BEYOND BEAUTY: Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives and 2666

Rebels are often attracted to storied lunatics and repelled by oppressors’ intuitive designs.

It also appears [anecdotally] that rebels throughout history [Diogenes, Thersites] have felt bourgeois methodologies irritated their sensibilities.[i]

Such radicals, being human, usually prefer running in their own circles, hoping to avoid the imaginary yet actual herd, which simultaneously defies the center while clinging to it. Everyone believes themselves a radical. Few see they’re in the herd, fewer still know the etymology of radical.

Among those who do see are some who linger open-eyed, squatting on the margins in Roberto Bolano’s The SavageDetectives and 2666, inspecting the fringes, discovering a numbing cruelty and complacency that becomes, in scope, a semblance of the whole species…a metaphysical super-organism existing for its own ends.

The reader reads the drip-drop-drip of a lunacy running amok in the imagined world[s] affected by particular cruelties and a generalized ennui, holograms that no longer coalesce over the old mythologies, re-imagining the emptiness of old rituals overturned by the arrival of maquilladoras, narcos and NAFTA, a post-communist unraveling of a previous order that reveals a mind trying to make sense of all the disintegrating contradictions—the cruelties of self fighting to exist in a multi-polar world—before being overwhelmed by the entropy of its own open-ended demise or conclusion [note: Bolano was dying while writing 2666, succumbing to liver disease shortly after finishing it].

The term “savage detectives,” like 2666, suggests more of a riddle than something concrete. Who or what are they? What’s savage about them? What are they trying to detect?

Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, semi-fictional leaders of Mexico City’s self-proclaimed “visceral realists” of the 1990s, flee with a whore from her enraged pimp into the Sonoran desert of northern Mexico hoping to find their poetic mother, Cesarea Tinajero.

These savage detectives are described as “sovereigns of sadness,” exploring the postmodern world’s slow-motion, metaphysical collapse. Belano [who’s also the alleged narrator of 2666] and Lima and those who follow them, read them, know or feel there’s no point to anything, nothing worthwhile, really, beyond rebellion for the sake of doing something visceral, something from the gut, something real that goes beyond mere semblance…to prove to one’s self that one’s really alive, to do something that asserts one’s existence in an irreversibly brutal mode that totally fucks with the man’s head while allowing the transgressor to spot something, anything, that might be construed as meaningful.

Over the course of the two novels, an amoral aesthetic based on youthful desperation and hunger [see “Mexicans Lost in Mexico”] gradually evolves into a magical fatalism as Lotte, Archimboldi’s elderly sister, informs the aging giant his nephew’s an accused serial killer in a Mexican prison, and though Archimboldi’s just a man, he’s done some amazing things, and may still do something amazing. The first novel begins with romantic writers in their youth searching for something real and the second ends with the greatest visceral realist of them all—Benno von Archimboldi—boarding a plane for Santa Teresa [Juarez] and a mysterious legacy, a magical fatalism where something is done when nothing’s possible anyway.

Abel Romero, a character in Detectives, says “…the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it …If it’s random…we’re fucked.” [420]

Bolano, however, knows it’s more complicated, that it’s not good or evil if it’s random, it simply is. Good or evil requires purpose or intent, and he shows the divergent ambiguities of such aims in perhaps the most amazing part of either novel, when, in Detectives, Jaume Planells speaks of Arturo’s duel with literary critic Inaki Echevarne:

“…this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn’t a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence.” [510-11]

Both novels embody Eros’ struggle over Thanatos, where life tries to “abolish death” [2666, 710] even though “No one pays attention [to the carnage, even though] the secret of the world is hidden in [it]” [SD, 348]…even though neither artist or critic, producer or consumer, can ever win the duel if humans are to exist.

The man who rents Archimboldi his first typewriter tells him that “Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.” [790]

Which is another way of saying everything we innocently perceive is symbolic, a crucifixion of the truth, a “semblance” of the apocalypse, where “…it was all real… in appearance.…a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.” [Ansky in 2666, 722-3]

It’s while fleeing from Stalinists that Ansky, a Soviet Jew whose journal the youthful Prussian, Archimboldi, had discovered while recuperating from his wounds on the Eastern Front in WWII, writes: “Only in chaos are we conceivable…something secret, horrible, and cosmic [is] afoot." [736]

Indeed. And Bolano’s fictions plumb this secret, giving voice to the ultimate mysteries of being human…a way of going beyond mere beauty with all the ugliness going on.

