1. On Stress, Its Seeking
1967
Kenneth Burke wrote this essay in 1966–67 soon after the republication of his first and only novel, Towards a Better Life (1932), in 1966 by the University of California Press. The occasion for the essay is identified by Burke in paragraph one. The many references to the novel are to this second edition, which also has a new preface in which Burke reinterprets the novel as a ritual of rebirth rather than a ritual of riddance. A unique and interesting biographical feature of the preface to the first edition (dated September 9, 1931) is its cryptographic dedication of the novel to libbie (his second wife) using the first letter of each paragraph. Burke's first and second wives were sisters. He had married Lily in 1919 and divorced her in the early thirties; he married Libbie in December 1933. No doubt, the personal trouble he refers to in the essay was partly caused by the breakup of his first marriage and his involvement with his wife's sister. Burke wrote the novel during a period of profound stress and change in his personal and professional life, as well as in the life of his country. He discusses these briefly in the section entitled "Sociopsychology of Stress."
Burke's essay does not tell us a lot about his novel or the ways in which we know it must have functioned as symbolic action for him. The essay makes no attempt to work out an interpretation of the novel but uses it as a source of readily available illustrations for an exploration of the topic Burke identifies in his title—which is stress, generated from within and without, and deliberate stress seeking as a "call." A man who climbs Mount Everest or sails singlehandedly around the world is obviously a "stress seeker"; as are professional athletes and soldiers, CEOs of big corporations, and traders on the stock market. What Burke does in the essay is explore some of the ways in which his own fiction is stress driven and stress seeking; he also explores some of the ways in which fictions in general may help us to better understand these most basic of human motives.
My first—and some might say my lamest—excuse for offering this article is that our inquiry has to do with stress-seeking, and the article is concerned with a fiction featuring a character who is forever stressing his notions about stress and thus distress—as a vocation, the deliberate answer to a "call."
My somewhat more justified but perhaps more embarrassing excuse for writing on this subject is that the fiction is a story of my own making
The problem, basically, is this: First, I must set up an account of the work as viewed ab intra. Here several sheerly aesthetic considerations must be treated. However since I take it that our inquiry should ultimately focus upon an approach ab extra—anapproach that looks upon the work as symptomatic of something or other—even in the "aesthetic" section I keep incidentally pointing toward the discussion that is to follow.
All told, the article is concerned with three orders of motives, orders by no means mutually exclusive,though we can at times distinguish them clearly enough. These three orders of motives are:theaesthetic,orpoetic; the personal, or psychological; and the environmental, or sociological.
Let's illustrate the three in their obvious distinctness:
- It's an aesthetic or poetic fact that a fiction might put stress upon a stress-seeking character because such character helps keep a plot going. In this sense, the theme of stress is as handy to a storyteller as, for instance, vengeance, or excessive religiosity. And, in fact, when going over old notes that I had taken but not used in preparation for my novel, I found among them that gloriously resonant line from the Aeneid, Dido's curse (IV, 625): "Arise, some avenger, from our bones" (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor).
- It's a personal or psychological fact that—as will be noted at many points in our discussion—the author variously reproduced or transformed for purposes of the fiction material that was experienced by him differently in the course of living.
- It's an environmental or sociological fact that the book was written during the period immediately leading up to and away from the cultural and economic situation rife in the United States at the time of the "traumatic" market crash in 1929.
It is necessary to begin with a consideration of the work in its internality before gradually widening the range of our speculations to include the major psychological and sociological motives.
THE STYLISTICS OF STRESS
A man, who is envious and jealous, deliberately sets up the situation whereby a friend of his is surprised, on a fatal night, into sharing the same apartment with the woman whom he himself had coveted. He bit terly resents the union that he had thus strategically helped to con summate. And his resentment is aggravated by his claim that the lovers profited from a kind of unearned increment. First, he accuses them of carrying over into real life the roles they had played in a decadent drama about the incunabula of the Christian culture. (The play de picted Mary, for all her exceptional delicacy and love of her husband, as having been successfully courted by a fiery young Greek. The aging Joseph had known about this state of affairs, which he had sympa thetically left unmentioned when the wise men came to honor the virgin birth.) Our Hero's other accusation against the lovers concerns the dignity they derived from their putative roles in plans for a colony. Though these plans never eventuate, for a while they look promising, particularly since Our Hero's rival suddenly comes into possession of the money that would make them feasible. In frustrated imitation, Our Hero starts extravagantly spending his own funds, on the hunch that something favorable will happen. Nothing does. Hence, at the end of part one we see him bankrupt and leaving town. He has picked a destination at random, in the country—antithetically to the metropolitan situation that has marked the conditions of his distress. The last two sentences of this section enigmatically foretell the subsequent develop ments of the story:
Reaching the little country station at dawn, in a valley still blank with mist, I stood on the cinders with my suitcase, in the chilly morning air, while the train continued on its way through the valley, and the vibrations of the engine diminished irregularly to silence. I noticed then the twitter of many unrelated bird-notes, with the rustle of water somewhere behind the mist— and a dog was barking, imposing fresh sharp sounds upon his own blunt echoes. (60)
The middle section of this tripartite novel marks a notable turn in the direction of its motives. Here the narrator recounts the steps he takes, after he has left the city and married for money in the country, in arranging for a troupe of actors to give a performance at a nearby town. Among them appears the girl from whom he had fled. After he has been falsely boasting of an idyllic love affair, although they are actually still apart, she finally does spend the night with him, in her dingy room at a local
The final section (part three) unfolds the motives implicit in this change. "I had been pushing against a great weight," he says; "and with this weight gone, I fell forward. While her train hurried down the valley, I experienced such gloom as terrified me. For even a life of bitterness was desirable as compared with a life without purpose." She had made him live "as though … living were a vengeance." But now " ‘You have no reason,’ I whispered to myself, ‘for doing any single thing’ " (131–32).
