rational,
is indeed insane and irrational. His rebellion is emphatic; he refuses
any further conplicity with his "captors" and takes flight to Sweden.
It is not that rebellion is of one form in these works, but that rebel
lion is some form of assertion against a state of existence that has
become destructive of authentic experience.
Ihab Hassan has suggested that many modern novels which appear
as tragic contain little or no real rebellion and the "hero" is a scape
goat ruled by necessity. Because much contemporaiy fiction appears to
present man as a victim and his actions at best futile gestures, in
short a scapegoat ruled by necessity, it would be useful to examine the
works of two writers who have been associated with these attitudes. If
Styron's works are examined collectively, however, it is evident that
his characters are not only perceptive of their condition but capable
of rebellion against those forces which victimize them. Their tragic
stance is in their perception and rebellion. A precise discussion of
the victim and his rebellion in Styron's novels should illuminate those
shadowy areas of the "existential" novel where man supposedly sits alone
amid empty and futile gestures, suffering total defeat. There is a tragic
"tone" in the "black" or "absurd" comedy of Joseph Heller. Hassan's dis-
19cussion of contemporary comedy, ' in which the "presence of death is as
strongly felt ... as is the presence of disorder and the traditional
19zHassan calls this "encounter with possibility," where the hero enjoys some degree of freedom and "gives the illusion of escaping from necessity. It is a mode which "veers" toward comedy. Radical Innocence, p. 123.
31
20comic redemption of society is markedly absent," describes the world
of Catch-22. Indeed it is Yossarian's unique perception of his society’s
disorder, and the haunting omnipresence of death within his world, that
make him an interesting character and his world as threatening as a tragic
one. The aim of this study, then, is to explore in some detail the na
ture of victimization and the substance of perception and rebellion in
the novels of William Styron and Joseph Heller. But Styron's work has
not been examined collectively (an examination which should include the
recently published Confessions of Nat Turner) in order to understand the
precise nature of victimization and the substance of rebellion he re
veals. Similarly, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has not been examined as ab
surd comedy that is very similar to the victimization and rebellion in
contemporary tragedy. This study will try to reveal how both authors
understand victimization and what each thinks rebellion to be. Because
a protagonist's action is central to him as a protagonist, it should be
evident that rebellion is very similar to what is usually identified as
tragic action. Rebellion is the assertion of an individual's will against
those forces which threaten to cancel his identity, and a strong word
like rebellion is essential to this study because the forces directed
against man are awesome.
Today rebellion as the artist views it is cast against a back
ground of forces that appear determined to control or fragment man's ex
istence, forces which, for example, range from advertising manipulators
who see him as a puppet to determinist psychologists who "predict" his
Radical Innocence, p. 201.
32
behavior. Yet these forces need not be manipulative or deterministic
to be dangerous. They might be nothing more than indifference or whim
man experiences in his daily intercourse, those occasions when all that
is important to him is subjected to "faulty anodes on an IBM machine,"
as a character in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 complains, or the "sportive
pleasures" of the gods. Furthermore, man lives with the haunting pos
sibility that rebellion will achieve nothing or that achievement is at
most provisional and temporary. But the failure of rebellion is similar
to the inevitability of failure that haunts all tragedy. It is, there
fore, logically difficult to hold with Sewall that tragedy's optimistic
view is in its "vitalism, which is in some sense nystical, not earth
bound, in its faith in a cosmic good; in its faith, however fleeting,
21of a world in which all questions could be answered." With or with
out this optimism, however, the question of rebellion remains essential
because it is in rebellion that genuinely tragic modes are born in the
twentieth century.
^Sewall, p. 123.
33
CHAPTER III
WILLIAM STYRON
With the publication of Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967 it is
possible to view in Styron's novels a persistent theme in varying forms:
the individual as a victim who attempts to alter his status as a victim
by an act of rebellion. Like the radical conditions under which he
lives, his rebellion is radical, for it is an "all or nothing" leap for
an identity, where he might become an acting subject rather than remain
ing a submissive object. Nat Turner in Confessions of Nat Turner is a
literal slave as victim in Virginia in I83I. Milton, Peyton, and Helen
Loftis in Lie Down in Darkness; Cass Kinsolving and Mason Flagg in Set
This House on Fire; Captain A1 Mannix in The Long March are also victims.
And each of them is marked by some kind of rebellion against their status
as victims.
I
*... it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes . . . the brother of death daily haunts us with dying momentos, and time that grows old in itself, bids us no long duration;—diutumity is a dream and folly of expectation.
—Sir Thomas Browne Urn Burial
Lie Down in Darkness was Styron's first novel. Published in
1932 when Styron was twenty-five, its wide acclaim established him as
an important writer. The general reaction, however, was that the novel
3h
was "Faulknerian" and part of the Southern Tradition, mainly because of
its techniques of handling time and dialogue, the location (Virginia),
and family guilt and disintegration. Virtually all of Styron's commen
tators discuss the pathetic condition of the Loftises, the central
characters, in terms of emotions and actions that lead them into tur
moil and death, as if the family had no genuine control over or under
standing of their condition. This is to say that the Loftises are "driven"
into misunderstandings and ill-conceived actions. But one can ask, how
ever, what are the "things" that drive them into unfortunate ends, that
make them victims rather than free agents? What oppressive forces exist
in their world that contribute to that experience of being led to the
bleak end suggested by the inscription from Sir Thomas Browne's Urn
Burial?
Death is the first oppressor in LDP. Even when death is not
near at hand, it is experienced in the novel as a generalized idea or
emotion hovering in the background of human action. This of course is
a repeated experience in literary forms ranging from the sonnet to the
novel. Certainly Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and the carpe
diem themes of the seventeenth century and the mutability themes of Shelley
and Wordsworth, to name but a few examples, suggest death the oppressor.
It commands absolute power over the individual because all men come neces
sarily to that end and all attempts to escape it are illusory. But death
has unusual significance when there no longer exists a power to which it
must answer or to which it is subservient.'*' In LDP, as in many
\john Donne, like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, saw death (or mutability) as indeed subservient to a higher power. In "Death, be not proud . . ."he writes, "One short sleep past, we wake
35
contemporary novels, there is no appeal of death's judgments. In ear
lier periods there certainly was such appeal, but in LDP death is a
master who makes the final reckoning.
A second oppressive force in LDP bears a similarity to psycho
logical determinism. The Loftises act but never really understand why
they act the way they do; it is as if their actions are motivated and
pressured by obscure causes and forces originating from the murky and
opaque recesses of their guilt-ridden and tormented minds. Compounding
this ignorance of self is ignorance of one another. They have as little
understanding of one another's motivations as they do of their own, hence
they act absolutely from positions of ignorance. They are, then, victims
of themselves—man as his own worst enemy—and this is a condition long
known to theologians and psychoanalysts. Ignorance of self and others
can be the cruelest of conditions.
A third oppressive force (or atmosphere) can best be called the
lack of a redemptive point of view, something external to the Loftises
which could aid them to see in their abortive actions a remedy which
would lead them from disorder to stability. Such a point of view, how
ever, does not exist and the Loftises remain to flounder as if they were
the cruel jests of a higher and indifferent power. Victimization is
eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." From the time of Donne, however, a general weakening of man's faith in a personal triumph over death has occurred. The radical intellectual conditions described in Chapter I of this study suggest that contemporary man has lost contact with a belief which would, account for his individual value in absolute terms. We are more inclined today to view the individual as part of a specific cultural context, and once departing from that context he is no more. But the Christian position from which Donne speaks posits man in absolute terms, i.e., man has an external and immutable status beyond his earthbound existence. Indeed, "existential" despair is to some degree derived from the awareness that the individual does not have a status in eternity and that "death does not die."
36
quite real in LDP. The victimization that the Loftises experience is
very little different from literal and physical domination of one person
by another, because the consequences of both instances are the same:
the individual ceases to be or never becomes the master of his life.
The present action of the novel takes place during a several
hour period of one day, beginning with Milton Loftis arriving at a Port
Warick, Virginia dock to meet his daughter who arrives "silent, invisible
in a coffin," and ends with services for her in a cemetery chapel in Port
Warick. But the novel’s central concern is for the past, a past reaching
as far back as Milton's university days and the past as near as Peyton's
suicide, a few weeks prior to her funeral in Port Warick, the present of
the novel. Her bocty’ is returned some weeks after her death to Port
Warick because of delayed identification. The narrator presents several
points of view in the many flashbacks which occur during Milton's journey
from pier to cemetery. Milton, Helen Loftis, his wife, Peyton, Dolly
Bonner are the central characters in these flashbacks and each with a
point of view which "circles in" on events and experiences that are im
portant to each of them, and each event and experience brings out these
characters'blunted actions and unfulfilled desires. The episode central
to the novel and symbolic of the Loftises' frustration is Peyton's mar
riage, occurring only a short time before her suicide. It is in that
event that Milton's slavish devotion to his daughter, Helen's jealous
hatred of Peyton, Peyton's desire to escape a family decay which is just
as much inside her as in her family proper, crystallize in blind hatreds
and futile actions. From that point to Peyton's death, all of them be
gin to "lie down in darkness."
37
The flashbacks do not folloft a .chronological pattern but, like ! ’ -i u
those in Joseph Heller '■ s•> Catchy, qontain many events which are seen ^5. ~ <<
from several points of vi,ew and emerge, to fulfill dramatic needs rather
than orderly sequence. Throughout the entire period suggested by the
novel, including the most distant flashback, is the Negro. In the imme
diate foreground are the Loftises' Negro servants and in the far back
ground, serving what Styron called a leitmotif, is Daddy Faith, a spir
itual healer who has sailed down to Port Warick aboard a raft to conduct
services that will bring forth the spirit of Jesus and the cry from his
Negro followers—"Yes Jesus! I seen Him! Yeah! Yeah!" But the story
remains with the Loftises and their tormented conditions. There is no
Jesus for them. They, like the existential man, must work out their
own salvation. And this they fail to do. Bit by bit they fall victim
to irreversible forces that are both corruptive and overwhelming.
Criticism over the past decade reflects the temper of these pre
ceding remarks: the central characters "repudiate the possibility of2
man's capacity to endure"; "On its symbolic level, Lie Down in Dark
ness is a tragedy of decaying values—a study of a paradise fallen into
chaos. . . .’*;3 "The Loftises fail and tiy again to squeeze a permanence
and beauty from each other which none of them can give."^ These conclu
sions derive from the sense of total frustration which marks the Loftises
2Jerry H. Bryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII (Autumn, 1963), 5U2.
^Jonathan Baumbach, "Paradise Lost: The Novels of William Styron," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXIII (Spring, 19610, 208.
^Shaun 0 'Connell, "Expense of Spirit: The Vision of William Styron," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 25.
38
lives, creating not really a spirit of tragedy but a process of inten
tional and unintentional victimization. They destroy themselves and one
another.
The first oppressive force in LDP is death. The title is a
chilling evocation of the human condition as is the inscription taken
from Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial; that one's life ends in darkness^
and immortality is an illusion. But the novel appears to accept this
judgment not as a temporary condition of man, but as a final statement
of his end, the final "reconciliation" of his values and persistent
struggles. Death is the final reduction (hardly reconciliation) of
man's human condition. Man's finality in ashes is first made explicit
in a scene in Potter's field in New York, where Peyton was buried after
her suicide because there were no means of identifying her. As Harry,
Peyton's husband of two years, and his friend Lennie locate the grave,
several people nearby are on a similar quest.
There was a sudden cry from the opposite side of the pit.Another coffin was open and the colored girl peered down into it, her eyes goggling. "God in heaven" she squealed, in a clear Brooklyn accent, "doesn't he look terrible!" (33h)
This scene appears irrelevant because these people have nothing to do
with the plot but it is, indeed, structurally significant in revealing
the bleak power of death. In Hamlet there is a scene which appears ir
relevant but which is structurally basic to the play. While talking
with the clown-gravedigger about the various remains in the Elsinore
graveyard, Hamlet abruptly asks Horatio, "Why may not imagination trace
the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a Bunghole?"
Answering the question himself, Hamlet speaks of the scope of death:
"Alexander dies, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the
39
dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam . . . might
they not stop a beer barrel?" (V,i). Death is the most persistent ob
jective representative of the oppressor man is subject to. Death is
not only a leveler of all persons without respect to caste or origin
but is degrading in the use to which it puts man’s remains. This is
also evident in the Potter's field scene in LDP.
Dolly, Milton's erstwhile mistress, a somewhat dull though sen
sually satisfying and relatively stable woman, fears entrapment by
death. Milton had left her once before for a temporary reconciliation
with Helen and now, on the day of Peyton's funeral, Dolly fears a second
reconciliation. If this should happen there would be nothing to do but
"leave town, go to Norfolk or Richmond, or back to Emporia and sit by
her mother's bedside, watch the withered, wasting flesh of multiple
sclerosis, look at her twitch and moan, change her clothes when her
sphincter gave way" (323-2U). Imminent death in the form of aging and
permanent debilitation is as powerful a reminder of death as the end of
life.
Shortly before her death Peyton, too, senses spiritual death in
her repeated description of her state of anguish. "I feel adrift, as if
I were drowning out in dark space somewhere without anything to pull me
back to earth again" (38). Alone, wandering adrift in New York, her long
interior monologue repeats this metaphor—"I'm drowning"—at every criti
cal juncture in her long walk. But it is Albert Berger, friend of her
husband, Harry, who brutally summarizes the meaning of death to her when
she meets him during this walk to death.
My view of the universe is harsh and brutal. In each act of creation, be it the orgasm of the simplest street cleaner or
ho
the explosion of atoms, man commits himself to the last part of the evolutionary cycle; by that I mean death, frosty, cruel and final. (367)
In LDP there is a persistent and "black-comic" objective cor
relative of death in the mechanically defective hearse carrying Peyton
to the cemetery. As Milton returns to the present from memories of
earlier days, the hearse stalls, fails, and begins again. Peyton is not
borne with dignity nor can Milton reflect in tranquility. As Alexander
was reduced to a stopper for a bunghole and the shocked grimace reflected
the terror when the coffin was opened, so Mr. Casper’s belching hearse
blows away the dignity which might ease the procession of death.
Once more the hood of the hearse went down with a crash. Mr.Casper stood erect and wiped his hands. Barclay got in and started the engine; it made a fitful, hacking noise, like a dog coughing up a bone, then caught; an umbrella of blue smoke rose to the heavens and Barclay waved his arm valiantly out of the window. Mr. Casper returned with a distressed look and climbed back into the front seat. The hearse moved ahead.
"I'm terribly sorry," Mr. Casper said. "Terribly. On a day like this. ..." His voice sank into a murmur of vague, inaudible recriminations, and the limousine, too, began to move again. (140
The concluding scene at the chapel is the final reminder of death:
Milton in a paroxysm of hate attempts to murder Helen. Death hovers
over the novel as a persistent reminder of what man labors under in his
struggle with his existence.
The second oppressor in LDP is a blind ignorance of the causes
of the Loftises' disintegration, an ignorance borne by the Loftises them
selves as well as by their friends. A consequence of this ignorance is
a gross lack of understanding of themselves and each other. "How can a
strong novel be written about weakness, when the causes of the weakness
p. 38.
hi
£are so ill-defined . . . ?" Davis' answer is rather unsatisfying, sug
gesting only that Styron's sensitivity with language succeeds whereas
his characterization fails; his characters are "extremely limited, self-
centered and basically uninteresting people," who appear far more sub
stantial than they really are.^
There are possible explanations for their condition: Helen's
jealousy of Peyton; Milton's incestuous desire for Peyton; Peyton's re
jection of her competitor-Mother. But much is made in the novel of not
understanding why things are what they are—and this is thematically im
portant. Nothing need be explained to the victim; it can be part of his
condition as a victim. Efy far the most penetrating examination of Styron's
characters with their "inadequately explained actions" has been done by
John Aldridge, who suggests that Styron's basic flaw is in his pastiche
imagination—an imagination that substitutes certain attitudes and tonal
ities of previous writers, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, for inadequately
developed characterization. At best the Loftises are victims of circum- 7
stances no larger "than their own cultural limitations and neuroses."'
More specifically their only curse is of "the House of Seagram's and theQ
House of Oedipus." There are echoes of Faulkner's blood guilt and Fitz
gerald's generation guilt but "these elements exist without relation to
-’R. G. Davis, "The American Individualist Tradition: Bellow and Styron," pie Creative Present, ed. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons (New York, 1963), p. 133.
6Ibid.
?John W. Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create (New York, 1966),
^Ibid., p. 36.
U2
the thematic meaning that they are ostensibly designed to express.
There is no real or felt agony to account for their implications of9
agony, no grand moral issue to account for the grandeur of their size."
The Loftises appear for Aldridge as tortured characters without any
really significant reasons for their condition other than alcohol and
private neuroses. It is true we don't know the causes for many actions,
and the motivations do indeed seem "opaque and confused" but Styron,
rather than hiding from this fact, seems to make it evident or inten
tional. Peyton is conscious of her lack of knowledge and this deficiency
points up her pathetic condition. In her last letter to her father,
shortly before taking her life, she speaks of the inadequate understand
ing she has of her life:
Oh, Daddy, I don't know what's wrong. I've tried to grow up— to be a good little girl, as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible despair.What's wrong, Daddy? What's wrong? Why is happiness such a precious thing? What have we done with our lives so that everywhere we turn—no matter how hard we try to—we cause other people sorrow? (39)
Remembering a "dumb" friend she senses a melancholy hope:
Sometimes I see Laura—you remember her. We all went to the Vanguard that night. She's very tiresome, but I envy her somehow. Maybe that's the key to happiness—being sort of dumb, not wanting to know ary of the answers. (39)
Those ignorant of causes include Harry, an individual free of the cor
ruptive "blood" of the Loftises. When Harry and Lennie locate Peyton's
grave in Potter's field, "Harry turned away, his stomach heaving. He
bent over and looked down toward his shadow, regarding the earth, weeds,
a cloud of gnats. No, he thought, I .just don't know whose fault it
^Aldridge, p. 36.
h3
is" (33lt)- Peyton echoes a similar thought in her last meeting with
Harry when she cries, "oh my Harry, my lost sweet Harry, I have not for
nicated in the darkness because I wanted to but because I was punishing
myself for punishing you: yet something far past dreaming or memory,
and darker than either, impels me, and you do not know ..." (377).
Peyton and more directly Milton have met with frustration and
defeat in the goals they have set for themselves as well as in their
relationships with others. Milton's condition in particular suggests
ennui and decay. He recognizes his debilitated condition on the day of
Peyton's funeral. Dolly has been his illusion of something stabilizing
in the shattered remains of his life but on this day he also thinks about
his relationship to her.
During the last few years he had relied upon her steadfast gaze of love and longing, perhaps unconsciously enough, as one among the assortment of props and crutches—along with all the whiskey and with Peyton. . . . (U3)
"Props" and "crutches" vividly evoke the debilitated man who has lost
meaningful freedom. Yet rather than suggest motives for the Loftises'
actions or causes for the collapse of a meaningful world, Styron appears
to make this lack of knowledge of motives and causes basic to their con
dition. Each is entrapped within actions and situations he helps create
but which he does not genuinely understand and for which he is unable to
determine responsibility. Such a condition is similar to the Christian
conception of sin whereby an individual becomes victimized by forces and
powers within himself he neither truly understands nor can control and
is "set free" only through an act of divine grace. Similarly, the
psychoanalyst observes that one can become victimized by deeply recessed
Uh
internal forces which are only partially understood and virtually be
yond a subject’s control, yet capable of driving him to self-destruction.
This sense of victimization is explicit in LDP.
Milton and Helen's vain struggle to adapt to each other after
Maudie's death in spite of not knowing what had driven them apart sug
gests the scope of the ignorance of their condition. In a rare display
of passion Helen says to him, "'Oh my darling, you do understand me,
after all.'" Milton reflects later:
No, he hadn't understood her, ever, but at that moment there had been no need of understanding: she was his once more, they were together and she believed in him. It was as if he had lifted by his self-abasement all the troubles from her shoulders, and afterward it was only when the desire for whisky became almost impossible to bear that he began to think glumly that he had let himself in for a hell of a situation. (236)
Peyton and Milton are at least conscious of their predicament;
however, Helen is not. Her distorted but empty world is characterized
by the crippled daughter, Maudie, anxiety dreams of corruption and death,
and empty consolations from a close friend, Reverend Carey Carr. It is
Peyton who speaks directly to Helen about Helen's condition. Her remarks
characterize much of Helen's actions throughout her marriage as well as
her relationship to her children.
"You can't even suffer properly," Peyton broke in, her voice solemn now; "You're like all the rest of the sad neurotics everywhere who huddle over their misery and take their vile, mean little hatreds out on anybody they envy. You know, I suspect you've always hated me for one thing or another, but lately I've become a symbol to you you couldn't stand. Do you think I'm stupid or something, that I haven't got you figured out?You hate men, you've hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn't known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don't hate men or Daddy but you hate everything, animal, vegetable and mineral." (311-12)
U5
This exchange occurred during the early evening of the day of Peyton's
marriage to Harry, shortly after Milton, having drunk too much had per
haps too warmly embraced his daughter. Helen reacts violently to both
Peyton and Milton but more to Peyton as if Peyton created her father's
drunken condition. Milton, himself, had failed to understand the hate
between the mother and daughter that drove Peyton to these judgments
about Helen.