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[i] I think of what’s happened re: the exploitation of Che Guevara. The Bolano myth’s on a par with “The Motorcycle Diaries” in the way the mainstream spectacle has sought to co-opt and invert energy antithetical to its existence for a profit, but that’s another subject…

TIME YOU WAS WEANED A THAT GUN-TOTIN, TOOTH-‘N’-CLAW TAMIN, LUSTY, SCREAMIN’ MEDDLIN NOVUS BALL-BUSTIN’ ORDO SECLORUM CALLED UNCLE SAM SLICK

A review of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, The Viking Press, New York, 1977

Richard Milhaus Nixon, molested by his father as a boy, having become perverse himself throughout his thought and actions, finds his career about to launch once he’s been brutally raped, anally, by a meme he identifies as Uncle Sam.

This sexual devastation seems a rite all future POTUSes must undergo at some point, a rite that instills in them the necessary presidential timber, according to Nixon, the predominant voice and viewpoint in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.[i]

The fact is, though it was published 35 years ago, this novel may be just as relevant in this Presidential election year as it was when it was published. Americans still [as always, apparently] demand a masculine Christian capable of killing for God & Country. And they’ve been lucky lately, getting macho-man killers in spades: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, perhaps the Clintons, and, now definitely Obama.

According to Nixon about halfway through the novel, which breathlessly covers the last three days of the Rosenbergs’ lives before they’re to be publicly executed in the electric chair in Times Square before a worldwide television audience, the reason Eisenhower was so great and had become President was that “he knew how to kill.” Nixon wondered if he could do the same. [258]

It seems that Nixon’s primary inner conflict about the Rosenbergs, according to the way Coover speaks him, is between pity and heroism and thoroughly delusional. Nixon comes across as a communist and fascist appeaser, in other words enthralled by the authoritarian position, where such folks as “premature anti-fascist[s]” thwart the patriotic war against the Phantom where “justice is entertainment.” [121]

The kind of person Nixon is shows itself in the dimensions of his existential world: “I felt caught up in some endless quest, a martyr to duty, but duty to what? My self perhaps, its creation and improvement, the need to show I had what it takes, that I deserved no matter what I got…” [298]

Are there any delusional would-be or actual killers among the current and former 2012 candidates? They seem to be aspiring killers for sure [Ron Paul excepted], if they don’t already have a few bodies strewn here and there throughout their past. We know even Obama killed Osama and other bad people [a few of them American citizens. At least the Rosenbergs had a “trial”].  Coover’s Nixon is definitely in this mode, with a strong possibility, which he hints at himself, of a body already somewhere in his past, buried like its repressed memory. He’s a confessed rapist and sexual mess. But he can’t help but wonder whether or not a Quaker, raised by Grandma Milhaus, could actually kill someone, especially decent, possibly even innocent people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: “Could I kill, I wondered? If it came to that, could I kill? Not something easy like the Rosenbergs, but this crowd in here…if they got in my way…? Why not? Killing was as meaningless as anything else.” [345][ii]

In the act of the Rosenbergs’ heinous public slaughter, Nixon realizes a few things that, if enough regular folks understood, there would be no America, no USSR, no troubles. Consider Coover’s tense choices. It feels a bit odd that Nixon’s speaking the past tense, and yet the action feels as if it were presently happening. Also, Nixon rarely thinks at all about the future, and when he does it’s a distant future that will build monuments to him once he’s gone. I think this suggests that Coover’s Nixon has lost touch with the present tense—an American symptom resulting from being trapped inside a Disney/Bernays’ spectacle.[iii] In this sense, especially toward the end at the bottom of page 473, it’s implied that the reader, who is by extension/in-tension the people, could be insane [unless part of some unspoken intelligence that knows better]. It’s the situation that’s insane. And Nixon personifies the peoples’ systemic situation…the mode in which we’re all mere actors on a stage.