Alone by the tracks, he begins turning his words "into a military rhythm," and "making a tune to fit at random." He calls his conduct "clownishness," and a "mechanical attempt to ward off the growth of melancholy."
But melancholy came, like the fog even then rising from the river. [Finally]… the arm of the nearby signal sank, showing that the track was free. "I will do only what I have to do," I said slowly into the emptiness, but I knew that this place would be henceforth unbearable. (132)
The story now progressively reveals the nature of this "free" track, enigmatically indicated by the sinking signal. First, the narrator becomes engrossed "in chipping crude, unfinished shapes out of stone. … Then I would punish the grotesque things by smashing them with one blow of a mallet, though I do not know why I either made them or destroyed them" (133). But surely their secret nature as vessels of a new motive is indicated when he says, "Since the beginning of my new pilgrimage, I have hacked at stone with venom. Let granite be abused, I have said, until its relevant particles drop from it, and it stands forth, a statue." In sum, this "store" which he "had accumulated unawares" and is now "tapping" is of an inward turning, reflexive nature, a symbol of selfviolation (134–35).
At various places in the story there are references to another girl, who loved the narrator with a simple, defenseless devotion, and whom he treated badly. At this point he takes up with her again, takes her with him on his "pilgrimage," and mistreats her to the point where she finally leaves, abandoning him to his self-imposed self-torment. After her departure without farewell, he calls down this evil fate upon himself:
If I were not myself, but something that looked down upon this that was myself, I should brand it, I should in quietude put an effective curse upon it, I should corrode it with the slow acids of the mind. (157)
The other aspects of the motivational recipe bear mentioning. At many points throughout the text a principle of divisiveness (a kind of "separating out") manifests itself. It takes many forms. Here I shall cite but a few:
Need one who is uneasy on finding himself in two mirrors (81). … [while talking desolately in a phone booth, he is grinning so that] the man beyond the glass, waiting to speak here next [might not suspect his condition] (221). … it was at this time, on glancing into the awry mirrors of a shop window, that I mistook someone else for me. When the phone next door was ringing, I thought it was ours (45). … he mentioned a bell which, installed at the door to announce the entrance of new patrons, gratuitously marked their exit (53). … I can remember stepping slowly into a lake, until my eyes were even with its surface, the water cutting across the eye-balls (135). … So, like a ventriloquist's doll, I suffered injurious remarks to rise unbidden to my lips (146). … the negligible shred of comfort he had got for himself recently by talking in two voices. (168)
This pattern of observations has its analogue in various kinds of characters with whom the narrator feels a kinship, sometimes hateful, because of traits or situations that he finds duplicated in himself. Two in particular should be mentioned. In chapter 5 of part one, there is the despairing lover who, while the narrator offers no resistance, commits suicide. The incident is summed up thus:
"Incipit vita nova," he confided smilingly as he left the table for this Leucadian leap into the unseen litter of the courtyard. And I felt that the new life he spoke of was to be my own. "He died for me," I whispered with conviction, though he had not yet descended. And for days afterwards I found myself repeating, "He died for me." (47)
In the third section there is a different but related mode of identification: "One evening when we were in his apartment, and he had interpreted an operatic score for me with unusual zest, after we had drunk somewhat, seeing that we were alone, and not liable to be interrupted, like youngsters we toyed with each other" (166). Since this figure is called "Alter Ego," in my present role as analyst I see it as a roundabout way of distinguishing the pattern of self-involvement by narratively splitting the motive into two roles. For such is the direction in which the "free" track is leading. And when Alter Ego vanishes, this is only another variant on the theme of self-abandonment. An earlier variant is the ritual
There is an interlude, a story by the narrator. We should note its ultimate internality even as sheer form, since it is a story within a story. In my subsequent criticism I have been much concerned with this aspect of the reflexive principle, whereby a work gets to the ultimate point of being inside itself. And as regards our sheerly sociopsychological inquiries here, I might point out that, although this chapter in its present form is the product of considerable revision, it stems from a story that I wrote as an adolescent student beset by an acute sense of isolation.
By then its development had reached a stage of "symbolic regression" that would attain its most accurate formal representation by reduction to a story within a story, a withinness-of-withinness that was ideal for my purposes, but that I could not have made to order. For I could not have so directly reimagined such conditions of my past that were now closed to me, so far as conscious retrieval was concerned. Yet here was the essence of the regression with which I was dealing. An accommodating fate had preserved one copy of the story and let me find it. And as regards content, I needed a kind of document that actually stemmed from a period of fierce male virginity, as experienced from within. Yet, in keeping with the nature of the work, it had to be a fiction. Among my unused notes I found a conceit that might be introduced figuratively: "The new application of this old story is as though, after learning a foreign language, I were to remember word for word a fatal conversation I had overheard in that language before I knew it."