God help him, hadn't he known all along that they hated and despised each other? Had he had to spend twenty years deceiving himself, piling false hope upon false hope—only to discover on this day, of all days, the shattering, unadorned, bitter truth? Those smiles ... of course . . . how Peyton and Helen had always smiled at each other like that! There had been words, too, attitudes, small female gestures which it had been beyond him to divine, or even faintly to understand. (283-8U)
It is in Reverend Carr that the ignorance of the causes of the
Loftises' disintegration is pointedly revealed.
Who was to blame? Mad or not, Helen had been beastly. She had granted to Loftis, in her peculiarly unremitting way, no forgiveness or understanding, and above all she had been beastly to Peyton. Yet Loftis himself had been no choice soul; and who, finally, lest it be God himself, could know where the circle, composed as it was of such tragic suspicions and misunderstandings, began, and when it ended? Who was the author of the original misdeed? Peyton, think of Peyton. Was she beyond reproach? Other children had risen above even worse difficulties. (239)
If there is a coming into knowledge, a point of disclosure in
this novel, it comes shortly before Peyton's funeral. Milton, speaking
with Carr, says, "there was a time . . . when I thought I'd found some
kind of answer. God, we go through life fooling ourselves, thinking
we've got the answer, only its never the answer really" (2li3-HU)• If
there is an answer it is in some kind of struggle and personal
U6
commitment: "I didn't realize that honor isn't given automatically,
but you have to fight for it just as strongly as I guess you do for
love. ... I hadn't fought hard enough" (2ljl|). But this suggestion of
understanding gives way a few moments later to the pent-up frustrations
which are vented upon Helen with the intention of destroying her.
A third sense of victimization derives from a negative state:
the absence of a redemptive point of view. No one has the ability to
set things right or even to understand or to interpret accurately what
has gone askew. The organized church as a central institution in the
community manifests itself as an empty and lifeless ritual, as ineffec
tual as Reverend Carey Carr, an Episcopalian minister whose name echoes
a child's toy. Milton remembers a Methodist church service of some
years ago.
A Sunday school choir commenced a falsetto chirping. Jesus loves me. Methodist, probably. He could almost see it: a row of maple chairs, young women with bad breath and halfmoons of sweat beneath their armpits, a basement somewhere smelling of stale leaking water and moldy religion. A sad, shadowy place, where the timeless rattle of Proverbs and Commandments outlasts age and decay and even the dusty, pious slant, itself, of Sunday sunlight upon worn hymnals and broken electrical fixtures and cobwebbed concrete walls.Methodists. They hated beauty. Ah, God ... He yawned. . . ,(55-56)
Carr's simple, Episcopalian-Fort Warwick faith comprehends little beyond
the vacuity of spiritual uplift. Comforting Helen at one point in her
shaky marriage with Milton he says to her in effect to keep a stiff up
per lip: "'I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: hence
forth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness'" (127). Their
relationship could xrell be that of two high school chums.
They became good friends, they talked about other matters; on one or two occasions she failed to mention Milton or
b7
Peyton—"her sorrow," as she put it once in an embarrassingly awkward attempt at irony. She seemed totally lacking in a sense of humor, but it really didn't matter: they talked of God, immortality, time and space, all in the enthusiastic, disorganized, eclectic way of high-school seniors, which Carey, being nominally, at least, and at the most unquestioningly, committed to Faith, hadn't employed in years, and which finally disturbed him so much that he guided the conversation back to the value of prayer, (lij.2)
With greater intellectual power Carr might have identified the Loftises
errors or perhaps aided in a catharsis of understanding through pain.
Hassan notes Carr is at best a reflector of what has happened and "use
less as comforter or savior."}’0 Carr's last words echo Judge Brack in
Hedda Gabler when the astonished and "learned" Brack observes Hedda's
suicide ("People don't do things like that"); Carr can say nothing more
in that last macabre scene when Milton leaps for Helen's throat than
"People, people."
Nothing exists that can correct or redirect these twisted ener
gies and blunted hopes. Hassan describes it as a living hell, the
Loftises' encounter with a necessity which culminates in defeat and de
struction.
And of course there is no surcease of terror as we move from the domestic to private experience where all terror begins, where it must end. The hell of love, the hell of purchasing one's happiness with another's pain, the hell, even, of failing to know the love one is supposed to know—these are dramatized in scene after scene.11
But tragedy in some special sense is liberation because it cul
minates in knowledge of error in oneself and knowledge of the workings
of the world as well as some kind of assertion. But in LDP neither of
-^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 128.
i:LIbid., p. 130.
U8
these—knowledge or assertion—emerge as normally acceptable resolutions
to badly mangled lives. Peyton and Milton know only the anguish of
their lives and the need to make some dramatic assertion to diminish
that anguish. And their assertion is suicide and attempted murder.
They see suicide and murder as the only options open to their victimized
states. Continued victimization is not an option to the man who has be
come aware of the condition that hinders and destroys him. Paradoxically,
suicide is an alternative when no other alternatives to a despicable
state exist. Cass Kinsolving in Set This House on Fire jestingly replies
to a psychiatrist who has asserted that suicide is the coward's way out,
"self-destruction is the triumph of a man whose back is to the wall, it
is at least one cut above imperishable self-loathing." When the victim's
back is to the wall, his last act of rebellion can be murder or suicide;
the final assertion of his dignity as he understands it. In this sense
it is a mode of raw and primitive assertion: a rebellion. This final
act of negation remains, however, only an extreme mode of tragic action
because in it the victim dissolves into the last oppressor: death. It
is an option taken when all others seem even more futile and hopeless.
Peyton and Milton choose suicide and murder. Both are aware,
however, of their sickness—it is the causes that remain obscure. In
one last desperate appeal to Helen, when they meet at the cemetery chapel
for Peyton's funeral, Milton pleads with her: "'Why have I wanted you?
. . . Because you're the only thing left! That's why! My God, don't
you see? We're both sick, we need to make each other - -'" (387). These
are not the words of a spirit totally stunted by its environment and
private neurosis but rather those of someone aware of impinging total
9
49
failure who desperately attempts to retrieve a modicum of value. In a
final burst of rage he shouts at Helen, '"Why, God damn you, don't you
see what you're doing! With nothing left! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!'"
Peyton's suicide has created no reservoir of feeling in Helen for their
relationship. In his last paroxysm of agony "Loftis pulled Helen about
so that she faced him and began to choke her. 'God damn you!' he
yelled, 'If I can't have . . . then you . . . nothing!'" (388). He does
not kill her but relaxes his grip, and is last seen running through the
cemetery toward the highway. Milton's actions emerge in a fury of pro
test—against himself and Helen. At that moment the form of the protest
ceases to fit a moral criterion; it is simply a violent reaction to the
intellectual and spiritual condition Milton and Helen have known. The
victim's fury can be telescoped into one violent act of rebellion, irre
spective of its moral quality or practical consequences. Milton's act
is and remains the violent act of protest, a fury directed against Helen,
who at that moment becomes the symbol of oppression. She persists in
continuing the sickness that has shackled all of them. And this Milton's
fury tries to destroy.
Peyton's monologue, as she wanders through familiar spots in New
York City, culminates in a defiance that is as extreme as Milton's—her
suicide. The familiar Faulknerian-Joycean structure accentuates her
awareness of that wreckage: past and present intermingle syntactically
as well as intellectually, revealing a web of interior conflicts and
criss-crossing motives. The central and repeated images of the monologue
are a jeweled clock she has purchased and the phrase, "I'm drowning."
The clock is harmony and regularity, time contained in perfect movement.
5o
Once I'd had a dream: I was inside a clock. Perfect, complete, perpetual, I revolved about on the mainspring forever drowsing, watching the jewels and the rubies, the mechanism clicking ceaselessly, all the screws and parts as big as my head, indestructible, shining, my own invention. Thus would I sleep forever, yet not really sleep, but remain only half-aware of time and enclosed by it as in a womb of brass, revolving on that spring like a dead horse on a merry-go-round. (335)
But she ultimately smashes the clock and drowns in a sea of unfulfilled
and only partially understood desires and fears. Yet the monologue is
an extraordinarily lucid reflection, bringing into violent juxtaposition
immediate present and distant past to create the precise intellectual
and emotional disturbances felt by Peyton. Her condition is her bondage
to and ignorance of the threads of the past that have influenced her.
Yet her lucidity is her awareness of this bondage, which parallels
Milton's awareness of his and Helen's sickness. Peyton has been unable
to establish a wholly meaningful relationship with Harry and has drifted
into a number of sexual relationships—the last affair initiates this
monologue. From this meeting she threads her way through parts of New
York, ultimately meeting friends of Harry and finally back to Harry and
their apartment, all the while constructing a mosaic of the fragments of
her life. But this mosaic is a brilliant presentation of her depleted
condition. When Harry forces her to leave, disgusted with her instabil
ity, she takes a subway to 125th Street, walks up several flights of
stairs to a warehouse loft and leaps from a window. Peyton knows what
is happening to her and asserts her will in one final act of choice:
suicide. Reflecting on her relationship with Harry and the corrupt,
tangled threads that are her life, she faces a self-imposed execution,
with
3i
the ax raised on high and I awaiting only the final, descending, bloody chop: oh my God, why have I forsaken you? Have I through some evil inherited in a sad century cut nyself off from You forever, and thus only by dying must take the fatal chance: to walk into a dark closet and lie down there and dream away my sins, hoping to wake in another land, in a far, fantastic dawn? (382)
But she knows there is no hope nor an alternative to continued frustra
tion: "What a prayer it was I said; I knew He wasn't listening, mark
ing the sparrow but not me. So to hell" (383). As she falls to her
death unclothed, shreds of memory and hope fall from her consciousness.
Her nakedness is total as she lies down in darkness, amid the faint 12glimmers of her expiring life.
Suicide and attempted murder culminate the actions of the two
central characters in LDP. These actions originate less from carefully
planned motives than from the pressures of frustration and suffocation
felt by Peyton and Milton. Both are individuals who have been chained
to forces that they neither understand nor from which they could gain
freedom. Their final acts are terminal acts which affirm nothing more
than disgust and despair with life as they have experienced it, but their
justification is simply that Peyton and Milton find the consequences of
such terminal acts less odious and hopeless than the stultification and
bondage they have previously experienced.
There is little doubt that there is significant and genuine
-I oPavid L. Stevenson suggests that for Peyton "existence or
death can be decided by no act of affirmation that can be isolated from the tumbled events of her life" ("William Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties," Recent American Fiction, ed. Joseph H. Waldmeir [Boston, 1963], p. 266). It is evident, however, that Peyton perceives clearly the "tumbled events of her life." Whether one calls her action the choice or death of instinct depends on how much he wants to accentuate her volition. It does appear, however, she acts (destroys herself) because of what she has come to know. Perhaps, too, this perception destroys instinct.
52
victimization in LDP. Time after time Styron reveals his major charac
ters subject to some condition that hinders and destroys significant
action. Unlike the transcendent God of Donne and Milton through whom
one appeals this flawed existence,
the Loftises are victims of an age in which God is dead; that is, the universe has no outer structure and everyone is awash in his own ego; an age in which family has neither social necessity nor moral import, there being, in effect, no worthwhile social structure and no agreeable morality.3-3
Yet Peyton and Milton are "victims" who are aware of their condition but
who are unable to take meaningful action save in two desperate acts:
suicide and attempted murder. Obviously, Styron’s portrait of man is a
bleak one in this novel. Rebellion against the bleak conditions of
their lives is manifested in Peyton and Milton not as meaningful and
significant action but only as violent protest that originates from
despair. But in that protest there is some measure of sympathy between
reader and character because the character is aware of his condition and
attempts to alter it. In the case of Peyton and Milton, the attempt is
futile; but their burst of energies reveals them as human beings assert
ing themselves rather than remaining dull and witless observers of an
environment bent on choking them slowly lifeless.
Rebellion against the limitations a character observes in him
self and his environment is quite pronounced in Styron's next novels.
Rebellion, however, takes a direction and form that suggest more than
futile protest. There is greater "tragic grandeur" in the assertions of
Styron's characters in The Long March, Set This House on Fire and Confes
sions of Nat Turner.
3-3q'Connell, "Expense of Spirit," p. 22.
53
II
Not because the hike was good or even sensible . . . but out of hope of triumph, like a chain-gang convict who endures a flogging without the slightest whimper, only to spite the flogger.Id
Philip Rahv selected The Long March as one of the works to ap
pear in Eight Great American Short Novels (1963). In recent years the
novella has received far more attention that it did at the time of its
publication in 1952, one year after LDP. On its literal level it has
much to say about tragic man as victim rebelling against his circum
stance. The handful of commentators who recognize its worth view it
either as allegory or myth, seeing its central character, A1 Mannix, as
15"original Adam" consumed with pride and defiance; a Christ figure which
"shows that Mannix must be seen not just as an individual rebel but as a
spokesman for the worth and human dignity of all people who have endured
centuries of pain and persecution;"^ "a grotesque caricature of Christ"
as well as an Adamic hero with a pride and will that "blind him to his
own tyranny."^ No degree of allegory or mythology succeed, however,
without an exact understanding of the literal components of the story.
The story contains hints (e.g., Mannix develops a heel wound during his
•^The Long March (New York, 1952), p. 72.
-’Eugene McNamara, "William Styron's Long March; Absurdity and Authority," Western Humanities Review, XV (Summer, 1961), 270.
^Peter L. Hays, "The Nature of Rebellion in The Long March," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 72.
^August Nigro, "The Long March; The Expansive Hero in a Closed World," Critique, IX, 3 [n.d.77lo£<LO9.
&
ordeal; Colonel Templeton appears as a god, etc.) that suggest, for ex
ample, a mythic overtone. But the story is strikingly organized on its
literal level in the development of its theme.
The victim as servant is basic to this work. A marine commander
Colonel Templeton, has ordered an endurance march of thirty-six miles
for his battalion, a battalion which includes a company of reservists
that has recently been reactivated and whose members are years removed
from the rigor of army life. The march is an order but appears as a
senseless one because it has no logical relation to physical fitness or
capability. It is merely Colonel Templeton's desire to prove USMC dif
fers from USMCR only alphabetically; he overlooks the qualitative physi
cal differences between the older and poorer conditioned reservists and
the younger regular marines. When company commander Captain A1 Mannix
and Lieutenant Culver, two of the reactivated reservists, learn of the
march it is in a tent lighted "like the stark, desperate, manufactured
quality of the light one imagines in an execution chamber" (2U). Mannix
endures the march much like a prisoner accepting severe punishment, ulti
mately appearing like a beaten man, "a ponderous, bobbling motion which
resembled that of a man wretchedly spastic and paralyzed" (113). This
sense of victimization is as strikingly evident as that which was found
in LDP, but the oppressor is more clearly defined and crystallized.
The Long March begins with an event that appears structurally
unrelated to the plot. Two mortar shells—for an unknown reason—have
fallen on a lunch line of marines who have bivouaced some thirty-odd
miles from their base camp near Charleston, South Carolina. The eight
dead marines have not so much "departed this life, but as if sprayed
55
from a hose, they were only shreds of bone, gut, and dangling tissue to
which it would have been impossible ever to impute the quality of life,
far less the capacity to relinquish it" (3). When Mannix sees them he
cries ciyptically, "'Won't they ever let us alone, the sons of bitches
. . . won't they let us alone?"' (63). But these marines were not part
of Colonel Templeton's battalion, hence they are not related to Temple
ton's plans for the forced march. Several hours before the march begins
numerous flashbacks occur, including those concerning Lt. Culver, the
principal narrator and Mannix's friend, and his life before the call-up,
and flashbacks from Mannix's earlier life, principally as a regular
marine. About one-half of the story describes the events of the march
itself, some thirty-six miles from the bivouac area to the base camp.
The military environment serves as an excellent setting for
Styron. But this environment does not provide the ordered and revered
authority a man may trust in and willingly subordinate to. It is rather
one that Mannix loathes.
He had a violent contempt for the gibberish, the boy-scout passwords which replaced ordinary conversation in the military world. To Mannix they were all part of the secret language of a group of morons, morons who had been made irresponsibly and dangerously clever. (42-43)
This world is counterpoised against the world Culver remembers, a lost
world now, where he could "return home to warmth and peanut butter and
liverwurst, to the familiar delight of the baby's good-night embrace,
to the droll combat between beagle and cat, to music before sleep" (10).
Colonel Templeton is literally important to the story because
he is Mannix's superior officer whom Mannix must obey; his voice is
"neither harsh nor . . . particularly gentle. It was merely a voice
36
which expected to be obeyed. ..." (18). But Templeton acquires sym
bolic significance: he is god-like or a representative of some superior
power.
In men like Templeton all emotions—all smiles, all anger— emanated from a priestlike, religious fervor, throbbing inwardly with the cadence of parades and booted footfalls. By that passion rebels are ordered into quick damnation but simple doubters sometimes find indulgence— (30)
When Mannix learned of the march from Templeton, Mannix had a "quick
look of both fury and suffering, like the tragic Greek mask, or a
shackled slave" (31)« Bryant’s point is well taken: "Templeton is above
the conflict; he is the Olympian who coolly and disinterestedly ordains
the fate of his underlings, singling out no favorites, admitting no
peer. "J"0 This is fitting, for the "shackled slave" never establishes a
rapport of equality with the master. The master, in this instance Temple
ton, "fixes" the world Mannix is to accept and the logic of the world
he orders is irrelevant to what Mannix considers acceptable. Mannix
characterizes Templeton’s march as gross stupidity:
"He can't take green troops like these and do that. After a couple of seven- or ten- or fifteen-mile conditioning hikes, maybe so. If they were young. And rested. Barracks-fresh.But this silly son of a bitch is going to have all these tired, flabby old men flapping around on the ground like a bunch of fish after the first two miles. Christ on a frigging crutch!" (33)
Furthermore, Templeton's command coincides with another senseless event—
the destruction of the eight marines by the two mortar shells—for which
no explanation can be given other than that the mortars were probably
old, left over from Guam and World War II. This is the world Mannix
must contend with, and contending with Templeton is little different
^Bryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," p. 3U3»
57
from contending with straying mortar shells. As both can destroy as
well as "bind” men in death, Mannix's world is especially made for vic
timization.
Mannix's past especially equips him to face Templeton and the
world he represents. Shortly after boot camp Mannix and several friends
were drunk in a tenth story San Francisco hotel room and Mannix experi
enced a horrifying and senseless event; he was held by his heels from
the window by his drunken friends—
"I just remember the cold wind blowing on ny body and that dark, man, infinite darkness all around me, and my ankles beginning to slip out of their hands. I really saw Death then, and I think that all I could think of was that I was going to fall and smash nyself on that hard, hard street below. . . .And I was reaching out, man, clutching at thin air. Then I wondered what that noise was, that high loud noise, and then I realized it was me, screaming at the top of ny voice, all over San Francisco." (57-8)
Later, in the South Pacific, on Peleliu Island, he was under heavy
Japanese fire while he held an outpost. It was here he received multiple
wounds. As the Japanese poured in mortar fire, Mannix pleaded over the
phone for counterfire, finally begging for anything from rifle grenades
attack planes. His pleadings went unanswered. He tells Culver later
in recalling this incident, "'and just before I passed out I looked
down at that telephone. You know, that frigging wire had been blasted
right out of sight all that time'" (b5). These two situations—talking
into a disconnected telephone and hanging by the heels from a tenth story
hotel with drunken friends on the other end—are more than comic episodes
They are grotesque and feared situations because a slip of a drunken hand
and a disconnected phone are arbiters of a man's fate. To die because
of either situation is as senseless as dying from old mortar shells
58
dropping on lunch lines and forced marches that are born from a belief
that only the alphabet separates USMC from USMCR. To live in such a
world suggests that man's values can topple unexpectedly and that he is
able to do nothing about it. As Thomas Hardy writes in "Hap," if one
happens to be where pain is "strown" rather than "pleasures" (or being
in that lunch line rather than this one when mortar rounds are fired),
then he and all of his values can be decimated by chance. For a moment
man becomes a victim and his future is no longer in his hands but, as
Styron reveals in the opening incident to LM, in the "hands" of chance.
But the destructive march originates from a concrete oppressor, not
chance. The march is a command from a master and Mannix, realizing this,
fears
not simply fear of suffering, nor exhaustion, nor the lingering horror, which gripped both of them, of that bloocfy wasteland in the noonday heat. But the other: the old atavism that clutched them, the voice that commanded, once again, you will. (69)
Culver too senses Mannix's frustration. "In the swamp, frogs had begun
a brainless chorale; their noise seemed perfectly suited to his sense of
conplete and final frustration" (69). And just before the march begins
Mannix discovers a nail in his boot; it slowly cripples him during the
ordeal. This chance event is as painful to Mannix as Templeton's absurd
quest. The nail works its way into his flesh during the march and proves
as physically damaging to Mannix as Templeton's order has proved damaging
to him and his company. Both events slowly reduce Mannix to pulsating
fury.
