‘“A hammer right over the heart’: War in Deliverance, Alnilam, and To the White Sea” is reprinted from James Dickey Newsletter, Volume Nineteen, Number One (Fall 2002). The following information is given in CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTES in that issue:
JOYCE M. PAIR, English Professor Emerita, Georgia Perimeter College, is the founding editor of James Dickey Newsletter. ‘“Measuring the Fictive Motion’: War in Deliverance, Alnilam, and To the White Sea,” revised in its appearance here, first appeared in The Texas Review (Fall/Winter) 2996/1997, a special double issue on the novels of James Dickey.
Presently, Joyce M. Pair is Senior Editor of the digitized James Dickey Newsletter (www.jamesdickey.org).
Although slight changes may occur with digitizing, page numbers herein replicate those in the initial publication. The copyright remains in effect, of course.
War in Deliverance, Alnilam, and To the White Sea
By Joyce M. Pair
True Hope’s a glorious Huntresse, and her chase
The God of Nature in the field of Grace.
-Richard Crashaw-
Contemporary analysis of the author’s role in narrative is especially useful after frequent statements such as James Dickey’s that his World War II service—his Army Air Corps experience in the South Pacific and his recall to active duty during the Korean War as flight instructor—was the formative experience of his life. War’s power and the tragedy of killing fellow human beings, especially killing anonymously from the air, shocked and shaped twenty-year-old psyches such as Dickey’s, as he attests in Self-Interviews: War on the human planet has a “God-like feeling. . . . It’s useless to deny it. You can never do anything in your life that will give you such a feeling of consequence and of performing a dangerous and essential part in a great cause as fighting in a world war” (137-38). As a poet, Dickey’s war memories of killing recollected in Wordsworthian tranquility are sometimes romanticized, but more often they realistically and surrealistically witness a young man’s awareness of the beauty in wholesale death and the mature man’s awareness of the ironies of such killing by young men described by Napoleon as willing to die for bits of colored ribbon. War activities have historically justified to man his heroic passage to a supposed Valhalla, his reward for conquering the intertwined enemies: sex and death. Though the lesser part of Dickey’s creative life, the fiction provides sustained insight into personal and societal violence in America. Dickey’s fictive account of the second half of the twentieth century encompasses the violence of the American male experience with war, beginning in a modern, peaceful community in North Georgia, continuing in training grounds for its air-dropped death, and ending in its ultimate chaos of napalm and postmodern America.
Dickey’s time was that watershed period for men of his generation who reached maturity during the epic world war that ushered in postmodernism. In Writing After War, John Limon describes writing milieus of modernism and postmodernist World War II: “the Second World War may have set the terms of post-war writing, but post-war writing conceived and reconceived the Second World War. The difference is in the rendering of inescapability—since inescapability is the shibboleth of all postmodern doctrine” (129). By the end of the fiction trilogy, the inescapability of the protagonist’s choices has become Dickey’s theme, often identified as the masculine hunt or adventure but also recognized as war. Richard Howard noted, for example, that “One of the rare accommodations of circumstances these poems [in Into the Stone] affords is, as we might expect, in aversion of warfare. . . . [T]he violence of war’s demands makes an appeal, in every sense, to Dickey’s understanding of honor, rank, and vassalage”(79). Also, in a comparison of Dickey’s first novel, Deliverance, and his children’s poem, Tucky the Hunter, Rosalie Murphy Baum applies Dickey’s world view (“a dialogic rather than a monologic one”1) of warlike violence to fiction and poetry, noting that readers of each work find “that the power struggle occurs within conventional male paradigms” (that of adventure and that of the hunt) and would be fascinated by the explicit portrayal of violence in Deliverance and the apparent subversion of violence in Tucky (2). Dickey’s formative experience, then, conceived not only many of the early and later poems but also the fiction. Significantly, Deliverance (1970), Alnilam (1987), and To the White Sea (1994) address the violence of conventional masculine paradigms that have proceeded in western-world literature, the art of war from The Iliad to the present.
Critics point to war’s inherent power and domination that are the subject of serious literary discourse, and to the fact that “Writers who miss the available or most pertinent war—for example, Henry James or Fitzgerald or Faulkner or Pynchon—will wonder not what the failure means for their manhood (if they are men) so much as for their art” (Limon 4). By the time Dickey wrote Deliverance, a modernist predecessor to the postmodernism of the following novels, he had addressed war and his youthful world view through his poetry. Although major poems such as “The Performance,” “Drinking from a Helmet,” and, especially, “Firebombing,” address Dickey’s war experiences, war is scarcely mentioned in Deliverance; nevertheless, the post-World War II condition and male obsessions with war inform the novel and lead to the second novel and to the third, where the warrior protagonist exists in psychological and emotional isolation.