One detail, however, is omitted. In the original version, the narrator thinks that he might throttle a boy he had seen clinging to the wooden figure upon which the victim of the "narrator's" story gets his fixation— in its nature as a rigid statue, guilty; but in its nature as a policeman, admonitory. When I think of the choking in Othello, along with the reference to one whom Othello likened to himself and whom he "seized by the throat" precisely when killing himself, I realize that this detail of fantasy should have been left in. I took it out because at the time when I was working on the book I did not interpret the chapter as I do now, and I simply found the notion too repellent to retain.
Where next? The story within a story carries the narrator to the point
Is his vision a lie, or not? At least, it comes to a focus in the image of an ark. Hence all this regression might somehow add up to rebirth? In the last chapter, the narrative ambiguously tries it both ways. The development may be inexorably back, back, back into silence—i.e., the womb in the absolute—or things may be directed towards resurgence, as some of the final jottings explicitly promise.
I think that we are here involved in vacillations ultimately having to do with the relations between tragedy and comedy. The pattern is this: The character builds upon a cult of tragedy, deliberately designed to rule out the amenities of humor. "Under the slightest of reverses, I would welcome bad weather, would go out to scan a broad, lonely sky at sunset, saying, ‘This I know; this is a return, a homecoming’ " (36).
There are two aspects of this motive. First: "There was gratification from the thought that I might derive even my defeat from within" (55). Second: "Let us endure minor reversals by inviting major calamities; let us dwarf annoyances, or even melancholy, by calling upon life's entire structure to collapse" (59).
All told, he celebrates his "despisals" as a "vocation" in which he must "persevere, even at the risk of great inconvenience" (145). He chooses "to grow sullen where I might have dismissed a dilemma by laughter—laughter which leaves us untried, which is a stifler in the interests of comfort, surrendering in advance, renouncing prior to excess, enabling a man to avoid the ultimate implications of his wishes" (198). A secondary effect arises thus: "Though no one would choose failure, we may yet maintain that failure is a choice, since one may persist in attitudes which make his failure inevitable" (200). And: "One should live in such a way that he has with him these three considerations daily: madness, the Faith, and death by his own hand" (168).
It becomes a question of purpose: "Place a man among these streets, instruct him to choose some act which puts a strain upon his temper. What work will he perform here, if it is work in the absolute, and not the accidental matter of flunkeying to an employer? If he does not mean by work the earning of a little money through assisting in a superior's blind purposes, but the straining of his resources, what manner of living must he choose?" (200) To which his answer is: "How be called muscular if you would not prefer the sewers and rat-holes of the metropolis?" (200);
The ultimate complication lies in his relation to money. "Wealth and talent being complementary, neither will deem itself enough without the other" (57). "I have never consented to console myself with the thought that we may be rich in spirit while tangibly impoverished. Wealth— wealth in love, money, the admiration of oneself and others—is indispensable to those who would surround themselves with the flatterings and stimulations of beauty" (28). Yet, in his "vision," at the culmination of his distress, he boasts and/or pleads: "It is good that some men are scorned by their fellows and made to feel homeless among them, since these outcasts are, through their sheer worldly disabilities, vowed to graver matters and could not, even if they would, prevent themselves from pouring forth their neglected love upon a formidable Father" (206).
Throughout the book, he keeps moralistically fluctuating between the paradoxical prosperity of poverty—a deliberate cult of disaster—and the conviction that there is an ideal need for a tradition of great wealth. And even at the last, when he is reduced to a total destitution largely of his own making, he warns himself: "You cannot renounce, for none but the rich dare speak in praise of poverty" (210). He ends in the condition that a stranger had described for him in the first chapter:
And upon my enquiring as to what he feared most of the future, he answered: "Destitution. Destitution of finances, destitution of mind, destitution of love. The inability to retort. The need of possessing one's opposite in years, sex, and texture of the skin; and the knowledge that by this need one has been made repugnant. The replacing of independence by solitude." (8)
As regards the question of literary species, this fluctuant attitude involves a kind of grotesqueness that is midway between tragedy and comedy, or, in the narrator's words, "the hilarious aspects of distress" (45). Many of the situations could be easily transformed into farce. Perhaps the most obvious instance is the episode about a compulsion to address the wooden statue of a policeman at the entrance to a store. He yields to the temptation, then fears that his act has been noticed:
I could have done the same under happier circumstances, but the meaning would not have been the same. It is quite natural to address inanimate things—it is no more foolish than confiding secrets to a dog. But as I looked about apprehensively, I saw that a woman had observed me. She was pretty, and insolent, and was watching me intently. There was no kindness in her eyes, nothing but cold curiosity. Her eyes, my dear, passed a terrible
Perhaps these two preparatory notes indicate the pattern most clearly: "Be sure to have him boast of things for which he has attacked others"; and "He's all for setting up rules, but when they are applied to him he insists that the case is different." In this respect, the work adds up to a grotesque tragedy with the birth of comedy ambiguously in the offing:
Though you, in learning, brought trouble upon yourself, let no man discredit your discoveries by pointing to your troubles. Nor must you turn against your bitterness. The sword of discovery goes before the couch of laughter. One sneers by the modifying of a snarl; one smiles by the modifying of a sneer. You should have lived twice, and smiled the second time. (217)
And the narrator's talk of lapsing into total silence is interwoven with his cry: "resurgam! resurgam! I shall rise again! Hail, all hail! Here is a promise: resurgam." Thus, personally, I look back upon the work as a kind of grotesque tragedy serving as a rite de passage into a cult of comedy, as explained in my preface to the new edition. But though I think that, in an ideal world, comedy would be the highest form of art, I find that tragedy leads most directly into the study of man's attempted solutions for his problems. I would but add the hope that, as with the ancient Greek theater, we sum up the analysis of "tragic dignification" by a satyr play, that is to say, a burlesque of the solemnities that have preceded it.