This work includes an examination of revolt as well as a descrip
tion of victimization and Mannix is the first of Styron's characters who
&
methodically plans his revolt. He first reveals his defiance of Temple
ton during a routine series of lectures given by Templeton to his staff
of junior officers. When Mannix is chosen to respond to a "generalized,
hypothetical question," Mannix's defiance is a simple "I don't know,
sir" rather than the expected generalized, hypothetical reply. When
pressed, he goes beyond this but only to state emphatically that his
presence there as well as that of the other reservists is absurd and
pointless. Tenvleton simply stares at him incredulously.
Mannix's ultimate stance as the rebel is created in his choice
of a mode of action. It is as dramatic as Peyton's suicide and Milton's
attempted murder. It echoes Dostoevski's underground man who chooses
spite and discomfort to assert his freedom and thereby escape moral
philosophies that attempt to predict his actions mathematically. The
underground man could choose pleasures and happiness rather than the
pain and discomfort of his "underground hole," but to do so would suggest
that he is a creature mathematically conditioned by the pleasure principle.
He chooses rather to suffer, to prove he can indeed endure the painful
consequences of his choice. Mannix might have rebelled by choosing not
to make the march but instead he accepts the pain and discomfort of it.
It is an ironic rebellion in that it conforms to the initial demands of
the oppressor. When Templeton commands Mannix to ride to the base at
mid-point in the march, Mannix refuses and chooses to continue the march
and suffer even greater pains. But Templeton's quest has been pointless—
the march accomplishes nothing—and Mannix refuses to be broken by the
pointlessness of it. It would appear "normal" that the underground man
and Mannix would choose lesser evils and discomforts; but both choose
60
greater ones and in so doing assert their understanding of rebellion.
Mannix will endure the march, in spite of that oppressor, as a sheer
act of defiance.
Not because the hike was good or even sensible, Culver thought, but out of hope of triumph, like a chain-gang convict who endures a flogging without the slightest whimper, only to spite the flogger. (72)
Culver is the only one to see this in Mannix; "he had detected in the
Captain's tone that note of proud and willful submission, rebellion in
reverse" (73)«^ And this is Mannix's stance: he will carry out the
command and thereby assert his dignity and humanity by defiantly endur
ing what would not be acceptable under humane circumstances. But to be
successful, this defiance must be carried far beyond the merely ordinary
commitment to an unpleasant duty. Mannix must commit himself to it total
ly and achieve a rebellion that dramatically illustrates the power of
human endurance. And Mannix does commit himself totally to this end.
The several commentators—McNamara, Hays, Nigro—who discuss this story in detail fail to see the "rebellion in reverse" theme. It is not a rebellion in the traditional sense of doing what was forbidden (e.g., Prometheus, Adam) but is one that does what is ordered and living with the lunacy of that order. The peculiarly modern temper of the story is man living with this absurdity, and virtually the entire plot reveals Mannix's determination. In view of this, it is irrevelant to muddy the waters with excessive ."mythologizing." Furthermore, Mannix's rebellion is the kind of rebellion open to the totally oppressed, he who chooses not to destroy the oppressor or even disobey him, both of which might be futile gestures, but rather he who chooses to carry out the insane desires of the oppressor and say to him, "Look what you have wrought. It is on your headl"
2i^Culver senses that Mannix's "gestures were not symbolic, but individual, therefore hopeless, maybe even absurd. ..." (33-36). This statement emphasizes the degree of victimization rather than diminishes the sense of rebellion. The hope of practical consequences emerging from the rebellion is diminished. Because of his extreme condition as a victim, Mannix in all probability will achieve veiy little save an "inner" satisfaction.
61
During the march the nail in Mannix's boot penetrates his foot,
first causing only a minor puncture, then bleeding and swelling, and
finally toward the end of the march his gait becomes "a grotesque and
indecent parody of a hopeless cripple, with shoulders gyrating like a
seesaw and with flapping, stricken arms" (114). Something of a symbolic
structure is apparent in the literal situation: Mannix, the woulded and
suffering Christ-figure and the stern but callously indifferent god-mask
Templeton who
looked still not so much the soldier but the priest in whom passion and faith had made an alloy, at last, of only the purest good intentions; above meanness or petty spite, he was leading a march to some humorless salvation, and his smile—his solicitous words, too—had at least a bleak sincerity. (87-88)
When Templeton first learns of the "wounded" Mannix he really can say
nothing but "well . . . well . . . well" and it is this bleak gesture
that ignites the final reservoir of hate in Mannix.
He didn't hate him for himself, nor even for his brutal march. Bad as it was, there were no doubt worse ordeals; it was at least a peaceful landscape they had to cross.But he did hate him for his perverse and brainless gesture: squatting in the sand, gently, almost indecently now, stroking Mannix's foot, he had too long been conditioned by the system to perform with grace a human act. Too ignorant to know that with this gesture—so nakedly human in the midst of a crazy, capricious punishment which he himself had imposed—he lacerated the Captain by his very touch. (89-90)
Templeton then suggests Mannix ride the rest of the way:
If there had been ever the faintest possibility that Mannix would ride in, those words shattered it. Mannix drew his foot away abruptly, as if the Colonel's hand were acid, or fire. "No, sir!" he said fiercely—too fiercely, the note of antagonism, now, was unmistakable—"No, sir! I'll make this frigging march." (90)
The confrontation achieves larger proportions as it envelopes
the men caught between Templeton's absurd command and Mannix's fanatical
62desire to endure it:
Most were sprawled in the weeds or the dust of the road in attitudes as stiff as death . . . And the men close at hand— the faces he could see in the indecisive light—wore looks of agonized and silent protest. They seemed to be mutely seeking for the Captain, author of their miseiy, and they were like faces of men in bondage who had jettisoned all hope, and were close to defeat. (9H-95)
As the march devastates the "shambling horde of zombies in drenched
dungarees" (their servitude is double—to Mannix and Templeton), Mannix
himself survives only through rage.
If in defeat he appeared despondent, he retained one violent shred of life which sustained him to the end—his fury. It would get him through. He was like a man running a gauntlet of whips, who shouts outrage and defiance at his tormentors until he falls at the finish. (107)
Mannix's defiance is total. In the final hours of the march
Templeton orders Mannix to ride in on a truck, but Mannix cracks:
"'Listen, Colonel . . . you ordered this goddam hike and I’m going to
walk it even if I haven't got one goddam man left!" (ill). Mannix ac
cuses Templeton of "crapping out" on the march and Templeton in his
first display of emotion attempts to restore the proper relationship of
superior to inferior but Mannix cuts him short with, "Fuck you and your
information. ..." (112). Mannix's commitment to the impossible reaches
rhapsodic proportions: "if one did not know he was in agony one might
imagine that he was a communicant in rapture, offering up breaths of hot
desire to the heavens" (llh).
Styron's final crystallization of the plot is the work of a
genuine craftsman. Mannix and Culver stumble into the base camp, wounded
and bleeding. Some hours later after a stunned, semi-conscious attempt
at sleep, Culver, the ever-present witness and apostle to Mannix, makes
63his way to the shower room in the officers' quarters. As he turns the
corner, he sees Mannix stumbling toward the shower room,
clawing at the wall for support, his face with its clenched eyes and taut, drawn-down mouth was one of tortured and gigantic suffering. The swelling at his ankle was the size of a grapefruit, an ugly blue, and this leg he dragged behind him, a dead weight no longer capable of motion. (119)
But directly in Mannix's path is a Negro cleaning woman who, seeing
Mannix, cries "'Oh my, you poor man. What you been doin'? Do it hurt?"'
The towel wrapped around Mannix slips and he stands there, "a mass of
scars and naked as the day he emerged from his mother's womb." Mannix
replies "only with the tone of a man who, having endured and lasted, was
too weary to tell her anything but what was true. "'Deed it does,' he
said" (119-120).
Indeed the Negro knows it hurts and the two victims, one with
a heritage of endurance, the other, an isolated man, stand locked in
one another's gaze as communicants. Mannix has created his defiance;
the Negro's history is marked with defiance. In The Long March Mannix's
stance creates a perspective from which to view the other senseless event,
the slaughter of eight marines by misfired mortar rounds. Mannix does
not act in terms of why events are what they are but in spite of what
they are. Mannix defies by refusing to break under the most awesome of
circumstances. Defiance is also a basis for accepting the death of the
marines: to endure in spite of a potentially absurd end to human action.
The Long March is a symbolic situation and the parallels are
many. August Nigro suggests several, ranging from the "American experi
ence in which the individual's dream of a free and peaceful Utopia is
betrayed by the suppression and bondage of a closed, tightly-organized
64
society" to the "degeneration of the hero in Western civilization" and
21finally to Mannix as an "Ahab-like hero," Christ, Atlas, and Moses.
And so on. But the story is not really so diffuse. Templeton is a
master in The Long March and he makes absurd demands. Yet he remains
aloof and remote. Little is known about him save in his capacity to
command. It is indeed possible for the victim as servant to know little
about his master. Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial is executed "like a
dog" and is as ignorant at the end of his ordeal (save in his knowledge
of the paradox of the "law") as he was at the beginning. Templeton is
defined only in person (a military commander) but not in purpose—there
is no real explanation for why he commands what he commands. As a sym
bol he is the aloof and unknown god who commands but does not explain,
as Yahweh commands but does not explain to the suffering Job. When the
marines are destroyed in the lunch-line, there is no explanation as to
why it occurred other than "old shells." The existential world cannot
discover a rational and benevolent superior power. It discovers, rather,
forces that act sometimes benevolently or destructively, sometimes with
deliberate intent or random selection. But man can defy (or rebel) or
remain a passive chess piece. Mannix's choices are not negative ones;
Mannix is not broken by the command that breaks virtually everyone else,
save the aloof Templeton. Though wounded, Mannix survives. His deter
mination to endure is his revolt.
21’Nigro, pp. 104, 110, 111.
65III
... we are serving our sentences in solitary confinement, unable to speak. All of us. Once we were able to talk with our Jailer, but now even He has gone away, leaving us alone with the knowledge of insufferable loss. ... we can only leave notes to Him—unread notes, notes that mean nothing.22
By I960, with the publication of Set This House on Fire, Styron
achieved enough acclaim as a significant writer to justify some thirty
odd reviews of this latest work. By 1967 at least a dozen scholarly
articles had appeared, devoted entirely to STHF or the three novels to
gether. Gunar Urang, in a 1966 issue of Critique, devotes all of his
twenty-three page essay to this work. The novel lends itself to many
points of view, including symbolic and nythic parallels. L. Hugh Moo re 3
has pointed out extensive Greek nythic parallels in plot, characteriza
tion and narrator-as-chorus. However, much of the novel, including the
tormented central character, Cass Kinsolving, who is filled with despair
and self-loathing, is presented in "biblical material . . . present
throughout the novel in the implicit forms of imagery and symbolism. . .
Each chapter seems to have its own special image or symbol of judgment or
of grace.As social criticism, O'Connell notes that in STHF America
is a culture that produces "plastic flowers, Hollywood (debased dreams),
the automobile (pointless protracted motion). Its best and its worst
22set This House on Fire (New York, i960), p. ¿4.97-
23l. Hugh Moore, "Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, and the Use of Greek Myth," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 80-81.
2^Gunar Urang, "The Broader Vision: William Styron's Set This House on Fire," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 53«
66
young men flee its suffocation and gather in Sambuco, Italy, to rape
23and murder." Finally, it has been read as a contemporary pot-boiler:
"The spirit of Hollywood looms and hovers over this absurd book like
some Unholy Ghost, giving it its vast Cineramic shape, its hectic vulgar
supercoloration, its hollow belting loudness of tone, and its ethos ofpZ
commercial self-excitation.
The work is neatly divided in two equal parts but both focusing
on the same events: a grotesque "party" in the Bella Vista hotel in a
small Italian village, Sambuco; the murder of an Italian peasant girl,
Francesca; and the death of Mason Flagg, a central character. These
three events occur within hours of one another and are focal points for
the direction and theme of the novel. In Part I, Peter Leverett, a
young American lawyer talks about his past, his boyhood friendship with
Mason Flagg, and their encounter years later as adults in New York and
Sambuco. Part I culminates with the party in Sambuco. Part II is dom
inated by Cass Kinsolving, an American painter living in Sambuco after
previous unsuccessful periods in Paris and Rome. This part also covers
a substantial period of time, from Cass' boyhood days in South and North
Carolina through his European experiences, and also culminates with the
events in Sambuco. The present of the novel is a meeting of Cass and
Peter in Charleston, South Carolina, years after the events in Parts I
and II, where both men, now in their early thirties, reflect upon their
2^Shaun O'Connell, "Expense of Spirit: The Vision of William Styron," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1963-1966), 29.
^Richard Foster, "An Orgy of Commerce: William Styron's Set This House on Fire," Critique, III (Summer, I960), 39.
67past and the strange events in Sambuco. This present filters in and out
of both parts but there is no confusion of location or time, as each
shift logically follows a prior sequence of events. While several charac
ters dominate Lie Down in Darkness, the last three novels concentrate
on one: A1 Mannix in The Long March, Gass Kinsolving in STHF and Nat
Turner in Confessions of Nat Turner.
In STHF there are pervading and extensive levels of victimiza
tion. The first is a "self-victimization," a loss of self-control and
direction, where undirected impulses are responsible for the individual's
thought and action. This is remarkably similar to the self-victimization
the Loftises experience in Lie Down in Darkness. They, like Cass Kin
solving, are without self-control or inner direction. The second is
domination by and subsequent alienation from culture, where a culture
dictates certain modes of activity, and exiles, spiritually or physical
ly, he who fails to conform to these modes. This cultural deprivation
echoes the words of Milton Loftis' father who saw strangulation occurring
in American culture and its citizens standing "at the backdoor of glory.
Now in this setting part of time we are only relics of vanquished gran
deur. ..." (LDP, 184). Such disintegration is almost cultural entropy;
the "system" loses energy and direction and reaches a state of random
ness. A third is the domination of one person by another, not in the
physical sense of a literal slave, but an emotional or spiritual enslave
ment of another. A fourth is suggested by the introductory quotation, a
metaphysical imprisonment: man is contained in a metaphysical Jail and
no longer able to talk with the Jailer. As the haunting atmosphere of
death prevailed in Lie Down in Darkness, so its parallel, a haunting
68
atmosphere of imprisonment, spiritual death, prevails in STHF. Victim
ization derives from many sources in STHF; it ranges from the immediate
and private experience to a generalized and encompassing metaphysical
statement.
It is Cass who first speaks of a personal, self-inflicted vic
timization, where one becomes dominated by unrestrained passion and un
disciplined intellect, lacking what Tillich calls a "deciding center"
that avoids "bondage to will." Such a person is hardly free in any
viable sense of the word. Lacking proper control, significant thought
and action continually elude him. When Cass and Peter meet in Charles
ton years after the Sambuco affair, Cass reflects upon his earlier lack
of self-mastery.
"When I was in Europe I didn't know anything at all. I was half a person, trapped by terror, trapped by booze, trapped by self. I was a regular ambulating biological disaster, a bag full of corruption held together by one single poisonous thought—and that was to destroy nyself in the most agonizing way there was." (5i|)
Much of Cass' monologue in Part II, before he meets Mason in Sambuco,
is a description of being entrapped by an unrestrained and undisciplined
self—of being "half a person"—and the entrapment manifests itself in
alcoholic and sexual extravagances.
Until the time Cass speaks with Luigi MLgliori, the Italian de
tective Cass comes to know in Sambuco, he remains virtually without self-
mastery. He appears to be a tormented and driven man: "Cass' normal
condition is an alcoholic stupor, which, combined with his guilt, suffer- 27ing and his ulcer, brings him perilously close to the brink of madness."
2?Moore, "Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, and the Use of Greek Myth." *
69When Peter and Cass are together years later in Charleston, Cass remarks,
"God I was a regular puddle of self." But Styron seems to make Cass'
lack of understanding of causes of his condition as thematically impor
tant to this novel as it was to Lie Down in Darkness. Cass not only
pursues activities that are destructive to himself but, like Helen,
Milton, and Peyton Loftis, really does not understand why he pursues
them. In Charleston Cass describes a dream to Peter that he vividly re
calls but which occurred during his hellish wanderings in Paris. He was
imprisoned for reasons he did not understand and amid shouts of "gas
him, gas him." While imprisoned he "seemed to be forever climbing end
less steel prison ladderways and going through clashing gates and doors,
chased down by a guilt I couldn't name and burdened with ity own undis-
coverable crime." Finally, "I was being led off to the lethal chamber"
(273-74). Cass never really comes to a complete understanding of the
causes of the condition the dream symbolizes, though he slowly comes to
an awareness of his total lack of self-mastery.
Though both central characters in STHF, Peter Leverett and Cass
Kinsolving, are Southerners, the "Southern" character of the novel is
in the leitmotif the Negro represents. The Negro filters in and out of
Cass' memories of his past. Part of his debased sense of self derives
from his involvement in a senseless act of destruction years earlier,
as a boy of fifteen or sixteen, in Colfax, Virginia. While working in
a hardware store with his father's cousin, Lonnie, the two of them re
claim a radio from a Negro sharecropper who had failed to meet the pay
ments due on it. After locating the slightly cracked radio in the cabin,
Lonnie in fuiy decides to use the sharecropper as a lesson for "'every
70black son of a bitch in this country.'" The lesson is virtual total
destruction of the Negro's cabin. At first Cass is stunned by the wan
ton destruction and fails to stop Lonnie—
and therein, he knew, lay his ponderous share of the blame.For although he was sickened to his entrails in a way he had never been, his newborn manhood—brought to its first test— had failed him. . . . something within him refused to allow him to give voice to the monstrousness he felt at his heart and core. . . . (377)
But worse, Cass enters into the destruction, "as if I'd picked up some
of this young lout of a maniac's fury and was set on teaching the niggers
too. By God, this feeling, you know, I remember it—it was in my loins,
hot, flowing, sexual" (377). This experience of debasement haunts Cass
in his adult life and appears to underscore his inability to live with
himself and the world. He is tormented by his past actions.
"No, there are no amends or atonement for a thing like that. But there is another thing, and though it won't bring back ary busted stove or plaster bulldog or picture either, it's something, and it's strong. What I mean is, you live with it. You live with it even when you've got it out of your mind—or think you have—and maybe there's some penance or justice in that." (379)
The actions with Lonnie, where Lonnie was something of a master, struc
turally parallel how Cass finally saw himself in relation to he who be
came almost a literal master in Sambuco, Mason Flagg. Mason, through
his wealth and Cass' debilitated spiritual and physical state, dominated
28Cass and saw in him only one more article to be used and abused. Cass
literally struck back at Mason when he learned Mason committed a wanton
?8Gunnar Urang aptly points out Mason's baseness and its symbolic overtones, quoting Cass' remarks to Peter that Mason is a creature from "a different race who had taken on the disguise of a man," who originated out of nothing and was committed to nothing (Urang, pp. 36-37).
71
outrage against Francesca, a poverty stricken, Italian peasant girl who
also had recently arrived in Sambuco with her aged and tubercular father,
seeking what primitive medical facilities existed in Sambuco for her
father’s illness. When Mason first saw her it was in terms of another
’’lay," or in Cass' direct terms, another "humping machine," as were all
women in Mason's life. But to Cass she was simply the painter's aesthetic
object—incredibly beautiful, "this sweetness and radiance she had which
made me simply want to contemplate her, to sit in this light of hers.
..." (ii39). Later, while talking with Peter in Charleston, Cass sug
gests that the episode with Lonnie reverberated in the brutal situation—
Cass' destruction of Mason—at Sambuco the morning he learned of Fran
cesca's murder.
"I could remember thinking of Lonnie and his ugly flat mug, and the cabin and the smell, and the picture and those sweet sad proud black faces, like ghosts still haunting me after so many years. And the guilt and the shame half-smothering me . . . adding such a burden to the guilt and shame I already felt that I knew that, shown one more dirty face, one more foul and unclean image of myself, I would not be able to support it." (379)
Though Cass loathes Mason, he sees in him all that is foul and unclean
in himself. It is this foul and unclean self which has dominated Cass
most of his adult life.
If Cass is a "puddle of self," his condition is worsened by
Mason Flagg, one who victimizes those around him. This need to dominate,
which is obvious in Mason in Part II of the novel, is evident in Part I,
before Mason arrives in Sambuco and enslaves his primary victim, Cass.
One critic saw little need for Part I of the novel because it appeared
to spend too much time exploring the extraneous character of Peter
72
Leverett (three years before the events in Sambuco). But it is Peter
Leverett who first introduces Mason Flagg, for he attended prep school
and exchanged letters with him, and finally, some years later, spent a
few days with Mason in New York. In Part I Mason's special sense of
corruption and his gross disregard of civilized relationships are ap
parent. His most significant acconplishment in prep school was the se
duction of a thirteen year old retarded child. What passes for his "new
morality" is old fashioned debauchery. During one of the parties in New
York (when he and Peter meet there as adults) he stages a bizarre sexual
exhibition with his mistress while his wife talks with friends in the
next room. Later Leverett stumbles into the unlocked bedroom to bid
Mason good evening only to find Mason and his mistress locked in a sexual
embrace. Peter is also witness to Mason's "artistic concerns" which
ultimately involve only repeated excursions into all forms of erotica
(a photograph of a "strapping, grinning, coal black African in mettlesome
coition with an ostrich"), excursions that lead Peter to reflect that
this art has "to all except perhaps the pubescent and the unbalanced,
the least staying power of all ..." (l5l).