Throughout the novel one might read echoes of Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord’s spectacle, the psychogeography of Deleuze and Guattari, the self-reflexivity and metafictive qualities of Coover’s pomo contemporaries in the way Nixon’s poetic neurosis/delusion becomes the textual pathology that seams the American citizen’s dis-ease together forming society’s schizoid insanity.

Consider Chapter 18, “The National Poet Laureate[iv] Meditates on the Art of Revelation,” in which Nixon says: “Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination…fakery in allegiance to the truth…objectivity is Gnostic…as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible.” [320]

From here on the narrator grows increasingly schizoid until it becomes quite clear that The Burning Game is an Avant-Pop presentation of the schizoid American psyche, that the USA has evolved into a pop culture spectacle and something that’s perhaps as dangerous, if not more dangerous in light of its nuclear weapons, thinning greatly any margin of error, than Germany in the 1930s. The social Darwinism of “manifest destiny” ranks right up there with Hitler’s Aryan master race when it comes to its mythomaniacal hucksterism. Each carries the “white man’s burden” making a pathetic, tragic mess of things.

Nixon’s deepest insight: “…this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as [Uncle Sam] pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well!” [532]

The people attain their exceptional American timber in the way they’re screwed. What goes around comes around. The people will, at some point, screw Uncle Sam the way Nixon did in Times Square [read the book!]. So, to say that Uncle Sam or Ike or any of the nation’s illustrious leaders were evil, “you might as well say that America itself was evil…that exemplary transcendence, through action and beauty, of the strong man’s wild streak, which…is what the West is all about,” [241] is an evil endeavor.

When Nixon discovers the truth about Uncle Sam: “You didn’t have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You’re a … a butcher! a beast! You’re no better than the Phantom!”, Uncle Sam replies: “It ain’t easy holdin’ a community together, order ain’t what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin’ to pretend it is, that’s how the game is played.”

“’You’ve…you’ve changed,’ I [Nixon] said, my voice shaking. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy!” --- “You’re forty years old, son: time you was weaned!...you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-‘n’-claw tamer of heathen wilderness, lusty and in everything a screamin’ meddler, novus ball-bustin’ ordo seclorum, that’s me, boy—and goodnight Mrs. Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way!”

Ever notice when someone tells you to grow up, get over it, [or that you’re delusional or in denial or suffering from a messiah complex] they’re really asking you to buy into their fantasy and play your part in it? We’re all guilty of it. This review’s guilty of it. We cycle between plaintiff and defendant depending on the situation. That’s what it seems being American is all about in Coover’s The Public Burning—the willingness to participate in the national fiction because it’s the path of least resistance, which makes it a true and courageous novel. Courageous because Coover put himself inside Nixon while Nixon was still alive. He let Nixon possess him the way Uncle Sam possessed Nixon. He shows that Nixon, an indefensible cad at the time, was a human being like the rest of us. Coover is Nixon. The reader is Nixon. I am Nixon. We cycle between demon and angel depending on the perceived situation [“we” being a subset of “everybody,” you might not be included. Only you would know.].

Finally, there’s a difference between childish and child-like. Is it childish or child-like to pray for everyone before going to bed at night? Is it childish or childlike to engage in Nixonian phantasy? When you’re Nixon, it’s childish. When you’re Coover, childlike.  The difference being one nauseates, the other thrills. And The Public Burning succeeds at both.

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[i] I find Thomas R. Edwards’ 1977 New York Times review an interesting counterpoint to my own. The difference, I think, is what we hear and how we hear it. I believe Coover would find Edwards’ view problematic on several fronts. But I’m only guessing…

[ii] This foreshadows the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the carpet-bombing and war crimes in Vietnam. Elsewhere in the novel, Coover plants hints of the future Watergate and anti-war movement and protestors. One sees Nixon’s political psyche starting to bloom, able to trace it from its seedling status, abused sprout up to the current messy stink flower.

[iii] Disney and propaganda; Edward Bernays 1, 2, 3, 4—Happiness Machines, The Engineering of Consent, There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed, and limousine liberalism [sic]; and spectacle, where in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." [Wikipedia, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy DeBord].