Before turning directly to the sociopsychology of our present concerns, perhaps I should mention one further point as regards the sheerly literary aspect of the book. At the time when I was taking preparatory notes, I was also doing much research in studies to do with the nature and etiology of drug addiction. As a result, I became interested in the notion that the case history could be readily adapted for purely poetic purposes. The form made for a kind of vignette with a strongly aphoristic aspect. Since the narrative is so designed that the plot gradually emerges from a sententious context—though the aphorisms are "in character," hence not to be taken as strictly identical with the view of the author—I discovered that the case history, as a form, blends well with the aphoristic; a reader hardly notices when one leaves off and the other takes over.
So much for a view of the work in its internality. Let us now reverse things and approach it situationally, from without.
THE SOCIOPSYCHOLOGY OF STRESS
"Surely no one will fall victim to a form of insanity which he abhors," Our Hero speculates (74) while willfully imposing upon himself a kind of stress that progressively tears at the edges of his mind, until his cult of quarrelsomeness and self-interference leads him into a self-perpetuating state of total isolation.
Since we ended the former discussion on purely poetic considerations, we might take them as our point of departure for this new phase. In Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, her major spokesman, the overripely perverted doctor, O'Connor, avows: "Calamity is what we are all seeking." On which I commented (in the spring 1966 issue of The Southern Review), "Maybe yes, maybe no, so far as life is concerned—but certainly yes, as regards the stylistics of lamentation." That is, I take it that, purely from the standpoint of literary appeal, lamentation is a pleasure. For "there is one notable difference between a biblical jeremiad and a purely literary variant of the species. … However great the artistry of any document that gained admission to the biblical canon (even so obviously literary an enterprise as the Book of Job), one should not approach a single sentence of the Bible purely in terms of literary entertainment." One should not, that is, if one is in the role of a devout believer. But "a literary jeremiad must somehow be fun." The same point is developed thus in my essay "Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction" (The Hudson Review, summer 1966):
I would assume that such delight begins in the preverbal solace of an infant sobbing itself to sleep. (See my comments on the "three freedoms" of lamentation, praise, an invective, in my essay on Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in the paperback Laurel edition.) Calamity, or pathos, serves another function, which I have called "tragic dignification." I here refer
In the case of this particular book, since the whole cult of stress comes to a focus in what amounts to a roundabout courting of insanity—or more accurately perhaps, near-insanity, a state up to but not beyond the edge of the abyss—it might be relevant to quote some lines from the recently deceased poet, Theodore Roethke, regarding his desire "to break through the barriers of rational experience." Or again "The only knowledge is reason in madness"; and "O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song." This view of poetic insight obviously takes on a hierarchal dimension in his rhetorical question: "What's madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" (The quotations are from an excellent article on Roethke by Denis Donoghue, in his recent volume Connoisseurs of Chaos [1965].) In Roethke's case, the predicaments that he periodically got himself into were, in a sense, willed—for he deliberately cultivated a vigilant search for a kind of expression that would be in its very essence neoinfantile.
Here another strand ties in. I refer to the "aesthetic of alcohol," the desire to attain, in one's sober writing, the kind of effects that one feels one is getting when under alcohol's influence. In a sense alcohol thus acts as a kind of "call," which the sobriety of writing can never wholly answer. In particular, insofar as alcohol stimulates assertiveness, like heated argument it tends to simplify complexity, a recipe one can discern quite clearly in the author's use of the fictional device of writing letters not just to a former friend, but also against that same person—a simplified complexity further compounded by the fact that the man to whom they are addressed is a recipient only in principle, since the epistles remain unsent.
But there is a further issue, as I have observed in my article "Art—and the First Rough Draft of Living" (Modern Age, spring 1964). Alcohol qua alcohol is not the same as alcohol during Prohibition—a notable aspect of the "cultural" climate prevailing during the years when this book was conceived and written. For those who were not bootleggers but who merely patronized bootleggers, alcohol under such conditions was in a penumbra of motives indeterminately lawless and sanctioned by custom.
The clearest instance of this aesthetic is in part three, chapter 1, where Our Hero most energetically inveighs (140–46). Just as in some primitive tribes there are places where, without fear of punishment, one can go and curse the king, so alcoholic argumentativeness was taken for granted. Hence many things, however vehemently they were said, could be received like water off a duck's back, except for the unexpected occasion when somebody got clobbered for almost no reason at all.