Mason's friendships are similar to his erotic art collection:
both are replaced when the sensations grow weak. Just before Peter
leaves for Europe, during his stay in New York with Mason, Celia, Mason's
wife, comes by Peter's room suffering from a head injury inflicted by
Mason. Mason "explains" this to Peter as Peter boards ship, "Oh Peter,
women! Sometimes I think I'll switch to beavers. -Or moose. Or
Rotarians" (169). When Mason arrives in Sambuco he "captures" Cass and
Cass pictures his relationship to Mason as one of servitude: "at last
73
I was tied to him, bound to him for reasons of pure survival, and not
just my own either, but of all those around me that I in turn had com
mitted myself to save" (U02). Cass had undertaken to treat the desti
tute father of Francesca, Michele, for extensive disorders including
tuberculosis. It is only through Mason and his contact with the mili
tary PX that Cass could obtain the drugs. The bondage that existed was
quite real for Cass because Mason had "the hungry look of a man who knew
he could own you, if you'd only let him" (i+02).
The most dramatic exploitation of Cass by Mason is the episode
around which the whole story turns: the grotesque, drunken debauchery
at Hotel Bella Vista in Sambuco, where Cass, Mason and later Peter stay,
along with an inferior Hollywood movie crew, dubbed by Cass the "flicker
creeps." The climax of this orgy is in the form of a self-debasing
dance before virtually the whole of the Bella Vista clientele. It begins
with foolish parodies and idiotic gestures and culminates in an obscene
imitative act. At Mason's command Cass
leered up drunkenly at the bemused guests, amber disks of light glinting from his glasses. As big and as hulking as he was, hunched over like a great desolate animal in this ignoble posture, his voice with its flawless accent was a simper, a prissy obscene lilt as once high-pitched and vacuous and dripping over with apathy—a perfect imitation of a Paris whore. "In Norway, the way they do it . . ."And then, stupidly licking his lips, adjusting his feet, his long maniac's hair dangling down over his face, he poised himself to duplicate in parody that act which even the Paphian gods above—had they had the eyes—would have mourned to see brought to such degradation. (191)
This act symbolizes the puppet or the dangling man who responds on com-29mand. And Peter notes: "Mason had Cass, had him securely in hand. . . ."
29Mason had even extended his control to Peter. The above quotation ends, "just as in an entirely different but no less impregnable
7h
A third experience of victimization is in loss of culture, the
rootlessness of the exiled wanderer. America had come to be no longer
a home to Cass, yet his time in Europe was fruitless and frustrating.
Two incidents with Americans, one in Paris and the other during Easter
in Rome, dramatically illustrate exile from America. In a cafe in
Paris one afternoon Cass is seated near two Americans, one of whom "in
the purest accents of America's hinterland" loudly complains of an over
charge. Cass looks up:
"Mother of God . . . I'm in a Howard Johnson's." He was hemmed round by a sea of camera lenses and sport shirts; the noise of his compatriots assailed his ears like the fractious harangue of starlings on a fence. "Willard!" the voice persisted. "Tell him off! In French, I mean!"
Later Cass cries to Poppy, his wife, "'it's the land where the soul gets
poisoned out of pure ugliness. It's because in the U.S.A. everything
looks like a side street in Poughkeepsie, New York!'" (281-282). In Rome,
shortly before wandering to Sambuco, Poppy and Cass meet an American
couple—Grace and Willard McCabe—and the party that follows that evening
has all the markings of the cornfed but empty American experience. In
Cass' studio, strewn with paint and canvas
McCabe, blind to the litter of paint and canvas strewn about the room, asked Cass what his "line" was. When told, he grimaced, grinned, but said nothing. In the Eternal City even the Pharisee cannot be unkind to art. (300)
The evening degenerates to a level not unlike the one later reached with
Mason: debauchery. The McCabes have two solid American virtues: black
jack and bourbon. Willard not only roundly defeats and humiliates Cass
way ... he had had me." Mason's strange and unconventional attitudes had captivated Peter until he observed what Mason had done to Cass in Sambuco.
75
in the evening long card game but out-drinks him as well. It ends in a
raucous fight with Cass stumbling into the night blind drunk. The
McCabes of Mineola, New York, are experienced practitioners of the two
American arts.
Cass' attitude toward America is echoed in Peter's talk with
his father shortly before Peter visits Cass in Charleston. The father
damns the culture: "'These are miserable times . . . Empty times.
Mediocre times. You can almost sniff the rot in the air. And what is
more they are going to get worse'" (12). The corrective can come only
from damnation and redemption:
"what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain—something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they'll be men again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented hogs rooting at the trough. Ciphers without mind or soul or heart. Soap peddlers!" (15)
It is Mason, however, who symbolizes much of what is shoddy in
American culture. Mason stumbled on to Cass accidentally, thinking him
to be a famous American painter. In their first meeting Mason praises
every scribble Cass has done and Cass quickly observes in Mason the
American philistine. (Something that Peter discovered much less quick
ly. ) When they meet in Charleston several years later, Cass says to
Peter, "there wasn't no more space or humanity in those drawings than
you could stuff up the back end of a flea. ..." (386). But in that
initial meeting between Cass and Mason, Mason generated bits and pieces
of pseudo-avant-garde conversation and Cass saw in him "the bleeding
shallow and insincere epitome of a bleeding neo-yahoo snakepit of a
76fifth-rate juvenile culture that only a moron could live in, or a luna
tic. He burnt my ass" (393). Logically enough, a large contingent of
Mason's friends at the party the time Cass debased himself were the
"flicker creeps."
There is defiance of these levels of victimization in STHF. It
is symbolized in a striking episode, but one which is incidental to the
plot. Cass returns one day from a glen near Sambuco and as he approaches
the gates of the town he sees a number of people crowded around a dog
that has been run over by a bus "with such weight and impact that his
entire lower parts from belly to tail had been mashed flat against the
asphalt pavement." But the dog's upper regions are undamaged and it
struggles to lift itself. Someone tries to put the dog out of its agony
by pounding it on the head, "knocking the beast's head to the road and
bringing forth from his nostrils a gush of scarlet blood. The dog once
more raised his bloody head and commenced to struggle" (3^3). The animal
refuses to die and defies, instinctively, the oppressor of injury and
club. Later Cass dreams that this situation occurs again but he is
called upon to destroy the dog; however, during the beating the dog
turns into one of the poor, down-trodden women of Sambuco who carries
faggots in from the surrounding valleys. Though she wants to be delivered
from the pain and suffering, the flesh wouldn't die—"I realized that
this was only He who in His capricious error had created suffering mortal
flesh which refused to die, even in its own extremity" (338). Like
Mannix, the old woman and the animal doggedly resist their tormented con
dition.
The first genuine indication of Cass' revoit is his action toward
77
Michele, Francesca's father. Cass saw in the weak and terminally ill
man the opportunity to expiate the guilt he acquired in the wanton act
of destruction of the Negro's cabin years earlier as well as the guilt
he experiences in the dissolute life he has known until Sambuco—"those
Negroes and that ruined cabin so long ago, which seemed to be the symbol
of the no-count bastard I'd been all my life" (398). Because he had no
money he resorted to stealing drugs from Mason, drugs which Mason had
used all along to control Cass, knowing Cass had a special interest in
Michele. To Mason, Michele was just another pathetic Italian peasant
sponging from foolish Americans. If part of Cass' servitude to Mason
derived from this need to aid Michele, he saw rebellion in that servi
tude: "the paradox is that this slavish contact with Mason that I had
to preserve in order to save Michele freed me to come into that knowledge
of selflessness I had thirsted for like a dying man" (Ui3). Like that
of Mannix, Cass' rebellion succeeds by enduring—enduring the insuffer
able Mason and completing an action that would be the exact opposite of
the debased act with Lonnie years earlier.
When Mason's oppression takes another turn, in the form of the
rape of Francesca, whom he has employed as a maid, Cass' rebellion also
takes another turn: murder—the final destruction of an external op
pressor. In the early hours of the morning, after the debauchery at the
^^This revolt against the debased self continues for Cass because Cass ultimately rejects his servitude to alcohol and self-imposed debilitation. Urang observes: "At the time Peter makes contact with him again, he has not had a drop of beer, even, in nearly two years. This represents, of course, not some 'moral' about the evils of drinking; it is set forth as a symbol of Cass' liberation from bondage to self and from his inability to face others and himself" (Urang, p. 6l).
78Bella Vista, Cass stumbles into the courtyard and learns of Francesca's
murder. Believing Mason is responsible for this outrage—Cass had
learned earlier of Mason's rape of her—he begins a relentless pursuit
of Mason. He searches for him first in his room, then in the court
yard and finally tracks him down near a bluff overlooking the sea. When
Cass strikes at Mason it echoes Milton Loftis' attack on Helen. In fury
31Cass strikes at the man who has corrupted all that he touched. It is
evident that Cass' attack on Mason was a fuiy motivated by the ugliness
which Cass had experienced throughout his life: the ugliness he remem
bered in the redneck cousin who pervertedly reduced the Negro's cabin
to shambles; the ugliness he saw in himself as he participated in it;
the ugliness he saw in the perverted and philistine Mason; the ugliness
he saw in himself as a broken artist. All of these crystallized in an
act of murder as rebellion.
Luigi Migliori, one of the two policemen in Sambuco, sensed Cass
pathetic condition. He knows Cass murdered Mason but closes the case as
a murder-suicide, allowing it to be believed that Mason killed Francesca
and then took his own life. It is Luigi who speaks of existence as a
jail and we the jailed who no longer can speak to the Jailer, for He has
gone away. If we are lost and confined in a metaphysical jail, "to con
fine any but the mad dogs among us is to compound that knowledge of in
sufferable loss with a blackness like the blackness of eternal night"
(497). In his last conversation he pleads with Cass,
^1The insidious irony of the situation is that Francesca was murdered by an idiot-man, Saverio, who had met her as she was returning late the previous evening to her sick father.
79
"Ask yourself whether it is not better to go free now, if only so that you may be able to strike down this other guilt of yours and learn to enjoy whatever there is left in life to enjoy. Because if by now, through what you have endured, you have not learned something, then five years, ten years, fifty years in jail will teach you nothing. . . . For the love of God, Cass, . . . Consider the good in yourself! Consider hope! Consider joy! . . . That is all I have to say. Now I am going to strike off that manacle." (U99)
It is Luigi who gives to Cass a sense of direction for his rebellion.
Later Cass reflects on meaningful rebellion: "to choose being, not for
the sake of being, or even the love of being, much less the desire to
be forever—but in the hope of being what I could be for a time. This
would be an ecstasy" (300-301).Unlike Peyton, Cass finds choice,
significant choice, not destructive choice, can emerge from chaos. And
so he does choose significantly.
Values for Cass are rooted in individual acts of suffering and
striving rather than abstract principles they illustrate or define.
Biyant correctly observes, "Only man gives experience meaning, and he
does so through his own powers of endurance, his capacity to survive
the suffering flesh is heir to."^ Senselessness continues to exist in
the world and provide its own kind of brutal absurdity: "The half-wit's
crime was irrational, just as fate or destiny or suffering is irrational.
Discernible causes and related effects do not figure into the fabric of 3
32Styron (or Cass) does not explain this statement and Aldridge observes a defect: "Kinsolving's last-minute choice of 'being' over 'nothingness' seems mechanical, trite, and imposed from the outside rather than prepared for by the facts as they have been given from the beginning" (Time to Murder and Create, p. i|8). Though this might appear as a last minute conversion by Cass, its justification is in rebellion as significant action even if the sources of rebellion and the causes of victimization are not clearly understood.
-^Bryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," p. 330.
80
experience, and it is folly for men to think they do."^ Even Cass' ac
tions toward Michele are futile, for Michele dies a grotesque death, a
lonely, sick and pathetic peasant.
Who will remember Michele, anyhow? he thought. Slowly he opened his eyes and gazed at the softly brightening sea, thinking: No, unless dust can feel suffering, there will be no one to remember his death. No one. But if dust can feel suffering maybe he will be blown about a while on the air and maybe this suffering dust will get in the eyes of men who feed too well, and maybe they will weep without knowing why, and maybe this dust will tell them how this man dies.A lousy sack of pus . . . (453)
But this sense of futility does not preclude revolt, however, though it
does profoundly mark the conditions under which a man labors. It is
the constant threat of this futility that gives rebellion much of its
importance, for without rebellion there is nothing.
Peter Leverett was also involved in a senseless act. On the
way to Sambuco his car.struck Luciano di Lieto, a young boy on a motor
bike who had come onto the shoreline highway from a sideroad. Luciano
had been years earlier almost mutilated in a World War II bombing episode.
As the car collides with the motorbike the mutilation begins all over
again.
34sryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," p. 550.
-^Galloway misses an exceptional point when he suggests that Cass is the nearest thing to an old fashioned tragic figure because such figures experience a tragedy that "demands for its full implementation a belief in a moral order superior to the individual." But Cass explicitly discovers no moral order. Absurd reasoning according to Camus, who functions as the intellectual guide for Galloway, discovers that there is no transcendent order but it derives value for man in the resulting tension created by this discovery. Man's isolation accentuates his values and points up his need to create, as nothing is guaranteed beyond his solitary efforts (David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction [University of Texas, 1966], p. 74).
81
Clawing at space, he seemed to suspend there for a moment in midair, before gliding with white floundering legs and arms across the hood of the car toward me, shattering the windshield in an icy explosion of glass. Like a collapsed puppet dangling on strings, he floated away past me and was gone. (29)
But months later Peter receives a letter from Sister Marie-Joseph in the
hospital where Luciano is being treated, to the effect that he has sur
vived and returned home. Yet within a short time he returns to the hos
pital with a broken collar bone, incurred when he fell down a flight of
stairs in his home. But he recovers. "The durability of this young
man is truly remarkable!" writes Sister Veronique to Peter. Luciano,
like the mortally wounded dog, like the disoriented Cass, like the
philosophically pessimistic Luigi, refuses to give up. He continues to
defy.
Indeed, the novel does end on an affirmation but a peculiarly
contemporaiy affirmation, one deriving courage to be from defiance.
Luigi, who has "saved" Cass physically and spiritually, makes this ex
plicit. Though the Jailer listens no more to the cries of the jailed,
man still can make some choices. And his rebellion (or defiance) is his
choice of what he believes are values that can be salvaged, at least for
a while. Rebellion is a necessity for the victim; without it he is held
rigid in his cell. As Sisyphus is imprisoned but refuses total surrender,
so Peter imputes as much to his father at the beginning before Peter goes
to Charleston to meet Cass.
"Son, life is a search for justice," this old draftsman told me once, betraying not a flicker of self-consciousness at the immeasurable phrase. I know now that he never found it, but perhaps that matters less than that he moved through dooms of love, through griefs of joy, in his lonely seeking. (13)
82
Ihab Hassan briefly discusses STHF in Radical Innocence and casually in
an essay, "The Novel of Outrage: A Minority Voice in Postwar American
Fiction."36 He suggests, somewhat vaguely and imprecisely in the former
study, that such a work (as STHF) is a "qualified encounter with neces
sity" and "hovers between comedy and tragedy." But the novel yields a
much more precise idea of tragedy (and comedy in the sense of reconcil
iation). The protagonist does suffer a sense of "outrage," arising from
the internal threat of an uncontrolled guilt-ridden self and from an ex
ternal threat of another person (Mason) as well as the alienation from
his native culture. The tragic mode is rebellion, and with Cass rebel
lion is more than a futile gesture. It is directed toward creation.
This is the first of Styron's characters to possess a more optimistic
defiance. Mannix defiantly endures the oppressor to the very end; Milton
and Peyton choose the extreme measures of attempted murder and successful
suicide; Cass chooses murder but later bitterly regrets it and makes a
final choice for creation. But all of the choices and actions stand as
defiance or rebellion against a victimization each character experiences.
The description, then, of many of Styron's "heroes" is rather
less despairing than Hassan's analysis of the ironic mode suggests, a
mode which he feels characterizes much contemporary fiction and certain
ly Lie Down in Darkness. The problem Styron's characters face is indeed
the exercise of their freedom (which is central to Hassan's position,
though he is imprecise about "real" freedom), but an even more important
problem is the nature of their rebellion when exercising what freedom
^American Scholar, XXXIV (Spring, 1963)
83they possess. (And genuine rebellion in Hassan's ironic modes appears
to have as little reality as freedom.) With STHF rebellion has taken
quite specific forms and certainly in some respects is more purposeful
than the virtually futile rebellion of LDP. But the causes of rebellion
for all of Styron*s central characters—Peyton, Milton, Mannix, Cass—
are quite specific forms of victimization. Each experiences a force or
forces that deprives him of meaningful human action, that makes of him
a suffering object rather than a meaningful actor. And in this respect
they are quite similar to one another.
Because of what we know of the world described in terms of rad
ical intellectual conditions and the manifold forms of victimization oc
curring in this world, rebellion cannot be looked upon as necessarily
accomplishing its end. It is more an assertion of dignity than a path
to fulfillment. Months after their conversation in Charleston, Cass
writes Peter that indeed Charleston is not Florence and he walks around
the city "like a wounded elephant, staggering with the usual pride and
despair." Marcus Klein's idea of accommodation is relevant to Cass' con
dition. Cass achieves no perfect union with his world after his rebel
lion. At best he achieves an accommodation such that "he exercises his
wits and thereby lives with his dilemma, and managing to live within it, 37he proposes the possibility of living."^
Luigi's remark, however, cuts away a bit of Klein's optimistic
position and points up a metaphysical master in STHF. "Once we were able
to talk with our Jailer, but now even he has gone away, leaving us alone
3?Klein, p. 30-
84
with the knowledge of insufferable loss." We remain confined in a world
that cannot be fully understood but even this could be more easily ad
justed to if we but could talk with God. But God has gone away and we
remain locked in our world without even an authority beyond our confine
ment to turn to for consolation. Such a condition is suggestive of the
shackled prisoner, the "chain-gang convict" of The Long March. But re
bellion against such harsh conditions is even more important than it
would be under less trying circumstances; it is the last hope of the
genuine human response. Rebellion may come to naught or accomplish
only the least of ends, but its assertion is proof of a human spirit.
IV
I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one.78
A slave is the total victim. He is an object with value but
solely within another man's context. If he is not directly physically
and mentally abused, his condition is not lessened, for he soon learns
he is totally without personal value. What value he does have is that
of property and as property he remains. In the Confessions of Nat
Turner Styron not only presents this type of victim but reveals his total
and calculated rebellion as well. Yet calculated and systematic destrueco
tion, which is at the heart of this revolt, is the extreme act of the
3®William Styron, Confessions of Nat Turner (New York, 1967),p. 428.
39>zMilton's attempted murder of Helen and Cass' murder of Mason are less calculated acts and more acts of passion, ignited moments or hours before the acts themselves. Turner's actions are carefully planned years earlier.
83slave. It is the slave rejecting the oppressor in the only remaining
way he sees to assert his dignity as person and not property. But his
choice of such actions remains critical and dangerous because he denies
to others what he wishes for himself: the future. Such an action's
practical consequences are unusually limited, for the same technique
might well be used on him, the slave. Cass Kinsolving in STHF regrets
his action.
"But to kill a man, even in hatred, even in revenge, is like an amputation. Though this man may have done you the foulest injustice in the world, when you have killed him you have removed a part of yourself forever. . . . What, if you had let him live, would he have become? Would he have stayed a swine, unregenerate to the end?" (STHF, p. Uh6)hO
But the bondage Nat experiences convinces him that he and other Negroes
will indeed remain enslaved men. Therefore Nat resorts to that final
act in total and calculated fury.
There are striking parallels between this work and The Long
March. Mannix is "bound" to an institution, the military, as Nat is
bound to a Southern institution, slavery; Mannix undergoes extraordinary
pain and suffering during his ordeal, and Nat suffers most of the indig
nities of literal servitude; Mannix rejects a higher authority and is to
be courtmartialed, and Nat is executed after the abortive revolt; Mannix's
rebellion appears futile and senseless, and Turner's rebellion culminates
in a retaliatory slaughter by whites of innocent Negroes; and so on.
The present action of Confessions of Nat Turner is a few days
^The thought echoes John Donne's Meditation XVII: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. ..."