[iv] The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Interestingly, there was no “poet laureate” from 1953-55. William Carlos Williams was appointed to serve from 1952-55, but had been investigated by the FBI for communist sympathies. He also refused to be fingerprinted or undergo other such indignities. Coover makes Nixon the de facto poet laureate for that time, which enables him to mock Faulkner by having Nixon sing his praises. The novel is stuffed with these kinds of pleasures.

When angry, why not laugh?

A REVIEW OF MUMBO JUMBO BY ISHMAEL REED/SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION/1972 [REED]; 1996 [SCRIBNER PAPERBACK]

The trajectory of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo feels like “madness maddened,” as if it were written by a comedic African Ahab at war with the white whale.

It’s as monolithic as the monolith it attacks, seaming together the international and inter-racial strands of an inside-out subjective analysis of “Jes Grew” nationalism:

We decided that we would be their [Atonists] desecraters, that we would send their loot back to where it was stolen and await the rise of Shango, Shiva, and Quetzalcoatl… [89]

MJ lays out the paranoid gist of a secret “1000s” year-old racial holy war between Pantheist Pagans and Atonists, pitting Eros v. Thanatos in an attempt, via “mumbo jumbo,” to exorcise our secret societies of their ancestors’ “troubled spirits.”

This task, according to the novel, is so important because the private struggles among secret societies are at the very core of all warfare:

Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H.P. Blavatsky concurs: “The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence it found its way to the Knights Templar.” 186

The aggressiveness of the Atonist White Man is the African Pantheist’s burden, which is made all the more difficult because “The White man will never admit his real references.” [194]

Certain Romantic, anti-Royalist Anglophiles may find the trotting out of the Osiris Myth old news and might even take exception to the way Reed’s narrator skewers Milton:

[Milton] foresaw the Bad News [Jes Grew] was going to bring to the world. John Milton, Atonist apologist extraordinary himself, saw the coming of the minor geek and sorcerer Jesus Christ as a way of ending the cult of Osiris and Isis forever. [171]

The narrator then quotes at length from “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” before pegging it:

And those “Timbrel’d Anthems dark” is the music that old Jethro played, the music of worshippers of those festivals where they had a ball. Boogieing. Expressing they selves. John Milton couldn’t stand that. Another Atonist; that’s why English professors like him, he’s like their amulet, keeping niggers out of their departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked for Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. [171-2]

A feeling may persist among lovers of Milton, I count myself among them, who refuse to damn the man because Africa wasn’t on his radar in the mid-Seventeenth century. Anyone who’s read Paradise Lost knows Milton didn’t love Jehova/Yahweh or the Demiurge, nor did he proclaim him a god worthy of worship. In fact, one might suspect Milton’s Satan of speaking on behalf of Milton more than any other character. God was the King Milton rebelled against. But still, Milton aligned himself with Cromwell, etc.

Reed, a humorist who more than once in MJ made me think of Kurt Vonnegut, skewers that and all world views which can’t and won’t groove to the blues.

By satirizing “white” political-economy and culture and contrasting it against counter-institutions on the “black” side, Reed ends up satirizing the whole of human society: “What is the[ir] wound?...the knowledge in his heart that he is a … charlatan …” [132]

Readers looking for history will instead find both an historical artifact and present-day conflict that seems to be forever ongoing in our affairs as human beings.

Today we have the so-called “Tea Party” representing a spasm of the Atonist vision of the “African” Obama, for whom the term African-American feels oxymoronic. Jes Grew embodies everything Ayn Rand and her wounded, tea-bagged followers most fear—the pursuit of a life worth feeling.

When Mumbo Jumbo was published in 1973, “Jes Grew needed its words to tell its carriers what it was up to. Jes Grew was an influence which sought its text, and whenever it thought it knew the location of its words and Labanotations it headed in that direction.” [211]

Jes Grew seams a necessary, subconscious drifting toward the beautiful, a desired after but slippery unity orchestrated by the psychogeography of a collected, unconscious mind. It’s like the narrator says early on: “This is the country where something is successful in direct proportion to how it’s put over; how it’s gamed.”
[38]

Allowing for the uncanny is always a trick. Ironically, there’s an old Jewish proverb that goes: “When fearful, dance; when sad, sing.”