All told, that complex composed a subpersonality within oneself, so that one was, as it were, "hearing a call" of that sort from within. In a sense, it added up to a vague, nagging kind of vocation for which no sheer job would be the answer. Furthermore, it could tie in with earlier motives that emerge and come to a focus in adolescence, a time when a "league of youth"—a band of heterosexual males—improvises modes or friendship that at the same time keep the members of the band sexually apart by quarrelsomeness. Such "simple" conditions necessarily drop away in later life, when one's financial and marital relationships, developed out of ties and obligations alien to the original situation, give rise to a set of "claims" no longer tolerant of such harsh sparring as was once the norm. (Perhaps the grandest instance of such a change is Falstaff's lostness when Hal becomes king and loses all sympathy with his clowning.)
An early story, "Prince Llan," in some ways illustrates the complexities of the case. The prince, now mulierose, has become separated from his old friend, Gudruff, whose nature as a motive is most clearly revealed by this passage, written in, I hope, not too ungrammatical Latin—after the fashion of the Greek Anthology, which the author had studied extracurricularly while at college, and which gave English translations for all but the "indecent" entries:
Suddenly, suddenly, plena recognitio facultaturn corporis latuit subito ei; se relaxabat, est molliter lapsus contra terram, deinde se dabat suorurn temptationi inquinum. The remainder of the morning he spent in reading.
The prince, in trying to answer this call, dissolves as in a dream while he opens a door that leads to a door that allows him "down a corridor beyond, the glimpse of a door" (The Complete White Oxen, 233). As I now interpret it, the incident represents a fantasy in which a later aspect of the author's self, in a mood of stocktaking, recalls an earlier adolescent identity, still surviving as a kind of subpersonality in the unconscious, and essentially identified with the poetic motive—in that our first literary methods are usually developed under reflexive conditions that are able to be ambiguously symbolized in terms of suicide, or "death by one's own hand."
As regards the full scope of the hierarchal possibilities here, we necessarily move into a socioeconomic sphere far beyond the muddled tieup linking propoetic, prealcoholic adolescence with the beginnings of mature relationships—a change that often breaks up old friendships completely. I have been trying to indicate ways in which adolescence, alcohol, and a modified aesthetic cult of madness, however distressing, might all tie in with one another. Yet, thinking along these same lines, we are now ready to consider a much wider range of problems.
First of all, as regards our fundamental inquiry into stress-seeking, there is an unresolved conflict centering in what might be called a secularized version of the poor-church principle—a view that comes to focus in the conviction that poverty is spiritual—in contrast with the cult of commodities without which our civilization could not last even until tomorrow. I take it that, although the narrator's surname, Neal, combines several motivational strands, a major one is "kneel." Contrast, in this regard, the conditions under which his name first figures—in connection with an act of cruelty, on page 122—and the passage on page 205: "He knelt while love poured from him, or poured into him from all outward things."
The author was raised in dingy suburban neighborhoods. To be sure, he didn't know how dingy they really were. For there was a scattering of weedy fields among the houses, and many years later he could write about them lyrically, nostalgically. (There was even a deserted, window-smashed haunted house with fascinating stories about it.) The author was among the poor relatives. And though he now realizes that there were no rich relatives, he took it for granted that his grandparents, who were so much better off, were rich, particularly since his grandfather had always boasted of great wealth when handing out a few pennies to the greedy, gratified grandson. And since the grandparents' house was obviously in a much better part of town than his parents', the difference
In brief, the poor-church principle—prosperity of poverty—had to combine with the thought that wealth and aesthetic flowering needed each other. A devious fusion, or compromise, was attained by imaginary acquiescence to mental stress—mental distress as a kind of ideal. (At least, such a development was to be welcomed as a sheerly aesthetic kind of risk.)
Also, although the actual story is a fiction from beginning to end, in principle it was "true"—at least in the sense that, as discussed in my first preface, it produced a "monster" by magnifying some aspects of the author's character and minimizing others. In this alembicated sense, it was a perversely idealized self-portrait. The author was in a state of acute internal conflict owing to maladjustments in his personal affairs. He was caught in a kind of dilemma from which such imaginings seemed like a kind of escape, or at least relief, as on page 211: "Speech being a mode of conduct, he converted his faulty living into eloquence. Then should any like his diction, they would indirectly have sanctioned his habits."
Thus these potentialities were intensely ambivalent. On the one hand, the fiction threatened to be autosuggestive, aggravating the very conditions for which it served as a relief. For the author's engrossment in its developments invited him to carry the attitude of the fiction over into real life, just as his protagonist had accused the fictive lovers of doing, when they endowed their lives with glamour borrowed from their roles in the blasphemous play.
On the other hand, there was the homeopathic aspect of such tragic imaginings, along the lines of this formulation in Milton's Samson Agonistes: According to Aristotle, Milton says, tragedy is designed "to temper and reduce" such passions as pity and fear "to measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated." And he continues: "Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion; for so, in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours."
At least, often the poetic usefulness of an author's personal quandaries does allow them to be faced. Some years back I suggested in the magazine Poetry that the myth of Perseus is particularly relevant in this regard. Although one cannot stare directly at the Gorgon's head of his entangled motives without being as it were turned into stone, their nature as material for art acts as a kind of protective reflector. By the subterfuges
I am battling like a fiend, battling for nothing less than my mind itself—and unless it is true, as I frequently tell myself, that () went mad for me, that I can derive from his collapse vicariously my own rescue, unless this is true (and the idea, I may convince you, may not be totally coocoo [sic], since I have in the knowledge of his errors the one stable point from which to orient my own), that unless this is true … [the sentence was left thus unfinished].