My motive in this discussion is not to advance explications of the characters of Ed Gentry, Frank (or Joel) Cahill, and Sergeant Muldrow but to outline more broadly the significance of war in the novels as they reflect the shift to postmodernism in Dickey’s fictive accounting of the 1940s through the 1970s.
The dual setting of suburban Atlanta and the North Georgia mountain river of Deliverance juxtaposes boredom, the ennui of men in a postwar city that offers no opportunities for display of their male prowess, with the vitality of men struggling for survival in the wilderness. That the ennui emanates from a need for the violence legitimately displayed during war is suggested by the leitmotif of war imagery that permeates descriptions of the men’s trip into the wilderness. The militaresque terrain map “unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back” whenever one of the four men lets go of his corner (13). The map, a flag-like symbol, shows the sortie to be led by Lewis, a wealthy sportsman whose foraging trips into the mountains, enemy territory, provide thrills in his otherwise protected existence. The military invasion of the dangerous backwoods territory calls upon the men’s courage and endurance, their willingness to defy death, as they prepare to canoe down the Cahulawassee River. The “snapping back” becomes their salute to the masculine paradigm, a duel, a war, an exercise in power and domination, what Ed thinks Lewis might call “A lesson. A moral. A life principle. A Way” (14). Lewis calls the mountain people “good people,” but
“They’ll do what they want to do, no matter what. Every family I’ve ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary. Some of them are in for making liquor or running it, but most of them are in for murder. They don’t think a whole lot about killing people up here.” (55)
Like many other enemies, however, the mountain people “leave you alone if you do the same” (55).
The physical and psychological savagery of the mountain people in this first novel finds a later parallel in To the White Sea with the Japanese who, Muldrow expects, will behead invading American soldiers, first cutting off their testicles. Lewis’s reaction to the raw innocence and evil of a people unschooled, violent, parallels the exhilaration of men in war. Dickey locates this ideal life principle in his essay “The Imagination as Glory” as a philosophy he acquired during the war: “If I survived,” he contemplates,
I would do something wonderful with my life: I would. . . I would . . . what? Life seemed such a precious thing then, as it always does when you may lose it. But when we’re safe, we don’t feel quite the same way: habit comes in, and the vast destructive powers of “the things that have to be done” the little things that kill by inches and leave behind nothing but the body of
one who kept neat ledger sheets, or another who never allowed rust to form on her kitchen appliances. (167)
The poet lives his excitement through metaphoric adventure, but the ordinary man, like
Lewis, ideally is the energized man,
the man with vivid senses, the man alert to the nuances and meanings of his own experience, the man able to appreciate and evaluate the relation between words in the right order [words] not used simply to sell neckties or industrial machines or to make cocktail conversation, but to serve as the vital center of a moving and changing, perceiving and evaluating world which, as long as it lasts-as long as he lasts-is that world of delivery. (“The Energized Man” 164)
Dickey’s early concept of the “moving and changing” energized man—one who “functions with not, say, fifteen percent of his faculties, as advertisers and psychologists say the average or statistical man does, but ideally, with a hundred percent, a veritable walking A-bomb among the animated or half-animated spectres of the modern world” (165)—is maturely realized in To the White Sea in Sergeant Muldrow, not so much as an energized man facing death in war but as a man facing the evil of war, a man fully capable of trading evil for evil. In Deliverance, however, Lewis introduces Ed to the energized world and Ed, who has never fired a shot, becomes a “veritable walking A-bomb” in the trip down the river.
Drew and Bobby are identified as the weaker or feminine, dephallocentered, non-warriors by their equipment, or weapons. They foreground wartime social systems of oppression and dehumanization of women found in the three novels. Women are victims who are silenced, marginalized, except as objects of male sexual obsessions, whereas men (exemplified by Ed, who admires Lewis and who fears and hates the rapist as well as exults over the man he kills) share an almost physical love for each other. Drew, “the best of us,” as Ed says, wears his “old GI shirt” (147) and carries a guitar, opposing the power of art to war. Bobby, the most vulnerable, brings “creature comforts.” “Namely liquor,” or, as Dickey calls it in “Firebombing,” “Combat booze.” Lewis and Ed, the two warriors, duelists for power and dominion, bring hunting bows and arrows—Ed’s “two-bladed Howard Hill broadheads . . . as sharp as new razor blades” (22, 42)—for illegal, preseason deer killing and each will kill in combat a mountain man. Bobby’s reactive remark, “atomic-survival stuff, eh?” (22), recognizes Lewis’s and Ed’s escape into the excitement of combat.
