Cormac McCarthy As Ransom Stoddard; Jonathan Lethem's Postmodernism As Liberty Valance

Among the many delights of Jonathan Lethem's new book, The Ecstasy of Influence, is a comic philosophical essay entitled "Postmodernism As Liberty Valance."

Lethem says, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely," namely, the relationship between modernism, high modernism, and postmodernism.  And more.

"The chewy center of TMWSLV is a gunfight.  A man (Jimmy Stewart/Stoddard) stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man (Lee Marvin/Liberty Valance).  The victim--for this is, technically, murder--represents chaos and anxiety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkillable."  After his death, the witnesses lavish praise on the killer (Stewart/Stoddard) and put him up for public office.

Not all praise him--his political opponents denounce him for shooting a leading citizen (Marvin/Valance) down in the streets.  Hearing this preys on Stoddard's conscience (despite the obvious self-defense rationale) and he considers withdrawing his candidacy until John Wayne/Tom Doniphon explains to him that he did not actually kill Valance, that he (Wayne/Doniphon) shot him with a rifle from an alley where he was hidden from sight.  Stoddard then gets back into the race and becomes a successful politician.

"The film allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity to the form of the lawbooks and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable)." 

Before giving us his own interpretation of the film, Lethem presents several definitions of postmodernism from several critics, which of course vary since no one seems to agree on exactly what it is.

"...the avowed, self-declared postmodernist school of U. S. fiction writers: Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, John Hawkes, and a few others, many of them one another's friends, and many of them influential teachers. . .This clan, when Barth and Pynchon were scooping up major prizes, rode high enough that they seemed worth knocking down.  This is the epoch John Gardner tilted against in On Moral Fiction.'

"True, this tribe once had the effrontery to imagine itself the center of interest in U. S. fiction, but if you still hold that grudge your memory for effrontery is too long.  To go on potshotting at these gentlemen is not so much shooting fish in a barrel as it is shooting novelists who rode a barrel over Niagara Falls twenty or thirty years ago.  Or the equivalent of the Republican Party running its presidential candidates against the memory of George McGovern.  (Of course, both are done routinely.)  We'll call these guys Those Guys. . .' 

"I'd like to suggest that the killing of Liberty Valance in order to preserve safety and order in the literary town is a recurrent ritual, a ritual convulsion of literary-critical convention.  The chastening of Those Guys, and the replacement of their irresponsible use of Free Power with a more modest and morally serious minimalist aesthetic sometime in the late '70s, was a kind of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a point of inception for the ritual.'

"Who first played the role of Stewart/Stoddard, the true-of-heart citizen shoved into the street to take on the menacing intruder?  Was it Raymond Carver?  I think Raymond Carver might have been the original man who shot Liberty Valance.  Who's played the role recently?  A few:  Alice Munro, William Trevor, Cormac McCarthy..."

In Lethem's interpretation, John Wayne represents the critic who sets up the author of high modernism to stand against the low-life postmodernist Liberty Valance, order versus chaos.  Lethem's arguments are witty, much more involved, and run several pages--you should grab his new book and read it all.

I'd now like to offer my own take on his take.  Cormac McCarthy is indeed a classical author who represents high modernism well.  I don't see Those Guys as much different from McCarthy, especially since Lethem includes Pynchon as one of them.  I do see the divide between High Art and low art, and I am content to let Charlie Sheen, late of 2 1/2 Men, represent low art, chaos, superficial id-dominated ego.

In my interpretation, looking only at this trinity in the story and not the other parts, John Wayne/Doniphon would represent, not just literary critics, but the entire population of readers who have learned to appreciate High Art, the domain of human universals, of empathy, compassion, of true love rather than self-aggrandizing possession.

To go back and use the body, mind, and spirit analogy in the original story, Lee Marvin/Liberty Valance is the id-dominated body, Jimmy Stewart/Ransom Stoddard is the mind-dominated one, and John Wayne/Doniphon is the super-ego dominated spirit guide in this trinity.

Or, if you prefer, Liberty Valance is a laissez-faire Republican; Stoddard's a bleeding-heart liberal Democrat; Doniphon's an independent existentialist/libertarian and the more evolved man.

I previously discussed Dorothy Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" at this link.

Monday's Books in Brief

I'm thankful for many more new books than there is time to review in depth here.  My compliments to:

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga, the author of the wildly comic and worthy Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger.  A bit too wordy in this one, but Adiga again demonstrates his grasp of situational power politics with a keen sense of human nature, illustrated with off-edge comic irony.  Recommended.

Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc.  I've hardly begun this one yet and may review it at length later.  There are 437 pages of miscellaneous Lethem items, including an interview with Bob Dylan, reviews of music, books, and movies, and random humorous pieces.  A keeper, no doubt.

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson, nicely edited by Jann Wenner.  We caught Johnny Depp doing his terrific imitation of Thompson last week on television too.  A natural.

Novelist Katharine Weber's interesting memoir, The Memory Of All That, especially for the sections concerning Cole Porter, but as a former member of Readerville, I know the lady is somehow related to nearly everyone.  Six degrees of separation from Katharine Weber, we used to say.  She writes beautifully.

Jim Harrison's The Great Leader.  On the surface, Harrison's flawed protagonist chases his own shadow/animal self.  I loved its inspired nuances and little quirky moments, all of which add up to the usually great Harrison novel.  Read Pete Dexter's funny review of it at this link.  But I liked it much more than he did.