A notable feature about this statement is that the author is referring to a real person's mental collapse much as his Hero refers to the fictive suicide in part one, chapter 5. And the book itself, as early as the second page, establishes the relevant convertibility of terms when saying that a person "may worry lest this day be the very one on which he snaps under the burden and, if not talented at suicide, becomes insane." The next sentence turns to the compensatory homeopathic principle: "Yet it is possible that by a constant living with torment, one may grow immune to it." But here "constant living with" should be read as a quasitemporal synonym for "radically imagining in principle." The fictive suicide, incidentally, killed himself in the cause of jealousy, a symptom that the author shared with his "smell-feast" protagonist, although in real life there was no such triangle as the plot is built around.
Perhaps I should pause here to say that when I state that this story is fiction from start to finish, I do hope that the reader will take me at my word. I am not merely using a stylistic subterfuge, for there would be no point to my lying, since all I'd have to do would be to leave these matters unsaid. What I am trying to get at, rather, is this: I am trying to make as clear as possible those respects in which a story that is totally false in its details can somehow be true in principle.
Consider, for instance, this kind of transformation from personal experience to fictive analogue: the narrator's notion that actors can derive unearned increment by reenacting offstage their roles onstage stems from
Similarly, although there was no actual plan for a colony, the congregating of artists and writers is always on the edge of "colony-thinking," and the attack upon coteries is not far, by implication, from the renouncing of a practice that was attempted again and again in the history of our nation, and thus doubtless is inherent in the very trends that militate against it.
Or consider the narrator's mystic vision on pages 111–15. I had in mind a place where I had actually lived for a time, on a hilltop. From there, one sultry afternoon, I had watched a storm, caused by contrary winds clashing and swirling in the valley. The ability to observe the sheer form of the downpour as a "happening" made an unforgettable impression upon me, particularly since the torrent was, as it were, the single outcome of conflicting currents in the air. Yet the situation was quite different from the lonely fury recounted in the book, while the nine white cranes are imported from memories of the morning after a storm at night in a wholly different valley under quite different circumstances. And who's to say that there were nine? One can only say that they somehow seemed like a message.
Nor did the author ever become the proprietor of a herd through marrying for money, to say nothing of stealing money from a woman whom he had coveted unsuccessfully. And above all, with regard to the cult of "straining" which Our Hero propounds so earnestly on pages 200–203, please allow it to be a fiction when he says, "Prowling about the wharves, I have ministered to unclean men, for in this there was some ghastly decency, something beyond mere safety."
According to my tentative notion, all such fictions are "ideal completions" of personal experiences that are circumstantially quite different; but they contain some problematic motivational trace which, if isolated and made absolute, would be symbolized most accurately—or with most dramatic thoroughness, most "drastically"—by such a fulfillment as the fiction settles on. And I would tinker with the possibility that any such aesthetic imitating of motives prevailing outside the realm of art can have literal analogues involving persons who in effect make up such works of art but live them wholly in the realm of life itself, and without benefit of the formal reflector that Perseus had in his battles with the snaky-headed monster he could not dare to look upon.
But I should say more about the role of the economic motive in these imaginings. The author's early formative years coincided, I believe, with the time in our national history when the stress upon capital goods— rails, mills, mines, etc.—was just giving way to the rise of cheap, machinemade consumer goods—an emergent trend that was epitomized in the Woolworth chain of five-and-ten-cent stores. The corresponding slogan, which my father constantly repeated with a humorous twist whenever the women began talking of some new contrivance, was "Who would sit down and make it for that?" People marveled not only at the thing itself but also at its price, which they still considered in terms of the elaborate preparations needed if you had decided to assemble all the material and go through all the operations needed for the production of one such item.
During an era when a country is building up its industrial plant, there is necessarily a strong emphasis upon modes of thinking quite analogous to what I have called the religious stress upon the "prosperity of poverty." The sentiments in Benjamin Franklin's Almanac are probably the best example of such puritanical abstemiousness, a set of secular norms religiously grounded, and still strong, though often best honored in the breach, as in the case of Franklin himself, who could become wellto-do by praising the austerities of poor men.
This sort of morality seemed natural to the author in his early years, even while feeling proud at the naive thought that his grandparents were rich. Indeed, he even thought of them as a kind of alternate parenthood—a divisive trend sharpened by the fact that, often in the summer, his grandparents took him to some lake or the seashore, where, for a week or two, he was transfigured by life in the magic of a "rich" hotel.
His book was planned—and several early chapters written and published—during the fantastic bull market of the New Era. And although the author in a mild way got enough from his jobs and writings to feel that he too was in the swim, somehow it never seemed "natural" to him. He always felt uneasy, as though he had stolen his money and would eventually get caught. True, many persons like him did get caught in the crash of 1929—but not the author; for even the few stocks he had bought at a time when people were gambling like crazy he bought outright and not on margin. So they could be held, and eventually in a mild way they recovered.