But the old Atonists forgot something: When angry, laugh. Life is play…

That’s mumbo jumbo.

THE SEAM WHERE THE BOMB IS PLANTED

REVIEW OF AVANT-POP: FICTION FOR A DAYDREAM NATION, edited by Larry McCaffery, Black Ice Books, 1993

A related review's at Reconfigurations.

Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation has become something of an underground, countercultural icon since its publication nearly 20 years ago. It’s become so because of its intense focus on identity politics and disobedience.

The term “avant-pop” refers to artists’ appropriation of pop culture icons, trademarks and logos. These writers suck them from the media membrane and digest them into necessarily re-contextualized characterizations that inevitably “disrupt the aesthetics” of the culture at large.

A carpe diem spirit works throughout Avant-Pop, jostling the groggy Western reader awake to live a more conscious life.

The very first piece in the anthology, “Blessed,” by Stephen Wright, a pornographic dramatization of the four Gospels in a campy over-the-top suburban freak show, seems selected by McCaffery to invite comparisons of his “gallery” to shows featuring work by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” perhaps the most famous and controversial work of art at the time, alluded to contemporary culture’s degradation of Christian iconography [according to Serrano]. And Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a bullwhip implanted in his anus made him the most popular whipping boy of the excessively homosocial Christian right.

The main thrust of all this seems to me various forms of naughty discontent, which then gel into a horrifying can of delightfully writhing, open-ended worms. McCaffery writes in his fictive introduction, “Tsunami,” that Avant-Pop is no exhibit of “bland workshop bore-ons,” but intense morsels of artistic interference intended “to rescue the badly nourished creative imaginations” of a daydreaming American public.

William T. Vollmann’s “San Diego, California, U.S.A. (1988)” best embodies this aesthetic. What makes Vollmann’s piece so striking is its placement of nature, not sexuality, which is to say gender-based personality, at the center of the narrative. Nature, not a human individual’s libido, defines character. The fact one is an Earthling trumps race, class and/or gender. Looked at from the standpoint of genetics, the fact seems as irrefutable as it does amoral: We are primarily Earthlings.

When the narrator says “I saw a girl naked outside a house and said: You’re too glowing to find meaning in but I can find meaning around you. –I heard my own voice,” a fluid mind becomes self-conscious—I’m naked!—by hearing itself over Nature…by becoming sentient.

Vollmann’s technique and style, like Nature’s, is so subtle and graceful it’s nearly invisible. At the end of “San Diego…,” when the narrator realizes he “became something more evil and more good….[and]…Now that it is over, I can say that I was happy,” the reader also realizes that everything seems imbued with a mind, haunted both by consciousness and unconsciousness, navigating the seam/membrane of the text by using what’s speakable and perceivable, that is audible and visible, as landmarks and touch-stones for whatever’s disappearing.

In “Politics,” Kathy Acker forces the reader to participate and perform and play with the text by largely absenting punctuation, only using periods to terminate sentences that quantify and equate life and death with money. For the most part, Acker’s disappeared punctuation might represent the stubbornness of inadequate identity: “…you get fed it from birth and can’t get away except by severe disruption…”

Richard Meltzer, one of the earliest practitioners of flash fiction, has three short-shorts here that display a meticulously styled, plain-spoken vernacular voice. And Meltzer’s textually justified cruelty and aggressiveness are as hilarious as they are heartfelt—

…weep in goddamn awe at the notion of YOU as essential principle, as the essential principle, every bit as basic as Thales’s water, Anaximenes’ air, Pythagoras’s number…

—and honest as well:

As gents who when we write (dine)(play) get at least something on our collars, faces, souls, we rise to the chore of showing ‘em how it is done…

Life dulls conscience, ignoring it until those rare times it’s actually needed for its own sake, a condition the writers present here as acutely felt. Each fiction conveys something of the way life feels under the skin of the speaking voice, the way It feels seaming Itself together with words, trying to imagine how It sounds inside the bodies of others.

As one of their beloved forefathers, the Marquis de Sade, writes at the very start of his voluptuous and impeccable Justine:

Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?