86
in late October and early November, 1831, just as that of LDP is a few
hours during the day of Peyton's funeral, and STHF a few days in Charles
ton, South Carolina. From those vantage points the novels look back in
to earlier periods to weave thematically, though not chronologically,
plot and character. In CNT Nat is in jail in Jerusalem, Virginia, await
ing trial and execution for his leadership of the Southampton revolt,
which destroyed some fifty-odd whites in that county. He is persuaded
by a Thomas Gray to "confess" the particulars of the rebellion as well
as his exact part in the murders. Styron has used an historical confes
sion given to an historical Thomas Gray but enlarged upon it to construct
theme and character.^ Puring his confinement Nat also reflects upon
his motives and his past life. These recollections go far beyond but
artistically interconnect with the original confessions to Gray. Nat's
^Many black writers (see William Styron's Nat Turner, ed. John Henrik Clarke, Boston, 1968) have reacted adversely to Styron's "meditation on history," principally because they believe that Styron's Turner is historically inaccurate, that he is not presented as the black and perfect militant that he probably was, that his involvement with Margaret Whitehead, a young white girl, is a vicious stereotype of the black man's desire, and that Styron implies slavery was far less odious than bloody revolt. In response to the first point, very little is known of the historical Nat save through his "recorded confession" and Styron has created a character which is, indeed, an obligation of the true writer. To
* the fourth point, that Styron implicitly justifies slavery, one mustrespond that it is Styron's Turner who articulates the subtle horror of being well-cared for property (as well as mistreated property), thus establishing motivation for the rebellion against this most excruciating form of victimization. To the second point, that Turner is not sufficient ly established as a black militant, one must say that Styron's Turner is substantially perceptive and heroic, and rather than presenting a stereotype school boy's black George Washington (thus creating a black mythology as unrelated to history as most white mythology), Styron has attempted the creation of an introspective consciousness who not only comes into full awareness of both subtle and overt victimization but who rebels against it. The following discussion should illuminate the depth and scope of Turner's perceptions and convictions. To the second criticism, that of Turner's involvement with Margaret Whitehead, see pages 98-100.
87recollections include all of his masters, beginning with Benjamin
Turner (through Nat’s eighth or ninth year); Samuel Turner, his brother
(through his twentieth year); Reverend Alexander Eppes (a master for a
few months, until, standing in a "nigger pen" in the village of Sussex
Courthouse, Virginia, he was sold for $460); Thomas Moore (through Nat's
twenty-ninth year); and ending with Moore's fifteen year old son, Putnam,
and indirectly Joseph Travis who married Sarah Moore, Thomas' widow.
("For although under law I was Putnam's by title, I belonged to Travis,
who had the right to exercise full control over me until Putnam reached
his majority" [p. 44]). Nat notes with irony that he was turned into
two-fold property, "not an unheard-of-arrangement but additionally un
satisfying to property already half-deranged at being owned even once"
(41). The revolt itself, which is a central recollection, began at the
Travis', circled outward to include the adjoining homes and farms, and
ended three days later, short of its immediate objective: the armory in
Jerusalem, the county seat of Southampton. At the time of his execution,
several weeks after the abortive revolt, Nat was just under thirty-two
years old.
Literal bondage is thematically effective for the novel because
it includes far more than restricting and directing the body; when it
is successful it is total and absolute control of person, a depersonaliza
tion which could be called the ultimate outrage. Literal bondage in
nineteenth century America was racial bondage and much of the novel
points up the depersonalization that occurred under it. The depth of
the outrage is vividly apparent in Gray's "benevolent" talk with Nat on
the nature of chattel. Animate chattel "poses a particularly tricky
88
and subtle jurisprudential problem when it comes to adjudicating damages
for loss of life and destruction of property" (20). Or more directly,
how does one punish "animate chattel" when such chattel violates the law?
"You ain’t a wagon . . . but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's how you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy." (21-22)
This legal nicety spares the slave punishment on human grounds; he is
more properly regarded as a self-motivating wagon. Like Mannix, the
literal slave is also subject to the arbitrary definitions and terms of
the master and is denied the dignity of seeing his deprivations reflected
beyond his own awareness of them.
The literal slave's bondage has all the earmarks of Hassan's ex
istential pattern, for there is no secular or external standard for the
slave to turn to which will guarantee the cause of human dignity as well
as measure the depth of his outrage. When told by Gray that "nigger
slavery's going to last a thousand years," Nat ponders at that moment the
plight of a fly in his cell, a form of existence
in which there was no act of will, no choice, but a blind and automatic obedience to instinct which caused him to feast endlessly and gluttonously and revoltingly upon the guts of a rotting fox or a bucket of prisoner's slops. Surely then, that would be the ultimate damnation: to exist in the world of a fly, eating thus, without will or choice and against all desire. (26-27)
But this is the condition of the Negro: "It seemed rather that my black
shit-eating people were surely like flies, God's mindless outcasts, lack
ing even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish"
^The purpose of the image is strikingly similar to Frederick Henry's observation as he sits before the fireplace in his and Catherine's
89Gray even berates Nat for his religious piety and denounces
Christianity.
"Christianity is finished and done with. Don't you know that, Reverend? And don't you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don't you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?" (Ill)
This comment is particularly painful to Nat because Nat's incredibly
thorough biblical education gave him clear motivation for his revolt.
After learning to read, which in itself was near miraculous for a slave
(as well as for some whites: Thomas Moore, who owned Nat for several
years, was illiterate), Nat virtually memorized the Old Testament. He
felt nearest the prophet Ezekiel, who felt a divine fury.
Go through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof . . . Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark. . . . (52)
[Ezekiel 9:4-6]
Nat ultimately obeys this injunction.
More painful to Nat than his confinement in Jerusalem is the
separation from God. While in the Jerusalem jail he is under something
of a metaphysical isolation because his religious visions and convictions
are no longer steadfast and he is plagued by doubt. This is a particular
ly grave situation for Nat because it was not private conviction that
motivated him but prophetic insight. A purely secular orientation would
have left him less convinced of his mission. His isolation is made even
Swiss retreat. Ants are in the middle of a log burning at both ends.The ants' bondage is absolute: they can suffocate in the middle or burn to death by falling off. Frederick looks on as a master but declines to become a messiah (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms [New York: Charles Scribner's], pp. 327-328).
90
more profound because the revolt wrought more suffering than ever ex
isted before. Those he hoped to lead out of bondage were the victims of
white vigilante groups which roamed Southampton county after the revolt
and were responsible for the indiscriminate murder of more than one hun
dred and thirty Negroes. Repressive measures against the surviving
Negroes were far greater than those known earlier, at least in Virginia.
The full impact of this religious isolation comes to Nat when Gray leaves
with the completed confession.
Then what I done was wrong. Lord? . . . And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?
I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem. (115)
Metaphysical or theological anguish is a cruel irony. Hassan speaks of
it in the existential pattern: "intention and fulfillment, dream and
fact, engage in a perpetual debate which can be both ludicrous and grind
ing.-"^ Though Nat never loses his faith, he dies thinking more of that
one person he would have spared than of the God that he felt had directed
his earlier actions.
Nat Turner's isolation in the Jerusalem jail has its roots in the
special feeling that arises in a slave, at least those who have not been
totally depersonalized. In the Negro, this feeling is called by Nat's
friend, Hark, "blackassed." It is noticed rather early: "dating from
the age of twelve or ten or even earlier, he becomes aware that he is
only merchandise, goods, in the eyes of all white people [he is] devoid
of character or moral sense or soul" (53). Nat experienced this condition
^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 116.
91
one evening while he was serving as a "house nigger" at the Turners'.
Samuel Turner had retained some measure of ambivalency toward slavery
but not his brother Benjamin nor their Episcopalina guests of that
evening: slavery was to them as natural as the church. In the course
of the conversation Benjamin refers to Nat as a slave and the effect on
Nat is instantaneous:
Nigger, Negro, darky, yes—but I had never heard nyself called a slave before. I remember moving uneasily beneath their silent, contemplative gaze and I felt awkward and naked, stripped down to bare black flesh, and a wicked chill like cold water filled the hollow of my gut as the thought crashed in upon me:Yes, I am a slave. (l6U)
Nat's awakening to this state of servitude took precise turns under the
benevolence of Samuel Turner ("Marse Samuel" to Nat), whose benevolence
was extensive, not imaginary. As a young "house nigger" Nat's precocious
ness caught the fancy of the women in the Turner household and they in
turn taught him such essentials as reading in order that he should become
a truly exceptional "darky." He developed an extraordinary biblical
learning but, ironically, his motivations for the blood-bath that follows
years later evolved from this biblical mastery. And Samuel's benevolence
did not necessarily breed thankfulness for morsels: "what sorrow he was
guilty of creating by feeding me that half-loaf of learning: far more
bearable no loaf at all" (l£6). Rather than decreasing, Samuel Turner's
benevolence increased the experience of being "blackassed."
Without an understanding of this peculiar servitude—man as
property—a judgment similar to that of Richard Gilman's unfortunate
evaluation of CNT occurs. He contends that
there is nothing in Turner's Negroness that accounts for his religious fanaticism or even provides it with a basis, unless
92
that might be the clichéd notion that oppressed and enslaved people might naturally turn to God. And there is a great deal in Styron's character being Negro that works against any successful imaginative appropriation of what being Negro is.
Furthermore, "Styron hasn't made a reading of Negro or slave mentality
but only of a religious fanatic who happens to be a Negro.It is
evident, however, that carefully structured in the novel is the Negro
as property and his awareness as property that prompts his violent re
volt. Even the "benevolence" of the master underscores this because it
is nothing more than a continuation under less harsh conditions of
"otherness" the slave feels. What many Caucasian Americans feel today
toward the Negro repeats this "otherness"—e.g., "what else do they
want?" Marse Samuel's benevolence toward Nat created a deep feeling
between the two.
Yet still the unhappy fact remains: despite warmth and friendship, despite a kind of love, I began as surely an experiment as a lesson in pig-breeding or the broadcasting of a-new type of manure. (155)
This is a crucial point in the novel because the revolt ultimately de
stroys innocent whites as well as bestial masters (but rather unsuc
cessful in this latter respect). The depravity of the master, whether
direct or subtle, infects the whole culture; therefore, a rebellion to
destroy this enormity is Nat's logic. Shaun O'Connell in his review
senses the full scope of oppression when he considers that Nat's basic
humanity far exceeds that of the "oppressor whose lack of human charac
teristics justifies ary retributive horror" and Nat's religious persuasion
^■Richard Gilman, "Nat Turner Revisited," New Republic, April 27, 1968, pp. 25-26.
93
in face of this horror demonstrates the need to lead in vengeance "a
majestic black army of the Lord."^
The idea of a revolt began for Nat during his days with Moore
but, indirectly, much earlier with Samuel Turner. At Moore's, three
events occurred that crystallized the urgency of a revolt: a vision
following a fast (an observance wholly consonant with Nat's religious
fervor) and two natural occurrences involving the shattering effects of
servitude. The vision is an encounter between two black angels and a
white one and a voice speaking through the black angels the prophetic
words from Revelations. The first black angel warns:
"If any man worship the beast and his image and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the Lamb, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever." (291)
[Revelations lb:9-11]
The second engages the white angel in mortal combat but the white enemy
of God is vanquished and the victorious black angel cries:
b5Shaun O'Connell, "Styron's Nat Turner . . .," The Nation, October 16, 196?, pp. 373-7U. The enormity of the oppression can be seen in Nat's friends. Hark: sold by "people or monsters" named Barnett to finance a move to Mississippi though his mother and sisters remained with the Barnetts. Willis: sold by Turner to a "nigger-trader" under the pretext that he was to be "hired out" for two weeks. Will: owned by a "nigger-breaker," Nathaniel Francis, who has "beaten him into some kind of stunned and temporary submission." Nelson: sold at least six times, and whose children were "scattered to the winds." Henry: deafened in childhood by a blow on the skull by a drunken overseer. And it should be remembered that Tidewater Virginia was a garden paradise for slaves when compared to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi. Numerous black critics are disturbed that many of the Negroes appear less than sterling examples of virtuous manhood. That some of the Negroes appear bestial, especially during the brief revolt, is entirely logical in view of the enormity of their enforced degradation. It would be most unfortunate to overlook Styron's subtlety: the thinly veneered bestiality of the owners of human property is a far greater corruption than the Negroes' bestiality because it has produced and perpetuated the latter's condition.
9b
"These shall make war with the Lamb and the Lamb shall overcome them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful."
[Revelations 1? :ll|]
Thus, the rebellion was cast in a theological mold.
The natural occurrences were equally vivid. Some days after this
vision, while riding with Moore into Jerusalem, Nat and Moore come upon
a "free" Negro, Isham, his wife and child.The three are near starva
tion, the child "a limp, shapeless tiny thing like a bundle of twigs."
Isham halts Moore’s team of mules and unleashes a chain of obscenities
upon Moore. Nat recalls: "Nor had I ever heard raw hatred like this
on a Negro's lips . . . ." Isham had never received the pittance owed
him by Moore for a few hours' work, and his fury crystallizes in a verbal
onslaught against Moore. Isham's only overt act is the pathetic defiance
of spitting on the master and this fails: "his mouth made a frustrated
smacking noise and again he tried in vain, smacking—a defeated effort
awful to watch" (297). Isham echoes the crippled and stunned Mannix
who has endured all the master has demanded. Mannix's obscene "fuck you
and your information" directed to Templeton parallels Isham's verbal at
tack against Moore. In both instances, defiance guaranteed no hopeful
consequent, but only the probability of further punishment. But the de
fiance remains and the event is burnt into Nat's memory.
Yet I had seen Moore's terror and his startled insect-twitch, a pockmarked white runt flayed into panic by a famished Negro so drained of life's juices that he lacked even the spittle
k^Nat's mother remarked to him as a child: "Druther be a low cornfield nigger or dead than a free nigger. Dey sets a nigger free and only thing dat po* soul gits to eat is what's left over of de garbage after the skunks an' dogs has et. . . ." (19U")
95
to spit. This terror was from that instant memorialized in ny brain as unshakably as there was engrafted upon my heart the hopeless and proud and unrelenting fury of Isham—he who as the wagon fled him through the haze shouted at Moore in an ever-dimming voice, "Pig shit! Someday nigger eat meat, white man eat pig shit!" and seemed in his receding gaunt contour as majestic as a foul-tongued John the Baptist howling in the wilderness. (298)
The third confirmation for the revolt occurs the next day, on
yet another trip to Jerusalem.^7 Nat witnesses a second act of human
degradation, one in which two Negroes are made to fight each other for
the amusement of white degenerates. The combatants are Will and Sam,
property of the nigger-breaker, Nathaniel Francis. This scene, perhaps
more than the earlier one with Isham, is horrifying to Nat because it
pits servant against servant destroying the last vestige of self-respect.
It is a form of depersonalization that for a moment substitutes bestial
actions by one slave toward another for the bestial demands of the op
pressor. After observing this perversion Nat comes into full awareness
of what is to be done:
it was at this instant that I knew beyond doubt or danger that— whatever the place, whatever the appointed time, whoever the gentle young girl now serenely plucking blossoms within a bower or the mistress knitting in the coolness of a country parlor or the innocent lad seated contemplating the cobwebbed walls of an outhouse in a summery field—the whole world of white flesh would someday founder and split apart upon ny retribution, would perish by my design and at ny hands. My stomach heaved and I restrained the urge to vomit on the boards where I sat. (306-7)
The examples in the quotation are critical. When the slave faces radical
conditions of servitude, selective or programmatic revolt is less
^7The Christian symbolism is pointed by now; however, historically the county seat of Southampton was indeed Jerusalem and later changed to Courtland. But the historical coincidence makes the Christian motif even more appealing.
96
emotionally probable than annihilation of the oppressor. The depth of
white depravity has made the oppressor congeal into one undifferentiated
form.
Thomas Moore's and Joseph Travis' farms adjoined and Moore's
widow, Sarah (Moore dies in a "bizarre and fatal accident") married
Travis. The last two years of Nat's life were spent on the Travis farm,
where he practiced his trade, carpentry, with great skill. Ironically
Nat's life with Travis was more comfortable and free than at any other
time since his years with Samuel Turner.
Yet inside I was burning. Burning! Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of ny life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them? (3^2)
For Nat benevolence only altered the hardship of being property, not the
fact of it. For example, at the Travis' "a well-liked nigger" ate well:
"we ate well from the leavings of the house"; the master comported "him
self like the slave's ideal master;" and Marse Travis was "owner of the
smartest nigger in Southanpton County." (3U3, my italics) Servitude
might well be softened by an absence of cruelty but its demeaning charac
ter is not obscured.
k^There is subtle depravity in unctuous piety, including that secular piety which appears as a regional brotherhood. In "This Quiet Dust" Styron speaks of memories and recollections of Southampton county before the actual writing of CNT. A cousin of Styron's in-laws took him on a detailed exploration of the county, but the cousin ultimately reveals more of himself than the county.
"You take your average person from up North, he just doesn't know the Negro like we do. Now for instance I have a Negro who's worked for me for years, name of Ernest. He knows if he breaks his arm—like he did a while ago, fell off a tractor— he knows he can come to me and I'll see that he's taken care of, hospital expenses and all, and I'll take care of him and his
97
Nat received prophetic directions about the revolt at the Moore's
but specific information at the Travis'. It was at the Travis' in the
late winter of 1831 that the Lord "spoke" to Nat and removed the "seal"
from Nat's lips. "The Spirit had appeared to me in the form of the
eclipse of the sun" and "had informed me that the Serpent was loosened
and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men. . . .
the time was fast approaching when 'the first shall be last and the last
shall be first'" (3h9). The exact date appeared almost providential: a
Baptist camp meeting was to be held in Gates county, North Carolina from
August 19 to the 23rd.
What an unforeseen bountyI Deprived of several hundred Baptist sinners—half of its population—Jerusalem should be child's play to capture and destroy. Silently I offered a prayer of thanks. It was my very last sign. (336)
The plan for the attack included striking first at Travis' on
Sunday night, the 21st; and to weave an "S" path by the next day to the
Whiteheads', a home with an ample supply of guns, ammunition and horses.
The ultimate goal of the plan was the county seat of Jerusalem and its
armory and from there to Dismal Swamp, some thirty-five miles from
family while he's unable to work, right on down the line. I don't ask him to pay back a cent, either, that's for sure.We have a wonderful relationship, that Negro and myself. By God, I'd die for that Negro and he knows it, and he'd do the same for me. But Ernest doesn't want to sit down at my table, here in this house, and have supper with me—and he wouldn't want me in his house. And Ernest's got kids like I do, and he doesn't want them to go to school with my Bobby, any more than Bobby wants to go to school with his kids. It works both ways. People up North don't seem to be able to understand a simple fact like that."
Intimate contact, benevolence, compassion, its all here. But most of what is here is an asymmetrical relationship between cousin Dan and "good ole Ernest" who would "die for him" ("This Quiet Dust," Harper's, April, 1963, p. 1)|2).
98
Jerusalem.. This foreboding area of five hundred square miles would be
the refuge for all of the slaves who joined in separate revolts as word
spread of Nat’s successful one. With extraordinary good fortune and
large amounts of discipline, Nat hoped to sweep the county and arrive
in Jerusalem the second day of the revolt. But Dismal Swamp was an even
more dismal objective than simply a swamp because the revolt disintegrated
within hours. The ranks of the discontented and despairing did not swell
with hundreds of fleeing slaves (indeed some fought alongside their
masters); some got pitifully drunk; and they collectively failed in their
objective to destroy those who might warn the remainder of the county.
The revolt failed but as Nat reminds Gray
what else could you expect from most young men deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, shackled, and hamstrung from the moment of their first baby-squall on a bare clay floor? It was prodigious that we come as far as we did, that we nearly took Jerusalem. . . . C396T”
Revolt against servitude of this degree has little chance to succeed be
cause of the conditions under which it originates. The dignity must be
in the act of revolt rather than solely in its consequences.
The least effective part of the novel is the relationship of
Margaret Whitehead and Nat. Nat had come to know Margaret from the time
he was loaned by Moore and later Travis to the Whiteheads (i.e., Nat,
"a smart nigger," could be temporarily swapped for a good yoke of oxen),
but the eighteen year old Margaret sensed something bestial in slavery
and specifically in the hypocritical cant of her brother, a Methodist
minister. Nat is interesting to her because of his apparent intelligence
and extraordinary biblical learning. Ironically, she is the only one
Nat kills and, more ironically, the least deserving to die. Much is
99
made of the fact that Nat found it excruciatingly difficult to kill dur
ing the hours of the revolt and ultimately killed no one but Margaret.
The irony is forced, however, because it originates from a cliche and
stock situation. Nat's attraction to her before the murder as well as
his later remorse repeats an unexamined commonplace, that a Negro's
ultimate vision of feminine involvement is white. The dying gasps of
forgiveness from Margaret before she succumbs to Nat's club echo the
worst of sentimental stock situations—a sort of, "I forgive you darling
li9as I swoon on to death."47
In the Plimpton interview (noted below) Styron justifies Nat's
reluctance to kill by arguing that Nat was "overtaken by his own human
ity" in his failure to kill as the others killed. Or, on philosophical
grounds, murder is dangerous because it "perpetuates the silent hostil
ity that separates the oppressor from the oppressed."^ But the fact
remains, Nat's fury was religiously motivated (visions, voices, biblical
learning, a prophet for the victimized blacks) and believing in that he
^In a recent interview Styron spoke of the relationship between Margaret and Nat.