Yet the book was already far enough along to act suggestively upon the author himself. During the almost magical terror that followed the crash, he deliberately resigned from a well-paying job, having resolved
But we have anticipated somewhat. It should also be mentioned that, particularly during his connection with The Dial, he had seen, in all its impressiveness, the magical interweaving of wealth and talent, and many of the comments on this subject reflect observations about the marvelous assortment of persons that variously came and went around The Dial’s offices. Here are typical comments: "I knew one man who had applied his wealth to carrying doubt into his very tissues. As birds, though out of danger, fly with self-protective darts and veerings proper to their kind, so he kept his statements guarded, even among friends" (57). Or the narrator's drunken statement of policy (197) to the effect that one should "make money … before railing against wealth"; for "whatever he would renounce, let him first acquire it in ample quantities, that he become immune to hecklers" (197). Doubtless it was for this reason that, after Shakespeare's Timon of Athens becomes a vicious misanthrope— when deserted by his friends following the loss of his fortune—the dramatist arranges for him to find another treasure, which he throws away like filth, thereby letting the audience see that Timon is now a universal hater on principle, and not just because of "sour grapes." Also at the offices was one man of great refinement whose wealthy upbringing had obviously put a great strain upon him, making him imperious even though he also had an almost pathetic desire to be frank and friendly. All told, it was a stable of racehorses if there ever was one—all swishing, and stamping, and tossing their heads nervously, all brought together by the
Perhaps the most general grounding of all for the kind of outlook we are here considering could be called Nietzschean, as with writers bent upon "glorifying the problematical in art" and "stressing the state of tension in itself, picturing the dangers and discomforts in maintaining it, hence relying upon the basic military equipment in man as their last source of appeal—though differing widely in their selection of the symbols which would serve as the channels in which this original biologic psychosis would run."
I am quoting from my Permanence and Change (1935), pages 87–88, Hermes edition. I had in mind here an animalistic grounding (64). And in a section on "The Peace-War Conflict" (197–98), I tangle with the Nietzschean puzzle in which, though "the organism has developed an equipment for attaining the benign sluggishness of satiety, the very equipment for bringing about such a worldly Nirvana is in itself the essence of turbulence and struggle." Thus:
We perceive here a contradiction at the very basis of behavior. For if the organism attained its state of quiescence permanently, the military equipment of nervous agility, of bodily and mental muscle, would fall into decay. On the other hand, to prevent such decay, one must exert himself in "warfare," abiding by the competitive genius of mind and body, thereby denying himself precisely that state of conscious death which he might derive from the booty acquired by his prowess.
It is a contrast that had long worried me. The titular story of my first book, The Complete White Oxen, is built around a contrast between a lion and the oxen, in a zoo:
Disdainful to the last, the lion retained his superiority even while being fed. He greeted the attendant with a baring of yellow fangs which gave the impression of sneering; and he snatched the meat from the iron prongs with a growl, as though he were stealing it. He kept his eyes on his feeder until he had disappeared, and then began tearing the flesh from the bone by licking it with his rough, scaly tongue. (7)
In contrast, it is said of the white oxen:
They were chewing in deliberate contentment. At times they would move their heads to look in another direction; at such times they ceased their chewing, as though disapproving of too many simultaneous motions. But once their head was firmly established in this new direction, their chewing would be resumed. Calm, harmless, sleepy, they lolled about their cage. [And later] To them the supreme gift of God was to sleep and know that
Doubtless we have a considerable measure of vegetarian idealizing here. And, as I observe in a footnote (Permanence and Change, 198–99), an overstress upon the contrast between the hunt and relaxation after gorging can mislead, in deflecting the attention from the humane realm of the sentiments. Also, in my analysis of Nietzsche's style, I tried to show that there are purely formal considerations involved in his use of what he calls "perspective"—a kind of sheerly terministic violence achieved by a method for wrenching words from a customary context and putting them in new, theoretical surroundings—a device for which I proposed the formula "perspective by incongruity."
But the main point is this: insofar as the human organism is prepared by adaptations through thousands of years to undergo strain, such equipment must manifest itself as a need to be exercised, as in sports, horror stories, monastic disciplines, excesses of ambition in the building of financial or political empire, juvenile delinquency, and similar exertions praeter necessitatem. And there may even be a kind of reality about pain that is weakened by anesthetics, anodynes, soporifics, and the like.