Mark Bowden's Worm: The First Digital World War.  The author of Black Hawk Down is always worth reading.  Crazy hacking terrorists.

Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party, which was touted as Blood Meridian-like.  I loved it, though it is not nearly as deep (nor as dark) as McCarthy's masterpiece.  It is similar in surface plot, attitude, punctuation, dialogue, cadence, and vocabulary, though not in philosophy nor symbolism and it is based upon an entirely different history.  I'll review it at length one of these days, when the mood strikes me to read it again.

Most novels being compared to Cormac McCarthy are no such thing, of course.

Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone and other good ones, when asked (in this interview) about the reviews which compare him to Cormac McCarthy, replied:

"Well, I've certainly read and admired Cormac. However, the books that influenced him also influenced some of the rest of us who are always getting hit with that 'sounds like Cormac' thing. I've read Shakespeare and the Bible and Hemingway and Faulkner as well, and so if that means I have echoes that sound like Cormac it doesn't necessarily mean it comes from Cormac. It comes from the original source. I don't think I'm that much like him, to be honest, but it does come up a lot."

There are two other books I've recently that are especially worth mentioning.  Both of them would have made my best lists if I'd been lucky enough to read them when they first came out.  The first is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which brims with spacey humor and lovely poetic turns of phrase.  The second is Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil, which I passed on last year, probably because it was a trade paperback and I wanted to read it in hardcover.

These two are not to be missed in any format, both of them charming, insightful novels.  Detailed reviews of them are not hard to find, but with these, the less you know ahead of time, the better.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Jonathan Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s.

My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone.

(If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles.)

In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle.

Only—here’s the rub—when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks in the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear.

That’s when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It’s an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah’s flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
_______


No Jonathan Lethem book is yet forgotten.  His books have earned him an ardent cult of fans, and indeed many mainstream readers consider him a cult novelist.  But Motherless Brooklyn, his murder mystery from which the opening appears above, is one that deserves a much wider appreciation.

It was first published in October, 1999, and the blurbs on the back call him promising,  "one of the most original voices among younger American novelists."  The black-and-white dustjacket, credited to Amy C. King, shows the blurry figure of a man walking down the road, the words MOTHERLESS and BROOKLYN at right angles like the street sign at a crossroads.

On the title page, the font looks temporary, parts of it have vanished.  Under the title are nine winding dots, like stones on a path.  These dots are reproduced on the cloth spine of the first edition, though not on the dustjacket.


The protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette's syndrome.  His mind floods with words and he compulsively mumbles them under his breath, or sometimes barks them intermittently, or sometimes shouts them out.  His brain malfunctions in this way, and he can't control it.  Potential readers who find this off-putting and turn away are missing out on Lethem's playful language and marvelous humor inside a genre-loving murder mystery. 


For in his dreams and in his written voice, Lionel is free of his compulsions and very witty, very insightful.  People are always underestimating him, calling him a freak, but he is not so different than any of them.  In the first chapter, he muses about the character, George Bailey, in It's A Wonderful Life, as being an everyman.  Then Ullman is introduced--as a shadow character, yes, but on another level as the concept of all men, everyman.


Lionel's nervous tics are more pronounced, often extremely so, but he too is representative of everyman.  The restlessness of western man is to be seen and heard everywhere, in a flood of words.  The constant background chatter-thoughts of the undisciplined mind, the monkey mind, is an excitable trickster.  It prevents us from seeing clearly.


The oldest and most famous traditional Chinese novel addresses this.  Monkey: A Journey To The West is a parable involving a monkey, representing the the modern mind.  The monkey is always accompanied by a pig, representing the animal nature of man, always present.

It is a monkey mind culture, as we are reminded everyday in the choice of news in an average newscast, told to an everyman taking in soundbites and constantly flipping channels with his remote, while someone else gabs into his phone on one ear.

In this quest parable, which is often published in three volumes, the chattering monkey mind is always getting himself into trouble.  He was the orchard keeper of the gods--something that might have inspired Cormac McCarthy's title--and, as in Genesis, he eats the forbidden fruit.  He gathers knowledge, including the knowledge of his own temporary existence, and a subsequent fear of death.

    
In the parable, the monkey mind evolves into a buddhist, learning to control his wayward thoughts.  And that is one of Lionel's quests in Motherless Brooklyn:  he longs for self-control.  Another quest is to see Ullman, who never quite comes into view.

I've heard some people complain that they did not like the ending, but I think that these were young readers still in the grip of that possessive blood lust that passes for love in this country.  Obsession is not love--if it were, stalkers would have it.  No, true love is that which is always willing to let go for the sake of those we love.  

I'm not going to spoil the murder mystery for you.  You'll have to find that out for yourself.  But I will tell you that Lionel gets better in the course of the novel, by working on himself and becoming more aware and compassionate of those around him.  For me, it is a feel-good-ending.

We might all be better off if we all learned how to calm our monkey minds.

This is a tag-along to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series.  Participating blogs offering forgotten books include:

Joe Barone

Paul Bishop
Paul Brazill
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Cullen Gallagher
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis/Tina Karelson
Todd Mason
Kevin McCarthy
Eric Peterson
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple