Overview
By comparing literary figures born in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and later with those born in the 1920s and 1930s, Cowart seeks to map the changing terrain of contemporary letters. Hardly epigones, he argues, the younger writers add fresh inflections to the grammar of literary postmodernism. Younger writers can continue to “make it new,” Cowart establishes, without needing to dismantle the aesthetic they have inherited from a parental generation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472121441 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 12/02/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 465 KB |
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The Tribe of Pyn
Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period
By David Cowart
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2015 David CowartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12144-1
CHAPTER 1
Fantasy and Reality in Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. — William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Rachel Ingalls, an American who has long resided in England, drew little attention in this country until the British Book Marketing Council declared her 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban one of the twenty greatest American novels after World War II. According to Jack Beatty, the book had originally sold only 500 copies in the United States. A brief though positive notice in the New Yorker (25 July 1983) was virtually the only review. But the British pronouncement (like the French appreciation of a nearly forgotten Faulkner in the forties) prompted belated cis-atlantic attention to a remarkable talent. Enthusiastic articles and reviews appeared in the Atlantic (April 1986), the New York Times Book Review (28 December 1986), and USA Today (25 April 1986). Ingalls began to be widely read in her native country; four years after its original publication, the novel became a kind of academic bestseller. While the students were reading Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1985), their teachers were reading Mrs. Caliban.
The reader of Mrs. Caliban encounters considerable mythic, literary, and psychological depth. Though not overtly allusive (only the title points clearly to literary antecedents), the novel seems to invite connections with a number of related fictions that enhance and extend its meaning. It seems at times a paradigm of intertextuality — of the tendency, that is, of a text to echo and imitate and rewrite other texts. A postmodern psychological novel, Mrs. Caliban reveals an awareness on the part of its author that the definitive venue of intertextuality, the supreme palimpsest, is the mind. Ingalls explores the fundamental conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle in terms of one woman's experiences with love, sex, motherhood, friendship, social integration, and fate.
Born in 1940, Ingalls is the oldest of the authors treated here as second-generation postmodernists. That is, I place her with figures such as Bobbie Ann Mason (also born in 1940), Alice Walker (born in 1944), Octavia Butler (born 1947), and Gloria Naylor (born 1950), rather than with such pioneers of postmodernism as Flannery O'Connor and Grace Paley (both almost twenty years older than the author of Mrs. Caliban). I admit, however, that a case could be made for including Ingalls — only three or four years younger than Pynchon and DeLillo, after all — in the first generation, and perhaps, given the memorable amphibian she creates ("Larry the Monsterman"), it will be just as well to treat her as his literary equivalent, a bridge between first- and second-generation postmodernism. Certainly one discerns links and affinities between this writer and both her older and younger fellows. Like Gloria Naylor, she rewrites Shakespeare's The Tempest; like Octavia Butler, she liberates science fiction and fantasy from the genre-fiction ghetto. Yet like the older writers, O'Connor and Paley, she favors short forms (only Binstead's Safari is long enough to be called a novel). By the same token, Ingalls's West Coast gothic (in Mrs. Caliban) displays affinities with the celebrated southern variety as it figures in O'Connor. More importantly, Ingalls's powerful representations of women's experience reframe, in some degree, those of the Grace Paley who in a 1982 interview characterized "[t]he dark lives of women" as "what made me a writer to begin with."
These affinities aside, Mrs. Caliban subsumes or parodies several literary and cinematic genres, in both romance and realist modes. These include, besides the psychological novel, science fiction, fantasy, monster movies, and soap opera. Ingalls also invokes the spectrum from "women's fiction" to feminist literature. This generic multivalence complements more specific affinities with such fictions as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Fowles's The Collector, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Beauty and the Beast in both its traditional and cinematic versions. The Wizard of Oz also figures, for Mrs. Caliban concerns a Dorothy with a remarkably rich fantasy life. In Ingalls's version, however, the adorable terrier has long since perished, and an unreal Southern California replaces both real Kansas and fantastic Oz. Like Fowles's The Collector, the novel invites its reader to reflect on the contemporary significance of the Caliban myth. Fowles's Caliban, a psychopathic clerk, exemplifies what Hannah Arendt famously called the banality of evil; Ingalls's Caliban, on the other hand, is a largely sympathetic portrait of embattled nature itself. Ingalls glances at Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in that she depicts a psychologically marginal housewife whose bizarre experiences alienate her forever from the dreary, unimaginative lives around her in wasteland suburbia. As an erotically charged fantasy about the female encounter with the sexual other as a beast at once fearsome and splendid, Mrs. Caliban has a mythic side that links it to Beauty and the Beast and the rest of what Bruno Bettelheim calls "the animal-groom cycle of fairy tales." As in The Great Gatsby, finally, characters' driving habits symbolically suggest their moral identities.