He goes on to suggest wherever there’s evil some good is born, which is to say, as he does for the rest of the novel, wherever there’s some good evil is born.

And this seems the seam where the bomb is planted, so I’ll slip away…

ABBEY’S “HONEST NOVEL” FEELS CATHARTIC IN CLAUSTROPHOBIC TIMES

A Review of Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1988 [Avon Books edition, 1990].

What do we want most to dwell near to?
Thoreau, “Solitude”


Not everyone wants or needs the same things, even though corporations would find their lives [sic] much simpler if we did.

The fact is we all want something particular to ourselves, as we alone experience our lives from beneath our skin. Our desires might take the forms of fingerprints for our souls if the opportunity then ability to produce such intended content were common, but it isn’t. Being free, however, gives one the right to find that out for one’s self by trying.

Only rarely, in certain works of art, do we humans find anything at all resembling the complex, peculiar beauty of a singular human life lived and experienced as in Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel—a fictionalized autobiographical fingerprint of the man’s “soul;” whatever that actually is, it will live on for as long as there are readers feral enough to experience it.

Abbey’s novel puts us through the mincing of a much ignored American-type male, the last generation of a self-reliant breed of lower class homo macho Americanus not mythologized by the likes of “John Wayne,” “Dan’l Boone” & “Davey Crocket.” Abbey’s Henry Lightcap ain’t none of those guys, but the real deal without any pink slime injected for mass consumption by obese, useless proles accustomed to wallowing in their own psychic hamburger of mythical shit, those “fat guys in distress” Henry would save from time-to-time in the non-myth wilderness of the Desert Southwest [Abbey almost had me there, being a fat slob and all myself]. Henry was an erudite mountaineer who loved life almost to idiocy, thus the “fool” of the title and that most confounding of all Americans—the wise redneck.

The whole country’s become a giant CAFO, a hootenanny for the moneychangers. Before there were too many people, you could take to the hills and make your own life…you could “go west,” “go home” or just go. Now we live in an eco-hell eerily akin to that eternal Christian heaven where our eyes are glued open to God and we’re permanently awake or plugged in, permanently producing and consuming profitable holograms, except in our case it ain’t eternal cause we’re slowly killed off as we lose our ability to consume efficiently. When one can no longer eat, one becomes irrelevant. It’s as Henry the narrator waxes romantic early on about the ability to escape “20th century man”: “A world without open country would be a universal jail.” [105] A man needs to learn his limitations for himself. They’re one of those sets of things that can’t be taught. He needs to be able to close his eyes once in a while to the limits others might place upon him, and just go.

SPOILER ALERT:

And eventually, being mortal, he wears out, slows down, grows sick and dies, perhaps without ever realizing it, while heading home, and then just keeps going. The cop who questions Henry at the end, the fact that he’s kind [and so is everyone else after that, giving him food and drink, willingly sustaining him] suggests that Henry and his dog died beside the flooding creek, or maybe even inside their truck, but didn’t know it. A different level of consciousness begins projecting the text’s reality that keeps it moving forward on its inertia, as if death itself were not an equal and/or opposite reaction to its desire to dwell nearest to home, the Earth itself, an ideal that Henry always wanted and managed to heroically live up to.

This novel is shamelessly sentimental, but so beautiful and seamless that the sentimentality is a necessary device in the very nature and process—the autopoietic unfolding—of Abbey’s text, which serves as a distraction from our inadequacies that is the essential spiritual spark to the human imagination—that which is essential to human being. And with that sentimentality comes a sharpened sword against the corporate machine, that which would deny everything that the novel, that Henry Lightcap, that Edward Abbey does.