"I was trying to suggest that—insofar as the phrase signifies anything—she was a white Southern liberal, meaning that she deeply sympathized with the plight of the Negro, which was not at all unusual for certain young ladies of the time, oddly enough. True, she might have had a buried passion for Nat because he was so much smarter than the white people she was associating with. Nat's feelings for her were just as I described them in the book: he was smitten by her, this paragon of the unobtainable, in some obscure and perilous way so that the killing of her was not only a matter of working out his frustration but possessing her soul and body as well."
(George Plimpton, "William Styron: A Shared Ordeal," New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1967, pp. 32, 3h.)
-^Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1957), p. 283.
100
readily accepted divine fury rather than existential humanism. Though
he failed to kill as the others did, though he experienced the anguish
of losing God during the peak of the slaughter, he reflects to himself
while going to his death: "I would have done it all again. I would
have destroyed them all." Yet he would have spared one—she who saw
him as person and not property. In her he saw that revolt need not be
absolute destruction. Margaret Whitehead saw a bit of humanity. The
others did not.
Confessions of Nat Turner is the most thoroughgoing statement
about victimization Styron has written. Nat faced a condition which
threatened him with and reduced others to depersonalization. Further
more, though victimization is present in its most extreme form, rebel
lion is present too. Nat's rebellion, however, changes nothing and
harms ultimately those he would have saved, other Negroes. But the re
bellion is a real and powerful assertion of freedom—freedom for the
right to have an identity. But tragedy doesn't end in total accomplish
ment; it ends with a protagonist asserting himself against those condi
tions which threaten to engulf and destroy him. And Nat's tragic mode
is his rebellion and the consequences of that rebellion.
V
In many respects the central problem for the writer today is
the problem of victimization. The victim is usually thought to be he
who ceases to be man and becomes manipulated object. Victimization is,
however, a radical extension of tragic man's suffering condition. In
view of this, it should be understood that the final values for the
101
victim as tragic man are not in the goals he reaches but in the percep
tion of his condition and the nature of his actions. But victimized
man today, it would appear, has little hope of developing perception and
even less hope for significant actions. William Styron's characters are
strikingly interesting because they do evince this victimized condition
but, more importantly, they reveal a very vivid perception of that con
dition and a determination to react to it. The actions are in the form
of rebellions, rejections of those forces which threaten them with total
victimization. But it remains, however, that the scope and depth of vic
timization they experience suggest probable limitations on the scope and
success of rebellion. This does not mean, however, tragedy is necessarily
absent; it only suggests that one must understand accurately what indeed
does occur under such extraordinary conditions rather than summarily as
sume nothing occurs save bleak gestures. What Styron has written recently
of Thomas Wolfe is true of Styron's work: "the clear glimpses he had at
certain moments of man as a strange, suffering animal alone beneath the cP
blazing and indifferent stars would suffice to earn him honor."-' If
rebellion can exist under the circumstances described by these phrases,
then man has earned tragic grandeur.
Arthur Miller once said that "the thrust for freedom is the qual
ity in tragedy which exalts."^ Rebellion is a thirst for freedom—freedom
from oppressive conditions that originate in one's self, another person,
-’■’william Styron, "The Shade of Thomas Wolfe," Harper's, April, 1968, p. 104.
^"Tragecty- and the Common Man," Aspects of the Drama, ed. Sylvan Barnet, et al. (Boston, 1962), p. 66. Originally appearing in New York Times, February 27, 1949«
102society, or freedom from the oppressive despair of a surrounding void.
But this assertion (or rebellion in the terms of this study) adopts
many forms, some of which challenge the basic notions of what is a
moral action. The rebellion of Peyton and Milton Loftis is negation of
the complicated condition which envelops them; Captain A1 Mannix's de
fiance is a determined endurance of an absurd demand; Cass Kinsolving's
rebellion is the murder of a tyrant but more significantly a choice for
"being" in spite of the void that lurks behind all actions; Nat Turner's
rebellion is the clear and decisive rejection of the oppressor at any
cost to himself and others. It is in Turner, however, that one observes
the near complete victim. Victimization reaches its profoundest limits
in Turner's existence, hence his condition is not only representative of
the nineteenth century slave but is virtually symbolic of modem man's
condition as well. Rebellion under such circumstances, though extraor
dinarily difficult, is not distantly removed from tragic action, because
both involve perception and assertion yet culminate in some specific sense
of defeat. Indeed, the identifying mark of tragic action is irony, action
leading toward frustration and destruction rather than the harmony and
creation a protagonist seeks. Because man today lives under radical in
tellectual conditions, it is most probable his rebellion will have a sim
ilar end. But the mark of twentieth century man must be rebellion against
that which victimizes him, though he must live with the haunting possibil
ity of nothing whatsoever coming of that rebellion save the act of rebel
lion itself. Nat Turner's words can be symbolic of man today: I would
have done it all again.
/a 3
CHAPTER IV
JOSEPH HELLER: ABSURD COMEDY AND CATCH 22
There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punishment . . . Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this uni verse. 3-
1
2Black humor and absurd comedy are phrases often repeated today
to describe a mode of dramatic and fictional writing new to literature
in the past two decades. As with most literary forms which appear as
original, however, there exists a tradition that exerts quite specific
influences on absurd comedy. Situations similar to contemporary absurd
situations can be found in earlier literature, from Aristophanes or
Sophocles (particularly in the latter because of the unresolved tension
between destiny and personal freedom) to Erasmus to Cervantes to Melville.
But what appears as "new" in absurd literature today is the scope, depth,
and dehumanization that are characteristic of disproportion and incongru
ity. The latter are not things ultimately to be corrected, but are
^Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York, l?6l), p. 169.
Because black has achieved substantially different connotations in the late 196O's, particularly as the new and honorific identification of the Negro, it would be to greater advantage to identify the comedy under discussion as absurd comedy or humor. Absurd should then be taken not in the perjorative sense of something ill-conceived but rather as an unusual state of incongruity or disproportion. Such a state is not only comic but also frightening and despairing because of the scope and depth of danger and destruction which await the comic figure.
io4
profound disturbances that not only must be lived with but that are
quite often looked upon by "normal" people in strange and perverse ways
as ultimate goods. But in its broadest usage absurd comedy does suggest
a similarity to traditional comedy; in either one a character is an ob
ject of laughter, perhaps scorn, presumably because he is in violation
of a moral or social order. In narrower usage, however, absurd comedy
is more at odds with traditional comedy, where, in the latter, "a new
order of society crystallizes around the hero." Such comedy "predicts
the ritual expulsion of death and disorder.But in absurd comedy the
absence of order (or resolution of the comic situation) persists and the
comic hero is left with his knowledge of the pervading illogic (i.e.,
disproportion, incongruity) of things. An example of such knowledge is
that of the warrant officer in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 who remarks that
there "doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punish
ment. In this remark his awareness or knowledge is a resolution of his
predicament only insofar as it is knowledge he can use if he is to live
in his world to avoid becoming a total (rather than a partial) victim
of the comic situation.
This "illogic of things" is a characteristic of "modern" trag
edy, with it emphasis on disproportion and incongruity, as it is of ab
surd comedy. This is really to say that contemporary tragedy and comedy
^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 201.
^■Herman Melville's famous lines echo the same point: "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange, mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own" (Moby Dick, Chapter XLIX, "The Hyena").
103have remarkably similar material with which to work and are not differ
ent in terms of the reality they portray nor in the seriousness with
which they approach it. For example, it was suggested in the study of
Styron that tragedy includes some form of victimization—and rebellion
on the part of the protagonist is a revolt against that victimization.
Victimization in absurd comedy is quite real and threatening; the comic
figure can be readily taken advantage of and exploited and quite often
is. (Many a current anti-hero, comic or not, is "on the run" because
someone or some institution is determined to control or destroy him.)
Furthermore, the errors in and evils of his world are not temporary or
ephemeral as they are in traditional comedy but permanent and deadly as
they are in tragedy.
Yet the tragic figure succumbs to the burdens of the world, and
the absurd comic figure attempts some mode of adjustment to what he be
lieves to be a ludicrous though deadly world. The world is ludicrous
because of the extraordinary gap between appearance and reality, a gap
found on all levels of experience—cosmic, social, private—and such a
ludicrous world often borders on the world of burlesque or low comedy.
But contained in the situations of absurd comecfy are matters of life and
^Melville's "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" are in part examples of nineteenth century American absurd humor. The comic character and condition of the lawyer in "Bartleby" and Captain Delano in "Benito Cereno" are obvious but the stories involve "deadly" serious themes of identity and blurred perception, where basic human values are at stake. In each instance there is no return to traditional comic resolution: the lawyer accepts that Bartleby was a dead letter clerk, thus finding an "explanation" for Bartleby's condition; Captain Delano is little disturbed by his woefully inadequate grasp of the happenings aboard the San Dominick and dismisses the whole thing: "Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves."
106
death, matters of ultimate values, and the reader both weeps and laughs
at the extraordinary predicament of the character. Living in such a
world demands great agility of the comic figure; the way he exercises
this agility, both verbally and physically, creates much of the comic
condition. This agility is, as Marcus Klein puts it, "a simultaneous
engagement and disengagement" and is "at best a lesson on the perpetual
necessity of killing adjustments." Absurd comedy doesn't achieve a har
monious view of the world; it continues to see the world as permanently
illogical or in its better moments only "provisionally" rational and
the basic act of staying alive is a test of the imagination.
Though there is, then, substantial similarity between tragedy
and absurd comedy today, the mode of response by the absurd comic figure
usually leads to different consequences than the mode of response by
the tragic figure and this has historical precedent. The latter's mode
of response usually leads to some form of defeat and subsequent demise;
the former's toward some form of adjustment and continued life as in tra
ditional comefy. But that continued life of the absurd comic figure is
often blurred and filled with error and blunted purpose, and he never
really reaches a resting place. And it is reasonably clear why he does
not.
In traditional literature, the ideal is juxtaposed to the real in order to demonstrate the falling away of the real from the ideal. In the paradox of absurd literature the real and the ideal are radically incompatible; hence the ideal is largely irrelevant and even destructive.6
^Vance Ramsey, "From Here to Absurdity: Heller's Catch 22," Seven Contemporary Authors, ed. Thomas B. Whitbread (University of Texas 19S57, p . 118.
107
The ideal, to carry it a bit further, is destructive because of the way
it is defined and upheld by "sane" people. The keeping of human chat
tels was as much an ideal in nineteenth century Virginia as are the ab
surd demands by the officer corps on Pianosa in Catch-22, though from
other vantage points these hardly seem ideals. In absurd literature
ideals often contradict one another and when reason attempts some mode
of correction or resolution, its power is temporary and provisional,
subject to the whims of circumstance and multiple points of view. Ab
surd comedy lives with this condition by viewing it for what it is,
comic situations fraught with danger and futility, and the protagonist
finds he must exercise his wits to avoid his destruction. What Martin 7
Esslin says about theatre of the absurd is true of absurd comedy, that
absurd comedy goes beyond categories of comedy and tragedy to combine
laughter and horror. Ramsey makes a similar observation about Catch-22:
"the combination of laughter and horror occurs throughout Catch-22 and
has caused it to be placed with other works in recent fiction calledo ,
’black humor.'" In most respects Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a para
digm of absurd comedy. Its world is replete with situations which are
grossly different from what they appear to be and its central character
(as well as the reader) experiences a central preoccupation: how to
stay alive. This is the first concern. All other concerns, significant
values and viable choices, are contingent on survival. In Catch-22,
Yossarian flees to Sweden in search of values and choices, but this
^Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961).
®Ramsey, p. 10£.
108
flight is first a flight from death in varying forms and second a flight
to something better. Absurd comedy lives with a haunting fear of death
in its myriad forms and the haunting possibility there will be no reso
lution to the destructive predicaments it encounters.
II
oCatch-22 was widely and, in general, favorably reviewed at the
time of its publication in 1961. Its original title was to have been
Catch-18 but was numerically altered to avoid confusion with the concur
rent publication of Leon Uris' Mila 18. Heller's work has received wide
critical attention since that date and articles continue to appear, each
successive one finding greater unity and subtlety in the novel than was
suggested by previous studies. Mary of the studies are content to point
out the welter of "absurd" characters and events and then classify the
novel as a specimen of black or absurd humor. But if Catch-22 truly de
serves the praise it has received it should be discussed in terms more
substantial than those involving a loosely integrated collection of
bizarre episodes that function as an indictment of chaotic life. Frederick
Karl senses this when he writes that
wartime life on Pianosa [the location of Catch-22] is a replica of life within any organization. Whether one is a lawyer, teacher, doctor, judge, union member, white collar worker, or writer attached to a magazine, advertising agency, newspaper,
9ln addition to Catch-22 Heller is expected to publish shortly a second novel, Something Happened, of which an excerpt appeared in Esquire, September, I96Ó. His recently produced play, We Bombed in New Haven, treating the inherent lunacies of war, was unfavorably reviewed by New York critics at its premier performance in New Haven, Connecticut.
109
or television station, he finds himself in a similar kind of world.
The force of the novel is indeed in its direct relationship to many non-
fictional human experiences—the military is only one—and how these ex
periences are revealed to have characteristics and features not readily
apparent without intervention by the comic writer.
The novel has as its ostensible purpose the presentation of the
mad desires of a wing commander of a bomber group based on a fictional
Mediterranean island during World War II. Catch-22 records the commander's
mania for personal recognition and the lengths to which he goes in achiev
ing that recognition. But the novel attacks at least four basic human
activities: the military, business and finance, religious attitudes and
beliefs, and conventional political and philosophical wisdom. Its exag
gerated characters and episodes magnify actual conditions in everyday
existence which are generally hidden by layers of custom, insensitivity,
and, often, plain stupidity. Everyone Yossarian, the central character,
encounters is an exaggeration but also an extension of the faulty per
sonal interrelationships one often experiences in a normal routine. Most
individuals are aware that everyday activities can and often do become
absurd, in the main because of their great distance from truly rational
or fitting actions. In Catch-22 it is Yossarian who accentuates this
predicament by questioning and acting in such a way as to make the illog
ical and unfitting reveal itself. Yossarian himself is an exaggerated
"everyman" who learns that irrationality is not just "out there" but
^Frederick R. Karl, "Joseph Heller's Catch 22: Only Fools Walk in Darkness," Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Harry T. Moore (University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, 196b), p. 135.
noquite possibly near at hand.
To a large extent Yossarian is the archetypal American innocent
facing a hostile and unknown world. Sanford Pinsker calls him a Puer
Eternis who "not only refuses the traditional learning of manhood, but
adopts the attitude of a perennial innocent. Ramsey goes a bit
further but in the same direction when he sees Yossarian as "a picaro
12... at odds with the role which society would thrust upon him" and
agrees with R. W. B. Lewis' observation that such figures are less than
heroic yet still defiant and perceptive. As Lewis notes
the picaresque characters themselves are not crusaders, they are not tragic or self-sacrificial heroes, they are not reformers; they are much rather Charlie Chaplain types, comedians on the move, at once ridiculous and touching in their defiant roguishness. They emerge ... as pilgrims . . . journeying through a mysterious and hostile world, a world both chaotic and conformist. . . .3-3
The "nysterious and hostile" world described in this study is subject to
radical intellectual conditions, conditions which abort man's desire to
grasp and live within his world in a rationally complete and satisfying
way. It is these conditions that parallel what was called victimization
in the tragic situations in William Styron's novels and are equally
parallel to the situations in absurd comecy. It is a world of profound
but diabolically comic ironies and paradoxes which entrap Yossarian. He
finds his "sane" world embracing what are really insanities and unlike
■’••’•Sanford Pinsker, "Heller's Catch-22: The Protest of a Puer Eternis, " Critique, VII, 2 (Winter, 1964-19^5), l£L.
-I p-^Ramsey, p. 113.
3-3r. W. B. Lewis, "Recent Fiction: Picaro and Pilgrim," A Time of Harvest, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York, 1962), p. 11+9.
Ill
the traditional comic figure he returns not to the community which has
been a threat to him but flees like his friend, Orr, from his community—
in search of another.
Most of the earlier commentators saw the novel as discontinuous
and disorganized, but later critics saw method in Heller's madness. For
example, when Heller avoids straight-line narrative, it is supposedly to
create a randomness structurally equivalent to the experiences of every
day life. Jan Solomon was the first critic to give a detailed account
of the chronological arrangement of the novel, and he suggests that the
chronological contradictions (events occurring where they logically
could not occur or are logically improbable when related to antecedent
events) do not detract and (in a way which appears rather vague) support
the basic sense of absurdity of the events themselves. For example,
Heller has Milo Minderbinder, a mess officer turned entrepreneur, discuss
chocolate covered cotton as a dietary supplement with Yossarian while
Yossarian is perched naked in a tree watching the burial of Snowden, a
fellow airman, irrespective of the possibility that Milo's cotton ventures
occurred earlier or possibly much later than Snowden's funeral. Of the
above example he writes: "Nevertheless, the logic is inescapable, the
symbolic juxtaposition of death and business."}^ Of course it could be
argued that this "symbolic juxtaposition" could have been created just
as well in a standard time structure.
If a reader is determined to maintain chronological time he has
only the bomber mission-count to go on; Colonel Cathcart, the group
}-\jan Solomon, "The Structure of Catch-22," Critique, IX, 2, 36.
112
commander on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa, increases the required
missions of his combat pilots just as they reach the current maximum
number and are to be relieved by fresh pilots. Even here Heller avoids
straight line narrative, for the mission-count is at fifty at the open
ing of the novel and drops to forty some sixty pages later, Heller ob
viously dropping back in time. The important emphasis is, however, not
in the absence of a straight line narrative nor in the subtle structural
value of a jumbled time sequence, but rather in the events themselves as
the narrator sweeps across them again and again, emphasizing their gro
tesqueness in a way that removes any damaging effects of direct chronol
ogy. But many critics are more satisfied in believing that a "juggled”
time structure aids the over-all purpose, e.g., "the irreconcilability
15of the . . . chronologies serves the effect of absurdity. . . ." The
essential point remains, however, that Heller refuses to allow the read
er to lapse into a neat chronological framework; the events themselves
are made to stand out severely by breaking them from a prefigured, order
ly time sequence.'*'6
But the real strength of the novel rests in the comically exag
gerated events which are really logical extensions of non-fictional re-17ality. ("Logical" is the proper word, for the logic of the novel is
"^Solomon, p. 55•
"I hx Heller has suggested much the same thing: "I had in mind Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. I wanted the feeling of simultaneous sweep. Experience reproduces itself. Snowden [a gunner aboard Yossarian's aircraft] didn't just die once. He died before the novel began, and he died all the way through it." An interview, Mademoiselle, August, 1963, p. 23U.
17’Included in this study of Catch-22 are a number of parallel situations from non-fictional reality which are intended to illustrate
113
indeed in the similarity of the events to many in our own lives.) The
point is sensed by John Greenfield in his quotation from Bernard Wien-
raub, a New York Times correspondent in Saigon, Viet Nam.
At a Wednesday briefing a few months ago—one of those "deep background" sessions—a brigadier general said with a smile:
"Well I'm happy to say that the Army's casualties finally caught up with the Marines last week."
There was a gasp. A civilian United States mission officer, sitting next to the general, turned and said incredulously:
"You don't mean you're happy."The general was adamant. "Well the Arny should be doing
their job too," he said.Jim Pringle, the bureau chief of Reuters, turned to me and
whispered: "My God, this is straight out of Catch-22."3-8
Apparently what Weinraub had in mind was Colonel Cathcart's conversation
with the wing chaplain about the value of prayer and related rituals for
achieving recognition by the Saturday Evening Post. Cathcart feels ex
ceptional casualties might accomplish this more rapidly than other means:
"The sooner we get some casualties, the sooner we can make some progress
... I'd like to get in the Christmas issue if we can. I imagine the
circulation is higher then" (277). In this instance as in that of the
brigadier general's concern for higher casualties, the point is the same:
maintenance of a "good image" at the expense of human life and suffering.
Weinraub's observation underscores the grim humor of the novel.
Interservice rivalry, for example, long a problem for former Secretary
much of Heller's comic intent. Comecy generally and satire specifically, as Northrop Frye points out, speak to an understood "norm" that is missing but to which the fictional work strives. But this norm and the distance from the norm are intimately reflective of the "real" world. Indeed, much of what motivates the satirist, for example, is his direct perception of the violation of the norm in his own society.
■’■^Quoted from Josh Greenfield, "22 Was Funnier Than 14," New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1968, p. 1.
liliof Defense Robert MacNamara, is crystallized in Generals Peckem and
Dreedle, the former head of Special Services (USO entertainment) and
the latter wing commander of the Pianosa force. This petty rivalry in
effect becomes a "second" front and is described in military terms by
Peckem.