The references to automobiles and driving, in other words, do more than authenticate the Southern California setting. Cars traditionally suggest responsibility, a means of freedom, a potential danger to oneself and to others. Dorothy's husband, Fred, for example, drives a car described as old and frequently in need of repair. It resembles his marriage, and indeed he must rent a car or call a cab to pursue erotic opportunity. The pursuit proves costly when he and his teen-aged lover perish in a fiery car crash.
Larry, another male who makes the automobile his means of freedom, hot-wires cars and roams far and wide. Dorothy's friend Estelle enters the novel with a comic crash of surrogate cars, supermarket carriages; the narrator subsequently describes her — with transparent symbolism — as a "natural speeder." As she drives, so does she roll over marriage vows and personal friendship. Ironically, at one point she complains about her daughter Sandra's having taken their car, which no doubt facilitates Sandra's own pursuit of Dorothy's husband. As for Dorothy herself, she appears as a "careful driver" (18), considerate, thoughtful of others.
Literary affinities like those noted above provide intertextual buttressing for the meaning or meanings intimated in the novel's title, which invites connections with Shakespeare's The Tempest and perhaps with Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos." Ingalls suggests with her title that she will somehow androgynize the monstrous Caliban, reluctant servant of Prospero in Shakespeare's play. Since the protagonist, Dorothy, is something of a despised servant who shops, cooks, cleans, gardens, and mothers, the novel's title can be construed to announce a meditation on Caliban as woman. Yet the title can also refer to an idea of woman as spouse of Caliban. Dorothy, in fact, is Caliban's woman twice over: wife and servant to the moral monster, Fred; lover of the physical monster, Larry.
If Dorothy embodies an idea of female subalternity in her relationship with Fred, the more refined feminist polemic figures in her relationship with Larry, which also allows for a more subtle exploitation of the Shakespeare paradigm. Shakespeare's Caliban symbolically represents what one critic calls "brute-matter" — that which human ingenuity, in the form of the magician-scientist Prospero, must bend to its will to improve the quality of human life. But the mastery of nature, begun so necessarily and gloriously in Shakespeare's Renaissance, has come in the twentieth century to mean the violation of nature. Science seems now to result in increasingly ambiguous advances, as experimentation with animals becomes indistinguishable from abuse of animals, and as new knowledge issues in weapons and pollution as often as in life-enhancing technology. Larry, brutally tamed at the Jefferson Institute for Oceanographic Research by Kelsoe, Wachter, and Forest, is Shakespeare's Caliban in the twentieth century, an embodiment of nature as helpless victim of modern science.
As Caliban-nature, Larry exhibits a simple affinity not with coercive, logocentric science but with woman. What is done to "Aquarius the Monsterman" is done by male scientists; only a woman can respond appropriately to this symbolic projection of nature itself. The nonrational, nonanalytic relationship with nature finds expression in Dorothy's instinct for gardening. She easily makes it a common cause with her Hispanic gardener, Mr. Mendoza, who represents an exploited minority as traditionally powerless as women. Together they make a point of gardening ecologically — without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Dorothy even imagines on one occasion that Mr. Mendoza shares her secret about Larry.
But Ingalls looks to The Tempest for more than Caliban. Shakespeare's play provides an ironic counterpoint to the bleak worldview that figures in this novel. The play concerns an island realm perfectly ordered by a benign magus or artist-figure, the powerful Prospero. His power makes him almost, symbolically, God, and with it he not only subdues and chastens the bestial Caliban but also obtains justice for himself and love for his daughter and Prince Ferdinand. At the same time, he neutralizes the machinations of villains like Antonio and Sebastian.
In other words, The Tempest is a near-utopian vision of an ordered world, a world in which virtue flourishes and evil falters because of the active involvement of a benign supernatural power. But in Mrs. Caliban, the reader enters a world filled with brutality and disorder both natural and social: children die or mothers miscarry; people betray their spouses and their friends; Tinseltown Lotharios enjoy sixteen year olds as sexual playthings, while other children seduce their parents' lovers; street gangs wreak havoc; pets get run over; scenes of carnage ensanguine the highways; scientists torment animals sadistically; the press battens onto every horror like a vampire; cheese and people are processed.