Henry sees it clearly, crossing America with his dying dog in his dying truck with terminal pancreatic cancer consuming him from the inside out, each being tinkered with in their own way just to keep going, just wanting to see home, knowing full well:

"…the America of my boyhood and youth it’s been blasted, obliterated, buried beneath the new America of black gummy asphalt and tinted glass and brushed sleek cool aluminum. What Edmund Wilson called, with prescient despair, 'The United States of Hiroshima.'” [211]

Even so, Henry Lightcap [Abbey] still feels smitten with existence: “[wanting] to weep. Not for sorrow, not for joy, but for the incomprehensible wonder of our brief lives beneath the oceanic sky.” [301] Henry seemed to view the human world as a distracted distraction, something to be dealt with and seldom enjoyed, and when it is enjoyed it always ends in sorrow as the fiddler must be paid. The cost of such complexities was not worth the profit made, at least not to Henry, for whom the word “Mountain…the simple easy bi-syllabic denotative, sen[t] a little pang of nostalgia through [his] central nervous system: homesick—[he was] sick for home.” [344]

What’s particularly heartbreaking, heroic, romantic and ultimately cathartic about The Fool’s Progress is how terribly long it actually takes to die because we want to live so much. And what’s outrageous is how corporate America helps death along with every step we [ie: Henry] take, killing us off one-by-one, step-by-step as the business of American business grinds on and on and on, etc. Death by corporation is slow.

The truck’s demise, the dog’s collapse, Henry’s altered projection, each is its own tragedy as each struggles heroically, to put things mildly. The tragedy of the truck’s death [as a literary device its dimensions were those of a word-being, so I include it as a character and thus capable of “dying”] is the end of tinkerability. The dog’s tragedy is the casualty of companionship. Henry’s death seems the death of an American aspect worth loving, something to be patriotic over [as opposed to nationalistic or greedy about]. How many Americans are left who are self-reliant like Henry, and how many of those can discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche? How many 50-year-olds will you hear honestly declaim: “I don’t believe in doing work I don’t want to do in order to live the way I don’t want to live.” [17] It seems with every generation they comprise an ever smaller portion of the population.

In Gender, the questionable Ivan Illich writes: "An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs." [9]

Such a program proves fatal to much of the American way of life. Americans of the Tea Party stripe recognize this, but can’t put their finger on it. They don’t even know who Nietzsche and Heidegger are, and can’t or won’t imagine they’re being horn swogled. They want to live like their parents did, but the world won’t let them. In fact, the world says their parents lived bad lives. They have more in common with the people they kill overseas than the folks who command them, but they can’t see it.

When they were kids, growing up didn’t seem so much an “economic” process as a spiritual one where a person would become responsible for their behaviors which were then incorporated into their livelihoods or the way they did business. Now, adulthood is merely “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” Only wage slaves need apply.

According to these corporatus americani, those of us who aren’t rich are broke because we’re inferior. But in Henry Lightcap’s case, at least he was self-reliant. He not only accepted personal responsibility, he was addicted to it. He couldn’t have shook it if he wanted to. Henry had his weaknesses…they were legion, and they were glorious.

Too much of our daily lives has been stripped of dignity and depth. Way back in 1975 Henry, on a visit home to West Virginia, noticed things were getting crowded around the old homestead. His older brother, Will, asked Henry what he was hopeful about, and Henry said, “A fast, efficient and painless plague. Desertification…I don’t know, Will. But something better happen soon.”

It didn’t. It hasn’t. It won’t. But when something akin to that does happen, it will be very painful, and pain’s something Henry knew all about. He understood that changing human nature meant mutilating human beings. He also knew that the America of the 1980s, and even more so the America today, was doing just that: attempting to change human nature so it would fit neatly into a proper set of target markets. Henry resisted this with everything he had. He was only one man, however, so:

"Henry felt that by contributing nothing to the annual Gross National Product he was thereby subtracting even less from what was left of the Net National Heritage. He himself would carry out a private one-man revolution in the belly of the beast. Freedom begins between the ears. The Good Life starts where servitude ends. In a nation of sheep one brave man is a majority…

"Theory. There was a flaw in the program. The program did not appeal to women, especially married women, especially those married women married to Henry Lightcap." [329-30]

My theory: Art like life will kill you, but until it does it will only make you stronger. Henry Lightcap was one of those rare philosophers for whom words meant something. Like Thoreau, he lived alone [with his dog] by his words, and died alone [with his dog] by them too.

But he wasn’t lonely, just solitaire.

WORKS CITED

Illich, Ivan. Gender, Heydey Books, Berkeley, CA, 1982.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Quality Paperback Book Club, 1997.