One may question whether such conditions establish the psychological necessity for war. But they would imply grounds for a cult of conflict. War is but one species of conflict—and the kinds of war in which we have distinguished ourselves depend upon fantastically excess wealth, in contrast with the African tribe that lives in so sparse an area it exists wholly without internecine strife. Indeed, the food supply is so scanty, the tribe would by now be extinct if its members had not developed modes of peaceful cooperation to a maximum—for nothing less could save them. But, of course, the severity of their environment supplies all the conflict necessary to exercise the body's natural aptitude for the undergoing of stress. But just as delinquency can engage the efforts of spirited youths whose way of life otherwise—in an orderly, well-to-do suburb, for instance—would not sufficiently tax them, so wars help any in our times who, unbeknown to themselves, want not jobs but vocations, as I put it in a "subversive" poem I wrote in 1933 (Book of Moments [1955], 59):
| We have even hoped for the trenches, | |
| That men might again be cronies. | |
| We have even told ourselves how by the wars | |
| We might again be brought together, | |
― 31 ― | |
| By the helpfulness of slaughter. | |
| The wars are fuller than the peace | |
| In fellowship. | |
We should also consider the frequent compensatory tendencies— along the lines of "tragic dignification"—whereby our ailments can provide the makings for inverted kinds of boasting—engrossments of ours that we ask others to share, even though we may bore them to the edge of shrieking. And there's a wonderful variant of such matters in a documentary film I once saw (Savage Splendor), about which I once wrote thus (in "Hermes Scroll No. 7"):
A MORAL MADE MANIFEST
See Savage Splendor, a long documentary film too soon over. And above all, don't miss the shot of the 300-pound king using for his throne the back of a prostrate slave. The king further burdened himself with 200 pounds of ornaments, and some several hundred wives, shown bunched in rows like a choir. And all told you could observe him being weighted down literally with the responsibilities of office, only 500 pounds of which he could transfer to the back of his slave. His immobilizing fat was presumably a mark of exceptional wealth and noble status, since only a personage of great means could afford to be so sedentary in a jungle. It contrasted with the litheness of the dancers who had come long distances to perform in his honor. You could see before your very eyes a gross physical burlesque of the Stoic scruples and meditative spirituality with which a Marcus Aurelius might assume the burdens of empire. And what directness of realism there was, in the symbolism of the prostrate slave so heavily burdened by the master! There was an indirectness, too. We refer to the way in which the burdensomeness came back to plague his lordship, a sufferance attested by the drawn lines of the royal phiz, so very weary, and by the technicolor of the bloodshot eyes. Another possibility: might not the slave have felt unbearably proud? Surely he lorded it over the other slaves, who were not thus sat upon with such Distinction. And if he knew his Hegel, he must have understood that he was, in his crouching way, a world-historical figure, evolved by the Divine Idea to fulfill this God-appointed task, as regards the heavy responsibilities of Universal Order.
And since we are now on the verge of tragic farce, let's include a reference to a practice of some current pitchmen, who help reinforce your sense of guilt by selling you remedies after first persuading you that you need them. Of course you stink. So, adopt the most "natural" solution possible; namely, obstruct the pores of your body murderously, or gargle with poisons. Of course you stink. After all, what are you for, if
ADDENDUM: ON "SPARAGMOS" AND THE EYE
As regards the enigmatic foretelling at the end of part one in the novel, I take it that the sound of water behind the mist presages the final downpour—of both the ersatz mystic vision on pages 111–15 and the book's last sentence: "Henceforth silence, that the torrent may be heard descending in all its fullness." Besides the flow of water, the whole range of connotations would probably include, at various places along the way, the flow of words, the flow of time, the frightened flow of urine, and what Coleridge called "the streamy nature of association," William James the "stream of consciousness." The passage most obviously linking words and downpour is near the beginning: "I would speak as a gargoyle would speak which, in times of storm, spouted forth words" (9). Its further tie-up is indicated by the fact that the narrator is on the subject of his scorn.
The dog barking, "imposing fresh sharp sounds upon his own blunt echoes," sums up the essence of the reflexive principle (including the chapter in which the narrator vilifies his cronies). The "twitter of many unrelated bird-notes" presages the disintegrative form of the last chapter. Borrowing from the Cambridge anthropologists' speculations on the incunabula of Greek tragedy, I'd want to contend that here, even in its very form, we find the "rending and teasing" that is necessary for a next phase, the ambiguously foretold turn from grotesque tragedy to a cult of comedy.
In the novel, for reasons which I hope I have made clear, this process of disintegration preparatory to reintegration takes place enigmatically and ambiguously at the end. But in my next book, Permanence and Change, which is explicitly concerned with questions dealing with the development from an earlier orientation to a new one, fittingly the "rending and tearing"—or sparagmos—takes place in the middle section, coming to a focus in the concept of "perspective by incongruity," which involves the Nietzschean clash of categories when a term that has
Incidentally, as considered from the sheerly aesthetic or poetic point of view, the mimetics of breakdown in the last chapter are seen to be but the transformation of a writer's preparatory note taking into a kind of culmination in extremis.
A fuller discussion of the book in its internality would have required the indexing of several other recurrent terms, such as the thesaurus of meanings surrounding the word "mouse," for instance, ranging from the "sickly and unsightly creature, a mouse-faced man" (29), through "if she but stamped her foot you would, deep within you, scurry away like mice" (149), to "would liken God to a little mouse" (209). And the term "yield" ranges from yielding in guilt, through yielding in adjustment or accommodation, to yielding like Christ on the cross.
But one term at least I should pause to consider at some length, since it also bears strongly upon an experience outside the book. Inasmuch as any cult of conflict—or stress-seeking—is likely to take on moralistic connotations, eye-imagery can naturally figure, particularly if, like the author, one was constantly admonished as a child that God was always watching. How would this conceit manifest itself in sheerly secular terms?
We have already cited the passage from the story within a story. But on going through the book again, I note two others that are particularly relevant. On page 72: "On dim, deserted streets I hurried through a city of eyes, under the surveillance of disparate objects which, as I passed, each transferred me to the supervision of the next. And there were real eyes among them, eyes of the cats that paused to note me with distrust (some of the cats stringy, others crouching in bunches behind their faces)." On page 210, when Our Hero is in extremis: "There is an eye, firm as the eye of the newly dead. When I am alone, this eye inspects me." I cannot say for sure whether I already knew Emily Dickinson's lines on watching "a dying eye." But, to the best of my memory, I can say that after finishing the book, the author had an almost intolerable
NOTES
This essay originally appeared in The Bennington Review 1 (summer 1967): 32–49, used with permission from Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont; and Why Men Take Chances, ed. Samuel Z. Klausner (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), 73–103.