What in the way of community could modern men blooded in World War II and Korea who have not yet faced the debacle of Vietnam expect? They had wives, children, homes, mortgages, country clubs, male buddies, and opportunities for commodity capitalism; however, what is lacking is the powerful excitement of the air above Beppu where the narrator/pilot, “With the honored aesthetic evil, / The greatest sense of power in one’s life,” releases a bomb that “ . . . finds a home / And clings to it like a child” (“Firebombing” 187). The poem, Richard Howard notes, contains
the same movement outward upon a real world, magic discarded like Prospero’s, books drowned and the natural man acknowledged. . . . . The poem is surely Dickey’s most complete statement of the magical life in its appalling triumphs . . . [of military rank and power] over against the slow conquests of an undistinguished reality. (93)
At his moment of epiphany, Ed, as “gentrified” or domesticated American male, is shocked out of his ennui to become an adrenaline-driven warrior with military rank.
Exhausted and almost deranged atop the cliff, Ed is the image of an antique warrior in an antique land, his self-inflicted arrow wound not mortal but symbolic. Totally gone is his peacetime boredom, the futility of the work at Emerson-Gentry Advertising Agency done by the men whom he and his partner hire. Some, the “saddest,” erroneously identify themselves as real artists rather than the hacks they are in the advertising business; they are sadder men, Ed thinks, even than the “ex-bomber co-pilot now drawing-in sacks of fertilizer” (24). Gentry sees himself as “of them, sure enough,” seeing them as in some way his prisoners, with himself the greatest prisoner of this stultifying world of peace (26). His anticipated escape onto the river fills him with “fear and feeling weak and incompetent but excited” (36), even while he holds his wife in his arms. The couple’s last-minute sex—Martha’s attempt to send her man off in good mental and physical condition—parallels leave-takings of men into battle. When Martha wonders whether his ennui is her fault, his response is an emphatic “Lord, no,” but as he says it, he thinks, “but it partly was, just as it’s any woman’s fault that represents normalcy” (37). Only through fantasizing about the model with the golden eye while he has sex with Martha does Ed fully feel “the promise of it [ sex] that promised other things, another life, deliverance” (38). That other life, that escape from marital routine, that deliverance, is war.
Lewis believes that Ed’s getting on the river will change his life, his sliding, or “living antifriction” (50), and it does. As John Limon notes, “Friction and chance are aspects of the temporal . . . dimension of real war, which play on fury and on which reason and genius must themselves play” (14). Creating, or re-creating, the excitement of war, Lewis says, “I just believe that the whole thing [that is, survival in a post-war nuclear world] is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all. I want to be ready.” The whole thing, he says, is “The human race thing. I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over” (51). Lewis’s “dreams of atomic holocaust” have led him to build an air-raid shelter stocked with emergency food supplies. He has the Cold War “survival craze,” thinking, “Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn’t mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive” (52-53). The key words are “who was ready to survive,” which emphasize American supremacy and its opposite, the “gook syndrome” (the only good gook is a dead gook), which “displays hostility and violence toward American allies . . . as well as blatant racism” (Jason 114). Without the struggle for power, for proof of supremacy, Lewis implies, life holds little excitement.
Fifty million people died in WWII, and in the apocalyptic aftermath that Lewis fears would be death-to-near extinction of Americans. “If everything wasn’t dead,” Lewis says to Ed,
“you could make a kind of life that wasn’t out of touch with everything, with the other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You’d die early, and you’d suffer, and your children would suffer but you’d be in touch.” (54)
To move into the hills without the threat of atomic destruction would be merely eccentric, for “Survival depends—well, it depends on having to survive. The kind of life I’m talking about depends on its being the last chance. The very last of all” (54). Thus, each energized man would fight to live, to feed his family; in other words, he would return to primitive conditions. The paradoxical metaphor of not war but North Georgia adventure echoes Fitzgerald’s move “from the Great War to The Great Gatsby, with football, cheating at golf, and the manufacturing of a fictitious World Series as increments” and Hemingway’s “metaphoric connection of war and writing by means of a bullfight aesthetic” (Limon 7). The canoe trip down river must become dangerous and demanding to re-create
Ed Gentry’s deliverance from bored householder to active warrior begins with the testing of Bobby’s gender and his own, a parallel to the rape and murder of war. The mountain man’s anal rape of Bobby situates him forever outside the phallocentric group, and Lewis prevents the oral rape of Ed much as a husband would protect a threatened wife. The fact that Bobby “was not tied mattered in some way” to both men; they believe that he, like a raped woman, should have resisted, that she was only pretending to be taken by force. Bobby’s rape from the back recalls Gentry’s sex from the back with the compliant Martha and his departure for power and dominion (38). Ed, momentarily unmanned and in a similar position on his knees before the “tall man . . . unbuttoning his pants,” arises a warrior “with the gun and the power” when Lewis sends an arrow through the other man’s back (124). Realizing that without Lewis’s intervention, he and the mountain man “would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying . . . but we would have been together in the flesh” (186). Consequently, Ed’s masculinity suffers until he takes on Lewis’ role and becomes the death-dealing commando.