"General Dreedle commands four bomb groups that we simply must capture in order to continue our offensive. Conquering General Dreedle will give us the aircraft and vital bases we need to carry our operations into other areas. And that battle, by the way, is just about won. . . . General Dreedle simply doesn’t know how to cope with me. . . .1 keep invading his jurisdiction with comments and criticisms that are really none of ny business, and he doesn't know what to do about it. When he accuses me of seeking to undermine him, I merely answer that my only purpose in calling attention to his errors is to strengthen our war effort by eliminating inefficiency. Then I ask him innocently if he's opposed to improving our war effort. Oh, he grumbles and he bristles and he bellows, but he's really quite helpless. He's simply out of style. He's turning into quite a souse, you know. The poor blockhead shouldn't even be a general. He has no tone, no tone at all." (316-17)
But pettiness can become destructive when basic human values are at
stake. General Peckem and Colonel Cathcart, echoing the fanatical deter
mination of Colonel Tenpleton in Styron's The Long March, are in the
long tradition of military figures who thrive on ordered and neat ap
pearance, irrespective of the disordered reality beneath the appearance.
A portion of their well-being derives from a senseless phrase: "bomb
patterns."
"Bomb patterns?" General Peckem repeated, twinkling -with self-satisfied good humor. "A bomb pattern is a term I dreamed up just several weeks ago. It means nothing, but you'd be surprised at how rapidly its caught on. Why, I've got all sorts of people convinced I think it's important for the bombs to explode close together and make a neat aerial photograph." (318)
During a briefing for a pointless bombing run the truth emerges: bomb
patterns have no real utility save in the creation of an aerial photograph
ii5with all the explosions geometrically arranged—and in the slaughter of
pilots ungeometrically arranged.
The absurdity of an ordered appearance obscuring reality is
pointedly suggested in a figure promoted through Peckem's Special Serv
ices, Lieutenant, Colonel and finally General Scheisskopf, whose sole
military distinction is a fanaticism for parades. Under Peckem this ac
complishment is temporarily blunted but Scheisskopf's dogged persistence
with the empty ritual endures. Though he cannot schedule parades in Rome
(headquarters location for Special Services) as often as he would wish,
Scheisskopf can "send out weekly announcements postponing the parades.
"Don't even bother to schedule them," Peckem suggests. Scheisskopf, how
ever, had brilliantly prepared for parades during his training days at
Santa Ana Air Force Base. There he
longed desperately to win parades and sat up half the night working on it. . . .He read books on marching. He manipulated boxes of chocolate soldiers until they melted in his hands and then maneuvered in ranks of twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had bought from a mail-order house under an assumed name and kept locked away for everyone's eyes during the day. (71)
But Scheisskopf historically existed some few generations ago. In a re
cent military study of the Crimean War, Cecil Woodham-Smith pointedly
examined the welter of lunacies in one of the more senseless encounters
of that futile campaign, memorialized by Tennyson as the "Charge of the
Light Brigade." Lords Lucan and Cardigan, leaders in the brigade assault,
were not too distant from Generals Peckem and Dreedle in their rivalry
with one another and Lord Cardigan's fanatical desire for order hardly
exceeded Scheisskopf's desire for precise parades or Cathcart's for neat
bomb patterns. It was he who led the Light Brigade down North Valley
116with Russian artillery and riflemen on the Fedioukine Hills and the
slopes of Causeway Heights at Balaclava. Woodham-Smith observes,
when advancing cavalry are caught in a withering fire and are too courageous to think of retreat, it is their instinct to quicken their pace, to gallop forward as fast as individual horses will carry them and get to grips with the enemy as soon as possible. But Lord Cardigan tightly restrained the pace of the Light Brigade: the line was to advance with parade-ground perfection.19 (ny italics)
Like Scheisskopf's plastic cowboys
the watchers on the heights saw that the lines of horsemen, like toys down on the plain, were expanding and contracting with strange mechanical precision. Death was coming fast, and the Light Brigade was meeting death in perfect order; as a man or horse dropped, the riders on each side of him opened out; as soon as they had ridden clear, the ranks closed again. Orderly, as if on the parade ground, the Light Brigade rode on, but its numbers grew every moment smaller and smaller as they moved down ’the valley.
The Russian riflemen and artillery must have been astonished with such
perfection as they devastated the brigade.
Lord Cardigan, looking up the valley over the scene of the charge, could see no sign of his brigade. The valley was strewn with dead and eying. . . . The idea of trying to find out what had happened to his men or of rallying the survivors never crossed his mind. With extraordinary indifference to danger he had led the Light Brigade down the valley as if he were leading a charge in a review in tyde Park, and he now continued to behave as if he were in a review in Hyde Park.21
This Hyde Park maneuver involving seven hundred horsemen destroyed five
hundred men and an equal number of animals.
If there are comic horrors in the military experience—at vir
tually everyone's expense save those who initiate them—so business and
^Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why (New York, I960), p. 237.
2QIbid., p. 238..
21Ibid., p. 245.
117
finance is equally responsible for its own dubious values. Milo Minder-
binder, the Pianosa mess officer whose name echoes a mental facility
capable of crumbling granite, is nothing more (or less) than the entre
preneur who manipulates a small sum into a large one, given a workable
environment: war or peace, cotton or scotch markets, or mercenary air
forces. His activities on Pianosa are comic extensions of much non-fic
tional business behavior. Operating from the wing command mess hall,
Milo constructs a syndicate for buying, selling and distributing virtual
ly ary product ary place. The syndicate claims to aid everyone and harm
no one by virtue of the large number of syndicate stockholders; what is
good for the syndicate is bound to be good for Pianosa, echoing former
President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense who suggested that what is
good for General Motors is good for the country. Milo's extraordinarily
complicated manipulations of products have excellent parallels in the
everyday world of gold speculators who create sudden demands on gold re
serves only to sell their own supplies before the market falls as .well
as a parallel in stock and fund manipulators who have the respect of
patriotic Americans by doing nothing more than buying and selling cer- 22tificates in the open market as it fluctuates day by day. Milo's ac
tivities are interesting because they also reflect the depth and scope
the human mind can reach and embrace in pursuit of financial gain. His
fanciful exploits have an excellent correlative in a business transac
tion noted by Robert Heilbroner. William Rockefeller and Henry Rogers
22Some months ago (1967) William McChesney Martain of the Federal
Reserve Board warned of manipulators of "performance" mutual funds whose sole function appears to be profit at the expense of market safety.Such manipulators appear capable of pursuing profit irrespective of the potential self-destructiveness of their actions.
118
years ago acquired Anaconda Copper Company without spending a dollar of
their own.
1. Rogers and Rockefeller gave a check for $39 millions to Marcus Daly for the Anaconda properties, on the condition that he would deposit it in the National City Bank and leave it untouched for a specified period.
2. They then set up a paper organization known as the Amalgamated Copper Company, with their own clerks as dummy directors, and caused Amalgamated to buy Anaconda—not for cash, but for $73 millions in Amalgamated stock which was conveniently printed for the purpose.
3. From the National City Bank, Rogers and Rockefeller now borrowed $39 millions to cover the check they had given to Marcus Daley, and as collateral for this loan they used the $73 millions in Amalgamated stock.
I;. They now sold the Amalgamated stock on the market, (first having touted it through their brokers) for $73 millions.
3. With the proceeds, they retired the $39 million loan from the National City Bank, and pocketed $36 millions as their own profit on the deal.23
Milo's business ventures are probably closer to than distant from the
norm of general business behavior than many individuals would think on
first reflection.
Failure to view the novel as comic exaggerations of non-fictional
realities results in Pinster's error about Orr—Yossarian's tentmate on
Pianosa. "The deus ex machina character of Orr's miraculous journey [he
rowed to Sweden from Pianosa] is unacceptable to modern sensibilities
which demand a greater sense of 'reality.'"^ Quite the contrary, the
whole book is "unreal" on these grounds. Far more unreal than Orr's
journey is Milo's contract with the German command to bomb Milo's base—
^^The Worldly Philosophers (New York, 1933), pp. 202-203.
2^Pinsker, p. 162.
119
Pianosa! While Colonel Cathcart looks on, moreover! This venture of
Milo into what amounts to self-destruction is good business because it
earns a profit for his syndicate. Destruction of one's own people—
hence one's self—has been documented by William Shirer in The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich. German businessmen bid on and constructed, with
full knowledge of their purpose, gas chambers for the infamous concentra
tion camps of World War II. It was good business for Milo to contract
with German officials to bomb himself and other Americans on Pianosa; it
was good business to help eliminate Jews in the Reich. Of course history
is replete with instances of property rights supported over human rights
but its philosophical framework was briefly but pointedly stated by
Machiavelli in his discussion of a prince's behavior. Machiavelli per
ceived certain virtues could be dangerous for the state and certain vices
helpful, and one traditional vice, homicide, could well be much less
haimful than another vice, that of taking another's property. Far better
to kill a man's father than take that man's property; the former he will
forget, the latter he will never forgive. If good business involves de
stroying others, including one's own, it is probable that this act will
be more readily forgotten—hence forgiven—than destroying or failing in
25a business venture which could be unsatisfying to all.
Yossarian's flight to Rome to look for the young sister of a
prostitute he and other officers had shared is a genuine mercy mission
for Yossarian, and Milo generously offers his aid. One of Mio's many
25-^Recently Gene Roberts of the New York Times quoted a Special Forces (Green Beret) commander on the nature of good business practices: "People don’t realize it, but we have the highest kill ratio per dollar spent of any unit in Viet Nam." With no reflection on the ebullient commander, it is grim humor to know human lives can be "cost accounted" like so many nuts and bolts.
120
contacts—the police commissioner in this instance—tells him that he
can be of little use because all of his men are "busy trying to break
up the traffic in illegal tobacco." This fact is the undoing of Milo's
generous and humanistic impulse.
!'Is there really that much profit in illegal tobacco?"Milo inquired with keen interest, his rust-colored eyebrows arching avidly and his nostrils sniffing.
"Milo," Yossarian called to him. "Pay attention to me, will you?" "Si, Marchese," Luigi answered. "The profit in illegal tobacco is very high. The smuggling is a national scandal, Marchese, truly a national disgrace."
"Is that a fact?" Milo observed with a preoccupied smile and started toward the door as though in a spell.
"Milo!" Yossarian yelled, and bounded forward impulsively to intercept him. "Milo, you've got to help me."
"Illegal tobacco," Milo explained to him with a look of epileptic lust, struggling doggedly to get by. "Let me go.I've got to smuggle illegal tobacco." (4-02)
Ironically, this is the first event in that chapter—"The Eternal City"—
a city which is a microcosm of the evil, not good, Yossarian experiences
all around him. Noble impulses are easily adjusted or ignored when more
interesting financial rewards appear, e.g., natural landscapes all of us
claim to value but we so easily sell to the lumberman and the strip
26miner. The comic exaggeration of Milo's ventures reveals the grotesque
inner realities of the non-fictional world, and Heller methodically peels
away the surface of this non-fictional world through Milo Minderbinder.
It has been suggested throughout this study of Styron and Heller
that the contenporary world has little in the way of external or absolute
<iDIn Voltaire's Candide, Pangloss has little difficulty in viewing the occurrences of this world as basically good ones, though Candide discovers something quite to the contrary in his travels. Indeed, he discovers the world is less harmonious and more a complete threat to his existence. Yossarian, too, experiences this in his travels. Yossarian, however, lives and travels with many Panglosses "gone mad" in their pursuit of what most sane people would call destruction.
121
standards to turn toward or believe in and what standards it does accept
are hardly conducive to metaphysical optimism. Accordingly, in such a
world religious values are often more the expression of attitudes and
feelings rather than dogmatic certainties. Styron's religious characters,
it will be remembered, included the ineffectual Carey Carr in Lie Down
in Darkness; the quasi-degenerate ministers in Confessions of Nat Turner
and the aloof and indifferent symbolic Colonel Templeton in The Long
March. Catch-22 systematically reveals an ineffectual religious wisdom
in the frightened wing chaplain, Captain Tappman, who is not only phys
ically isolated from the officers and men, living in a wooded area with
an acid and insubordinate aide, but feels "normal" only when he is so
isolated. He is either studiously ignored or irreverently addressed by
all; his aide, Corporal Whitcomb, considers himself Tappman's superior
and the chaplain stands in mortal fear of the corporal. The chaplain’s
isolation is pronounced.
It was already some time since the chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was there a God?How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army was difficult enough under the best of circumstances; without dogma, it was almost intolerable. (262)
Tappman's most singular encounter with Pianosa life is a moment of terror
experienced when he musters courage to talk to Cathcart about the increase
in required missions for all surviving pilots. But the subject never
really comes up and the chaplain finds himself a sounding board for Cath
cart's project for elevating himself to wing commander and a general's
rank. Cathcart believes proper coverage by the Saturday Evening Post
will aid in this quest and suggests to Tappman that prayer sessions in
volving supplication for tight bomb patterns which make for nice aerial
122
photographs—something General Peckem admires—will place him in the
forthcoming Christmas issue. Tappman listens in stunned silence as the
Colonel demands a prayer that will be "something humorous that stays
away from waters and valleys and God . . .I'd like to stay away from
the subject of religion altogether if we can" (190). But the whole idea
collapses when Cathcart learns that enlisted men and officers pray to
27the same God and that atheism is not against the law, thus making it
difficult for Cathcart to punish those who don't share his persuasions.
Later that afternoon the second confrontation with Cathcart in
volves form letters to be sent to relatives of missing, wounded, or de
ceased airmen. The letters will run, "'Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr.
and Mrs.: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced
when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or re
ported missing in action'" (273). But like the ineffectual encounter
that morning with Cathcart, Tappman is unable to respond to this mimeo
graphed mockery of human loss. The final portion of this scene is the
beginning of the humiliation of the chaplain; Cathcart's gift of two
plum tomatoes to the chaplain later is used as evidence of the chaplain's
bad character; he must have stolen them for why would Cathcart give
Tappman two plum tomatoes?
The ineffectuality of the chaplain parallels the ineffectuality
^Cathcart's sudden revulsion when learning that enlisted men and officers have a common humanity echoes the embarrassing racial repression today. Cathcart's "liberality" is unmistakably suggestive when he says to the chaplain:
"Some of my very best friends are enlisted men, you understand, but that's about as close as I care to let them come. Honestly now, Chaplain, you wouldn't want your sister to marry an enlisted man, would you?" (192)
123of the conventional political and philosophical wisdom of Nately and
Clevinger, friends of Yossarian who die senselessly. Clevinger as a
literature major at Harvard was a joiner, petitioner, group leader, who
petitioned, joined, led, picketed for and against everything. "In
short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and
no brains ... he knew everything about literature except how to enjoy
it" (67-68). But is is with Nately and an old man loosely managing a
Roman whore house where one sees Heller totally debunk conventional wis
dom but only to reveal a deeper, more disorganized and comic reality than
conventional truths might reveal. Nately, Yossarian, and friends congre
gate in Rome (on leave) in a place that "was a fertile, seething cornu
copia of female nipples and navels . . . there was bare flesh everywhere,
most of it plump. ..." The old Roman pimp "watched . . . with victor
ious merriment, sitting in his musty blue armchair like some satanic and
hedonistic deity on a throne. ..." (236-37). In this setting Nately,
the aristocratic, wealthy, young American debates the old, unnamed,
spindly-legged Roman on the historical role of great nations and the
nature of a well-lived life. Nately proposes all the conventional
truths: strong nations with powerful armies and lofty purposes survive
with trandeur; infinity can be counted in a life time; noble death is
valued over less noble life. The old man systematically reduces Nately's
positions to the less than profound utterances they appear to be. At
one point he replies to Nately's patriotic assertion about America's
strength:
"All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so."
124Nately squirmed uncomfortably. "Well, forever is a long
time, I guess.""A million years?" persisted the jeering old man with
keen, sadistic zest. "A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as . . . the frog?" (238)
Undaunted, Nately trumpets the value of power and success in war. The
old man cuts to the deeper reality.
"You put so much stock in winning wars. . . . The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost.Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers.Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated." (240)
Finally Nately concludes that win or lose, "it is better to die on one's
feet than live on one's knees." The old man says he has indeed heard
this but suggests Nately has misstated it. "'But I'm afraid you have
it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's28knees. That is the way the saying goes'" (242). Rather than remain
content with surface realities, the old Roman has lived long enough to
see beneath surface commonplaces.
<i0Hemingway created virtually the same figure in Count Greffi who tutors the young Frederick Henry in Farewell to Arms. Henry assumes, for example, that such an old and distinguished man as the Count must have great wisdom. Count Greffi counters with what appears as great wisdom in the old is only great caution. Greffi and the old Roman are archetypes of the "wise old man" but inverted ones. Their wisdom is not heroic and optimistic insight into deeper harmonies and nysteries, but, quite the contrary, a feeling that the traditional virtues and verities are more verbal utterances thah substantial truths.
123
The comic reduction of Nately, or perhaps his humanization by
removing him from "lofty verities," is completed in this same setting.
An indifferent whore and her young sister become the sole objects of
concern for this aristocratic young man who was placed in the air corps
by parents who were convinced the German and Russian forces were near
immediate collapse. After his futile talk with the presiding old Roman.,
He asked his girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast. The kid sister tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three of them ate respectably in a nearby open-air cafe. But Nately's whore was already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately and the kid sister followed meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to pick up valuable pointers,Nately to eat his liver in mooning frustration, and both were saddened when the girls were stopped by soldiers in a staff car and driven away. (2UU)
This reality of solitude and tenderness is far more substantive than con
ventional verities. Like the military, business and finance, religious
security, conventional wisdom is stripped of its surface pretentions;
what is revealed are truths that are both grotesque in their disturbing
and disquieting manner, and humorous in their marked difference from con
ventional wisdom. This is the world of absurd comedy.
29The scope of the satire z is not restricted to the areas just dis
cussed. Indeed scores of experiences and episodes are ironic. The
29one commentator more precisely identifies the genre as romance- parody, generalizing from Frye's description of this form as the subjection of "mythic properties" of romance to everyday experience. "Not only has the hero become unheroic; all other conventions of the romance are also made to achieve an opposite effect through irony. . . . parody of romance . . . shows life to be more hideous and less meaningful than the experiences of ordinary men" (Constance Denniston, "The American Romance- Parody: A Study of Purdy's Malcolm and Heller's Catch 22," Emporia State Research Studies, XIV [December, 19631, U6). But Frye also suggests that comic heroes in the romance-parody are debased figures. Yet Yossarian possesses, as do many current "anti-heroes," an accurate vision of the
126
"soldier in white," a patient in the base hospital, is encased in a
plaster cast from head to toe but rather than treat him as a person who
would create an automatic (and probably unfelt) sympathy, Heller presents
him as a vanishing identity. No one really knows for certain if anyone
is inside; the plaster shroud, save for the telltale drip of liquid in
to a bottle, is the only indication of human form. The soldier in white
is, as his name indicates, more an object than an individual and the
plaster shroud is only the illusion of identity. The full horror of a
vanishing person is thus concealed. Like the officer viciously named
by his father Major Major Major and who is promoted to Major by faulty
electronic equipment, the soldier in white is another victim of a mechan
ized society. Yet there is really no other way to treat him.
They brushed his bandages often with a whiskbroom and scrubbed the plaster casts on his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis with soapy water. Working with a round tin of metal polish, they waxed a dim gloss on the dull zinc pipe rising from the cement on his groin. With damp dish towels they wiped the dust several times a day from the slim black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the two large stoppered jars, one of them, hanging on a post beside his bed, dripping fluid into his arm constantly through a slit in the bandages while the other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the fluid away through the zinc pipe rising from his groin. Both young nurses polished the glass jars unceasingly. They were proud of their housework. (167)
Milo's bizarre financial dealings, Cathcart's Saturday Evening Post
mania, the chaplain's pathetic ineffectuality, Nately's aristocratic
stupidity parallel the soldier in white: beneath the surface of the
world he lives in, hence he comes to at least partial terms with it rather than being subjected to total victimization by it, which would include subjection to illusion and commitment to the very values from which he flees. He simply admits to less power than a romance hero but this does not make him less human.
12?
human condition is a reality which is often lunatic, dangerous or death-
ridden, and because it is so distant from surface "normality" it pos
sesses a comic point of view.30Heller's title is descriptive of the entire book. "Catch" is
fittingly part of absurd comedy, for the informal definition of the word
suggests discord and disharmony amid apparent harmony and order, e.g.,
pilots would fly a reasonable number of missions but for a "catch"; Milo
would generously aid Yossarian but for a "catch"; strength and success
would be virtues but for a "catch." It is the catch that flaws the sys
tem, that punctures the ideal, and mocks man in the various acts of liv
ing. Recently Heller explored the "catch" in Tudor England, the "catch"
then known as "Morton's Fork."
Morton was a minister of King Henry VII, and would raise money by going to some nobleman's house for dinner. If the nobleman put out a big spread, Morton would compliment him on his generosity and say he expected him to be generous also in his donation to the king. If the nobleman skimped on the food, Morton would praise him for his frugality, because that would make possible a larger donation to the king. There was no way out. In Tudor England, this technique came to be known as Morton's Fork. . . .31
Obviously, the "catch" has a long and honorable tradition. But it is
language itself that reveals the full scope of the catch, because contra
diction and paradox, two essential features of the catch, are readily re
vealed in language. When language reinforces, however, destructive and
3°The catch as an English seventeenth and eighteenth century musical device is worth noting here because it too played upon surprise or irregularity ("resulting from the interlacing arrangement of the words and phrases"—Harvard Dictionary of Music) to make a point, usually an indecent one. The philosophical "catch" or other forms of the catch is oftentimes an indecent attack on human values.