No Prospero, no Ariel, no God. The subject of religion comes up only to be dismissed as superstition. Dorothy "had asked herself was religion really the only thing that kept people together, wrongly believing bad things will happen after death?" (23). She has, then, nothing to fall back on as her hopes for fulfillment dwindle: fate closes off every possibility of escape from her increasingly desperate circumstances.
In this benighted world, science and the press, charged with providing some understanding of the natural and the social disorder respectively, prove corrupt; their corruption, indeed, sometimes mirrors and sometimes promotes the disorder they investigate. This perception may account for Ingalls's dark picture of scientific inquiry. Like William Kotzwinkle in Dr. Rat (1976), this novelist takes an unsparing view of what animals are subjected to in the laboratory. The experiments with Larry proceeded simultaneously with instruction in language and behavior, but Dorothy recognizes in his pacific demeanor only evidence of how cruelly he has been treated: "He was always scrupulously polite. Now that she knew of the brutal methods that had been used to ram home the Institute's policy on polite manners, she found these little touches of good breeding in his speech as poignant as if they had been scars on his body" (36).
When Larry turns on his tormentors, he reenacts the fury of another sympathetic monster, the literary creation of another woman who examines the problematic relationship between nature and science. Mary Shelley's nightmare creature embodies the repressed id of her protagonist, Dr. Frankenstein, but as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic, the monster also projects the largely unconscious anxieties of the woman ultimately responsible for him. By contrast with the Frankenstein monster, Larry has no psychologically symbiotic relationship with an irresponsible scientist. He reifies, rather, the unconscious of the woman who succors him.
One notes, in this regard, the parallel between Dorothy and Larry as lab specimens. Larry has been injected, tormented, toyed with, sexually abused, and made superficially polite by draconian methods of behavior modification. He is not so much a clockwork orange as "Alex," the protagonist of Anthony Burgess's famous novel, but he is clearly made into something unnatural by the scientists' methods. Dorothy, too, is an experimental subject. Rushing to get dinner ready for her husband and a guest, she recognizes herself as performer in a maze: "it was like some sort of test or race. Perhaps, like her, laboratory rats took a pride in solving the puzzles scientists set them" (24). But Dorothy is a specimen in the laboratory of cosmic caprice, the subject of a senseless but even more sustained course of torments at the hands of existence itself. She loses two children, a dog, her husband, a lover, a friend, and perhaps her mind. The extent of her bad luck seems like something almost metaphysically malign — God as mad scientist or as the capricious deity imagined by Caliban in Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos." Both she and Larry are subjected to the most sadistic and cruel treatment imaginable; both are, as a result of their suffering, gentle and considerate.
Larry answers Dorothy's mental, emotional, and physical desperation so specifically as to suggest an answer to every reader's first question about this book: is Larry supposed to be real? The negative answer to that question comes in a variety of forms, beginning with the radio messages ostensibly intended for Dorothy alone. One notes, too, the suggestive passage that follows her initial encounter with Larry. Driving home after a shopping expedition, she sees, "up in the sky ... a gigantic mounded cloud, as large and elaborately molded as a baroque opera house and lit from below and at the sides by pink and creamy hues. It sailed beyond her, improbable and romantic, following in the blue sky the course she was taking down below. It seemed to her that it must be a good omen" (38). No more substantial than this lovely cloud, "improbable and romantic," Larry exists only in her fevered and desperate mind.
The novelist's undeviating commitment to Dorothy's point of view supports the argument that Larry is imaginary. One notes a similar technique in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, published a couple of years after Mrs. Caliban. Atwood's novel also concerns the life of a woman cut off from meaningful activity — even reading. Atwood's Offred, like Ingalls's Dorothy, plays Scrabble with a disagreeable spouse named Fred and suffers the loss of a child. The first-person narration of The Handmaid's Tale, like the scrupulously limited third-person narration of the Ingalls novel, contributes to a sense of claustrophobia and exitlessness.
Dorothy never shares her knowledge of Larry with any of the people around her, and the narrative technique contributes to the likelihood that Larry exists only in her desperate imagination. Although press reports seen by characters other than Dorothy would seem to confirm that something has in fact escaped from the Ocean Research Laboratory, the reader has only Dorothy's perceptions for such corroborative testimony. Perhaps, like the neurasthenic governess in The Turn of the Screw, she surrenders to psychosis. From first to last, Larry remains her personal secret, never to be shared — except perhaps with a psychiatrist.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tribe of Pyn by David Cowart. Copyright © 2015 David Cowart. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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