31p. 128
■Joseph Heller, "How I Found James Bond," Holiday, June, 1967,
128
diabolical paradox and contradiction in an attempt to make them palat
able, then language as one of man's final hopes for bringing order to
his world collapses. Yossarian first experiences this collapse when
questioning Doc Daneeka, the flight physician on Pianosa. Yossarian
suggests that his friend, Orr, should be sent home if he is mentally un
stable, and if Daneeka agrees that Orr is unstable then he would be
quite naturally released from further missions—he would but for the
catch:
Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22, and let out a respectful whistle. (U6)
Language itself forcefully frames the contradictions the spirit is heir
to. Another professional man on Pianosa, Major Sanderson, a psychiatrist
who "ministers" to the pilots' emotional problems, robs words of their
last vestige of hope—common definitions. Speaking with Yossarian he ex
claims,
"You're antagonistic to the idea, of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Slums depress you. Greed depresses you. Crime depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a maniac-depressive!"
"Yes, sir. Perhaps I am.""Don't try to deny it.""I'm not denying it, sir," said Yossarian, pleased with
the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. I agree with all you've said."
"Then you admit you're crazy, do you?""Crazy?" Yossarian was shocked. "What are you talking
about? Why am I crazy? you're the one who's crazy!" (297-98)
129
The anti-hero, the man on the run, the absurd-comic hero is fully aware
of the way men think, men who use language to mask and perpetuate lunacy
32and death. When men can discourse, for example, on the subtle differ
ences between human and inanimate chattel, as they do in Styron's Nat
Turner, or define sanity as insanity, as does Major Sanderson, then it
is apparent the absurd permeates to the core of man's last contact with
coherence: language.
Interlocking the many areas of satire in Catch-22 is Yossarian's
flight from death, a flight made necessary because Snowden "spilled" his
secret. The death of Snowden is told and hinted at in fragments and re
vealed in detail in the last few pages. And it is Snowden's death as a
brute reality for Yossarian that transcends all other human concerns:
loyalty, patriotism, verities of all shapes and descriptions. Snowden,
a gunner on Yossarian's B-25, was mortally wounded over Avignon before
the missions demanded by Cathcart reached astronomical proportions. It
was there he spilled his secret. As Yossarian tended the wounded Snow
den, he discovered a second injury.
Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the coveralls just above the armhole of Snowden's flak suit. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled
32doC Daneeka himself becomes a victim of words. He is listed as being aboard a plane which crashes with no survivors. A flight record has recorded him as being there, therefore he is dead, and no amount of explanation by Daneeka will change that verbal fact. Language refines Daneeka out of existence.
130quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared—liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away dizzily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat. (429)
The secret Snowden spills is a reality far more important than the half-
truths, lunacies and lies of daily intercourse.
Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn.Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret.Ripeness was all. (429-430)
It is this reality that lies at the base of all human activities. Al
though many human actions ignore this reality or diabolically pursue it,
the comic horror is that indeed man is matter—bone and breakfast—and
this is an awful truth. Shortly after Snowden's mortal wound, Yossarian
refused to dress, and observed Snowden's funeral naked in a tree. The
act is less a symbolic gesture of disaffiliating himself from war but
one more literal in its intent. Snowden's "matter" spilled on Yossarian
he spilled his life which turned to death as it ran down Yossarian's uni
form. At that moment Yossarian learned the full magnitude of mortal man
and death; he ran naked from the literal death of Snowden and later he
ran from the various forms of death pursuing him everywhere on Pianosa.
Death in Catch-22 is a master chasing a wayward servant; this Yossarian
knows and this knowledge dominates his actions. "That men would die was
a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of cir
cumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but
circumstance" (67). Yet man often is a victim of circumstance, and on
131many occasions his life hinges on the peculiar circumstances surrounding
him. So it is that Yossarian fanatically tries to avoid death, the
enemy that is everywhere.
Yossarian is surrounded on all sides by hostile forces: his enemies are distinguished less by their nationality than by their ability to get him killed. Thus, Yossarian feels a blind, electric rage against the Germans whenever they hurl flak at his easily penetrated plane; but he feels an equally profound hatred for those of his own countrymen who exercise an arbitrary power over his life and well-being.33
Death is in many forms in Catch-22. There is much literal death^^
and symbolic death, the latter including insane desires and paradoxical
purposes of one's friends and enemies. Dunbar, a bombardier friend of
Yossarian, accentuates life and repulses death by cultivating boredom,
an experience that prolongs psychological time. And it is the awareness
of death in spite of the myriad actions of men which obscure it that mo
tivates Yossarian to seek his salvation in Sweden. For men not only ig
nore the reality of death but, and this is the diabolically comic point,
actively pursue it under other names: perhaps Cathcart's lunatic demands
and quests; perhaps Nately's superficial beliefs which ignore graver real
ities; perhaps Clevinger's great intelligence but absence of wisdom; per
haps Milo's financial wizardry for buying and selling death. But
33jRobert Brustein, "The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World,"New Republic, November 13, 1961, p. 12.
3^-"An incredible number of people 'die' in Catch 22. Some, like Snowden and Kid Sampson, die in scenes of tremendous horror; others, like Clevinger, simply 'fly into a cloud' and never come out. Some die in absurd situations, like the 'soldier in white,' whose temperature finally gives him away one afternoon; some 'die,' like Doc Daneeka, because of an official technicality. In the midst of these varieties of death, Yossarian (who 'rooms' with a dead man) wants to survive" (Pinsker, p. 139).
132Yossarian is aware of these realities and so on to Sweden. After all,
Orr rowed there from Pianosa. Couldn't Yossarian make it through the
Alps?
/33
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
This study began with a phrase, "radical intellectual condi
tions," in order to describe a current understanding of the relation
ship of individual to the world. These conditions are radical for two
reasons: they appear to be basic influences on our lives today and
extreme in asserting that man's knowledge of himself, society, and uni
verse is "permanently tentative" and fragmentary. In such a world there
is little reason to accept or try to make sense out of things spoken of
in absolute terms, be it absolute values or absolute knowledge. These
conditions are extreme in a second sense: man's values are his alone
and cannot be projected beyond himself. Man's knowledge of his world
does not suggest that he himself, his society or his universe is moving
toward any end that could suggest some positive eschatology, religious
or secular, involving himself or his world. If optimism or pessimism
must be advanced to characterize man's condition, what is believed is
decidedly pessimistic in the long run. Examples of these radical intel
lectual conditions include, from science the concept of entropy which
describes the behavior of a system in terms of its movement from order
to randomness, "an unstructured state of equilibrium;from history that
■^Bertrand Russell vividly describes this process and its broader implications:
that all the labours of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably
134telos or purposeful end is a fiction and that progress has a diabolical
irony in taking from man as much as it gives; from social analysis that
social engagement, even in the sympathetic words of Marcus Klein, is
maintenance of "a tricky distance between one's self and society" and
is a lesson in the "perpetual necessity of killing adjustments." The
list of examples could be amplified and of course argued against, but
it is fair to say that if there is an intellectual temper in the twen
tieth century, this characterizes it in a meaningful way. Or, in a
less dogmatic way, if there are intellectual tempers in the twentieth
century, this describes one of them in a meaningful way. A leading his
torian has said,
for good or ill we must regard the world as a continuous flux, a ceaseless and infinitely complicated process of waste and repair, so that "all things and principles of things" are to be regarded as no more than "inconstant modes or fashions," as the "concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their way.'"2
Radical intellectual beliefs in the twentieth century are extreme
in divorcing man from the eternal and the absolute. His purposefulness
is of his own making and the world he lives in is either neutral to it
or destructive of it, or both, depending on historical circumstance of
time and place. Most discussions about absurd comedy and contemporaiy
tragedy have them meeting on common ground. The experience of profound
discontinuity between means and ends, the belief that the universe is a
be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Mysticism and Logic, p. 47. Quoted from Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Centuiy Philosophers (New Haven, I960), p.Í4.
2Becker, p. 12.
135dying organism or at best a cyclic machine pointing to no eschatological
end, the skepticism of man's social perfectibility, the haunting fear of
an anti-utopian nightmare characterizes absurd comedy as much as con
temporary tragedy. As Douglas Davis writes of the absurd humorist,
there may be in this author or that author, this passage or that passage, a groping for system like the groping of a Spinoza or a Dreiser. But if there is, the search shall fail. We have gone too far in science, in technology, in philosophy, and in political theory for any new synthesis remotely like the old. It is not absolute meaning we seek anymore, but how to live at peace with ourselves and with the universe.3
Absurd comedy cannot return to a rationally and benevolently ordered
world. It does not exist. Even Yossarian's flight to Sweden in Catch-22
is at best a veiled hope. There is no guarantee Sweden will be markedly
different from Pianosa. It simply will be no worse.
There are striking similarities in character, plot and theme
shared by Heller and Styron. There is absurd humor in the character of
Thomas Gray, who records Nat Turner's confession, when Gray digresses to
expound upon and illuminate for Nat the subtle differences between in
animate and human chattel; in Cass Kinsolving's "puddle of self" that
floats around France and Italy in search of salvation; in The Long March
where death in a lunch line has all the earmarks of a burlesque of human
potentiality. But on the other hand, much of the reality of Catch-22 is
decidedly not humorousit is, rather, deadly and destructive. Men kill
3Douglas M. Davis, The World of Black Humor (New York, 196?),p. 26.
^"1 tried consciously for a comic effect juxtaposed with the tragic, working the frivolous in with the catastrophic. I wanted people to laugh and then look back with horror at what they were laughing at." An interview with Heller in Mademoiselle, August, 1963, p. 23U.
136each other and make a profit while doing so; superficial and inadequate
ly reasoned attitudes perpetuate the gross horrors men want, or say they
want, to escape; lunatic desires in the garb of prestige and power pass
for patriotism and brotherhood. And worst of all, as Yossarian learns,
language itself has no real contact with the external world because mean
ing derives from the user of the language, and not from common and stable
concepts. But reality in absurd comedy is not simply evil but diabolical
ly evil, because many individuals either fail to recognize the full scope
of the evil or deny that it exists at all. George Orwell has noted how
easily individuals disguise evil and accept it as a good. This is notably
true in the propensities of the political right or left.
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine- gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.?
Language "changes" reality and therefore what was thought to exist ceases
to exist.There are, then, tears in absurd comedy and laughter, "absurd"
laughter, in contemporary tragedy. And they are not there for relief or
-’George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," A Collection of Essays (New York, 193b), p. 173-
^In a contemporary context Bruce Friedman makes much the same point that Orwell makes:
A news magazine says what's all the fuss about anyhow and describes one of our Vietnam gases as "fragrant-smelling," the implication being that if the little Red bastards weren't so sneaky, hiding in caves, we would not have to use gas in the first place. ... It may be said that the Black Humorist is a kind of literary Paul Revere, a fellow who unfreezes his mind, if only for a moment and says, "For Christ's sake, what in hell is going on here? What do you mean, 33»000 Vietnam 'advisers'?"
Bruce Jay Friedman, Black Humor (New York, 1963), p. X.
137diversion; they are basic to both modes.
Many commentators on contemporary literature and drama agree
that there exists in many novels and dramas a tragic "tone and atmos
phere," though not necessarily tragic action or tragic characterization.
The reason for this, Robert Brustein believes, is that man in the exis
tential world is a victim, "usually a tramp, a proletarian, a criminal,
an old man, a prisoner, confined in body and spirit, and deteriorating 7
in his confinement." But if action as rebellion, significant rebel
lion, is absent "the rebel can still express his outrage verbally. Too
the nothingness of life he responds with the dry mock. ..." At best,
however, this sort of "tragedy" is a tragedy of perceptions. "It lacks o
a tragic hero, but it evokes a tragic sense of life. . . Hassan's
observations concerning the novel and Brustein's comments concerning the
drama state what indeed many believe to exist in much contemporary fic
tional and dramatic writing: perhaps a tragic atmosphere, but no tragic
hero or action.
But the question remains and it has been the question of this
study: given the radical conditions under which man lives today, con
ditions which present him as a victim, is it possible to observe sig
nificant characters and significant action, comic or tragic? It is dif
ficult to answer yes because the contenporary condition seems so overlaid
with that which would destroy it. But contained in the worse sort of
^Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, p. 32.
®Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 30.
138
victimization is the seed of rebellion. "Terror and torment are too
much with us today to make us choose to dwell upon them; but in our
sometime capacity to face these feelings lies the hope for our spiritual
regeneration."10 But there exists in the central characters of Styron’s
novels and in Yossarian of Heller's Catch-22, as this study has tried
to reveal, not only an accurate perception, an insight into the harsh
reality of human existence, but the ability to rebel against the victim
ization they experience.-, Contemporary man can face the "terror and tor
ment" but we need to learn to distinguish between his significant be
havior and immobile or destructive behavior. The differences are more
subtle than pronounced. But failing to make the distinctions blurs im
portant experiences emerging in twentieth century writing, and reduces
our critical perception of our own period to a narrow judgment that we
indeed would not impose on another literaiy period. Significant be
havior is evident in the works of Styron and Heller, though it is be
havior that might appear unorthodox and unacceptable on first glance.
But it is the second and third glance that we need.
It is not in character behavior that one notes sharp dramatic
differences between contemporary characters and past ones,'*'■*' but in the
l^Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, pp. U16-U17.
^Davis' point in The World of Black Humor is well taken: Black Humor, we are told in review after review, dwells on "anti-heroes," spurning the ideal qualities of the Aristotelian hero, that it dwells on mindless, inconsequential men, driven by passion rather than ideals, flawed not in one way, but in many, many ways. This is pure bosh. ... A historical list of "prohero" writers working within the Western tradition would be a small one, indeed, if we were to define our "hero"—in the manner of so many traditional critics—as an exemplar of middle-class virtue. Hamlet, Tom Jones, Frankenstein, Heathcliffe, the Snopes
139startling perception by contemporary characters of their fragmented re
ality. But the intellectual temper or climate of opinion, described in
Chapter II as radical intellectual beliefs, is an outgrowth of intellec
tual trends beginning in the Renaissance. Such trends, many believe,
have reached a point where there has noxv come to exist in much contempo
rary literature an understanding of the human personality as thoroughly
defeated. But in the work of Styron and Heller, two well-established
"moderns," we see that in spite of the prevailing radical intellectual
beliefs, beliefs certainly perceivable in the background of their work,
characters are created of remarkable vision and resiliency. Their modes
of response are an assertion of the human desire for reasonable freedom
and the possibility of authentic human experience.
family, and Augie March all rank quite as low on the scales of YMCA virtue as Yossarian or Dangerfield, and lower than Stern, say, or Peter De Vries’s Don Wanderhope. (p. 2h)
A Selected Bibliography
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Friedman, Bruce Jay, ed. with introduction. Black Humor. New York: Bantam Books, 1963.
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Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton University, 1937•
Galloway, David D. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction. Austin:University of Texas, 1966. Contains a William Styron checklist through I96I4 and a portion of 1963.
Gassner, John. "Tragic Perspectives: A Sequence of Queries," Tulane Drama Review, II (May, 1938), 7-22.
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li|2
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Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1965.
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. "The Novel of Outrage: A Minority Voice in Postwar American Fiction," American Scholar, XXXIV (Spring, 1965), 239-253«
________ . Radical Innocence. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Hays, Peter L. "The Nature of Rebellion in The Long March," Critique,VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 7O-7U-
Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1953«
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1961.
. "'Catch-221 Revisited," Holiday, April, 1967, pp. hh-60, 120,llil. Heller's return to Corsica and the airbase where he served during World War II.
_ _______ . "How I Found James Bond," Holiday, June, 1967, pp. 123-130.
________ . Something Happened, Esquire, September, 1966, pp. 136-lhl.An excerpt from an unpublished novel.
________ . "Too Timid to Damn, Too Stingy to Applaud," The New Republic,July 30, 1962, pp. 23-26. A review of Alfred Kazin's Contemporaries,New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1963.
. We Bombed in New Haven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.
________ . Mademoiselle, August, 1963, pp. 23U-235• A brief interview.
Howe, Irving. "The Fiction of Anti-Utopia," The New Republic, April 23, 1962, pp. 13-66.
143
Karl, Frederick R. "Joseph Heller's Catch-22: Only Fools Walk in Darkness," Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois, 1964.
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________ . "The Point Is That Life Doesn't Have Any Point," New YorkTimes Book Review, June 6, 1965, pp. 3, 28, 30.
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Lehan, Richard and Jerry Patch. "Catch-22: The Making of a Novel," Minnesota Review, VII, 3 (1967), 238-244«
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Mandel, Oscar. A Definition of Tragedy. New York: New York University Press, 1961.
Miller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man," Aspects of the Drama, ed. Sylvan Barnet and others. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962. Originally appearing in New York Times, February 27, 1949«
Moore, L. Hugh. "Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, and the Use of Greek Myth," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 75-87«
Muste, John M. "Better to Die Laughing: The War Novels of Joseph Heller and John Ashmead," Critique, V (Fall, 1962), 16-27.
Nigro, August. "The Long March: The Expansive Hero in a Closed World," Critique, IX, 3 (n.d.)J 103-112.
O'Connell, Shaun. "Expense of Spirit: The Vision of William Styron," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 20-33«
. "Styron's Nat Turner," The Nation, October 16, 1967, pp. 373-374.
Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954.
Pinsker, Sanford. "Heller's Catch-22: The Protest of a Puer Eternis," Critique, VII (Winter, 1964-1965)? 150-162.
Plimpton, George. "William Styron: A Shared Ordeal," New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1967, pp. 2-3, 30, 32, 3h.
Podhertz, Norman. "The Best Catch There Is," Doings and Undoings.New York: Noonday Press, 196U.
Rahv, Philip. "Through the Midst of Jerusalem," New York Review of Books, October 26, 1967, pp. 6, 8, 9.
Ramsey, Vance. "From Here to Absurdity: Heller's Catch-22," Seven Contemporary Authors, ed. Thomas B. Whitbread. Austin: University of Texas, 1966^
"A Review: Catch-22," American Reading Public, ed. Roger H. Smith.New York: Bowker, I963T An unsigned review originally appearing in Daedalus (Winter, 1963), 133-163.
Robb, Kenneth. "William Styron's Don Juan," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1963-1966), 3h-h6.
Rubin, Lovis. "William Styron and Human Bondage: The Confessions of Nat Turner," Hollins Critic, IV (December, 1967), 1-12.
Russell, Bertrand. Mysticism and Logic. London: G. Allen and Unwin., 19U9.
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Sokolov, Raymond A. "Into the Mind of Nat Turner," Newsweek, October 16, 1967, pp. 63-69. A feature article on Styron.
Solomon, Jan. "The Structure of Catch-22," Critique, IX, 2 (n.d.), I46—37-
Stevenson, David. "William Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties," Recent American Fiction, ed. Joseph J. Waldmeir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963•
Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Randon House, 1967.
. "Hark," Partisan Review, XXXIII (Fall, 1966), 37U-382. An excerpt from Confessions of Nat Turner.
________ . Lie Down in Darkness. New York: Viking Press, 1937.
. The Long March. New York: Vintage Books, 1932.
________ . "My Generation," Esquire, October, 1968, pp. 122-12U.
________ . "Oldest America," McCalls, July, 1968, pp. 9h, 123. Reflectionson Tidewater Virginia.
1WStyron, William. Set This House on Fire. New York: Random House,
I960.
. "The Shade of Thomas Wolfe," Harper's, April, 1968, pp. 96- iojj.. Harper's announced in this issue that Styron would contribute book reviews regularly to the magazine.
________ . "This Quiet Dust," Harper's, April, 196£, pp. 135-1U6.
________ . "Virginia: I83I," Paris Review, IX (Winter, 1966), 13-U^.An excerpt from The Confessions of Nat Turner.
"William Styron Replies," The Nation, April 22, 1968, pp. 5>U7- A reply to Herbert Aptheker's criticisms of The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Sypher, Wylie. Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Vintage Books,I96U.
Thelwell, Mike. "Mr. William Styron and the Reverend Turner," Massachusetts Review (Winter, 1968), 7-29.
Thompson, John. "Rise and Slay," Commentary, November, 196?, pp. 81-8^.A review of The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. University of Chicago,19^1, 19!?7, 1963^
Urang, Gunnar. "The Broader Vision: William Styron's Set This House on Fire," Critique, VTII (Winter, 196^-1966), I4.7—69-
Wain, John. "A New Novel About Old Troubles," Critical Quarterly, V (Summer, 1963), 168-173.
Waldmeir, Joseph. "Quest Without Faith," Recent American Fiction, ed. Joseph J. Waldmeir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963.
________ . "Two Novelists of the Absurd: Heller and Kesey," Contemporary Literature, V (Autumn, 196U), 192-20^. Formerly Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature.
Waterman, Arthur. Flight and Search: Three Essays on the Modern American Novel. School of Arts and Sciences Research Papers, No. 7 (February, 1965»), Atlanta: Georgia State College.
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Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Reason Why. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., i960.