Drew’s death, the second in the sortie, and Lewis’s fractured leg provide Ed the deliverance he seeks from the monotony, the tedium, of peace. As an energized man, his voice begins to sound “like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing” (159). Before he begins his climb up the cliff, Ed gets a “renewed feel of all the elements present,” elements that include himself: “I was the one,” he thinks, relishing fully his new power (156).
The stylistic bellicosity in the September 16th section further identifies Ed as soldier. If the unfurled colors of the map of North Georgia are a symbolic call to arms, then field commando Gentry’s attack upon the cliff is the sheer bravado of the new lieutenant. Adrenaline flowing, now “a killer,” he “felt wonderful, and fear was at the center of the feeling: fear and anticipation—there was no telling where it would end” (177). Launching his arrow into the chest of the mountain man from his stand in a pine tree, Gentry evokes the nuclear death Bobby and Lewis suggest earlier, the death from the air of Alnilam, and the fire that eventually rains down upon Tokyo in To the White Sea. Moved from his anti-friction toward “reason and genius,” he believes his readiness in the pine tree is right: “Everything about it was logical” (191). Just as the climb up the cliff has been Ed’s assault upon his own psyche, the impending death of the mountain man brings warlike camaraderie: “We were closed together, and the feeling of a peculiar kind of intimacy increased, for he was shut within a frame within a frame, all of my making” (197). The camaraderie, even love, of males in war surfaces again. Close to an intimate embrace with the first mountain man Ed now recognizes the relationship of warriors in his sighting of the second man.
Dickey’s world view frames himself, the writer, as well as the protagonist-narrator and the mountain man whose death will be “The honored aesthetic evil, / The greatest sense of power in one’s life, / That must be shed in bars” as the “Firebombing” narrator recognizes (187-90). The corpse is a battlefield tragedy with which its maker must come to terms: although the body cannot be dragged three times around Troy’s walls, Gentry can “cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes,” or he can “eat him,” he can “do anything”; however, as the “ultimate horror” of death over-
Dickey collapses into World War II the Korean War and the Vietnam conflict. Alnilam‘s training ground echoes more specifically Dickey’s own Korean War experience; however, racism in Deliverance does as well. Even though Ed returns to normalcy, he does so during the Vietnam battle, among “the headlines of war and student strikes” (281). He and Lewis, newly aware of the heroic code that “dying is better than immortality,” practice Zen archery, because “Those gooks are right. You shouldn’t fight it. Better to cooperate with it. Then it’ll take you there; take the arrow there”” (283). It, the Zen mind that seeks wisdom, sought for thousands of years by the “gooks,” flows from the Korean experience with Asians as well as the Vietnam experience. For example, in Michael Lynch’s Korean war novel, An American Soldier, the inadequacy of the American allies is represented much like the poor skills of the later South Vietnamese allies: ‘“These R.O.K troops are worth shit,’ Spina said. ‘They’re gooks, what do you expect?’ Cernak said” (124). Thus, the language of the South Pacific and the disdain for Asian enemies and/or allies (Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) applies in all places in Dickey’s time.
Although he lives chronologically in the postmodern period, Ed still finds remnants of unity, of the modern, static world. Returning to an orderly community and to his studio, “still boring, but not as boring as before” (276), Ed goes in summer with Martha to his cottage at the lake where he socializes with Lewis, now the idol of Ed’s son. Despite his return to a peaceful community, Ed has disturbed dreams with memories of combat-like experiences. He fears unexpected automobile lights approaching his house at night and unfamiliar voices on the telephone. Called “Unorganized Crime” by Lewis, or “U. C.” during cocktail chatter among strangers, Ed, now a surviving veteran, becomes more comfortable, more organized, as the lake water covers his combat experiences, the casualties: “Drew and the other man were going deeper and deeper, piling fathoms and hundreds of tons of pressure and darkness on themselves, falling farther and farther out of sight, farther and farther from any influence on the living” (275). The major pretense of war takes over as Ed rises at least for the moment above his boredom and forgets the fallen, resuming his community roles as employer, husband, and father.
In Writing After War Limon clarifies the use of war as model, explaining that “Creativity is more or less a direct transference of resources from the individual to the world”:
[T]he world gains whatever is lost to the anorexic body. It is not that art seeks metonymically an alternative space (a space beside that of war). . . . Nor is art essentially like war; the violence of war is unpredictable and omnidirectional but the violence of art is introjected for the sake of creation at large. Art must take the army as its model; it necessitates a perfect discipline, a perfect order, a complete submission of the body, an imperial system to which every affront is aestheticide, tantamount to regicide. This is nearly postmodern; in opposition to the Foucauldian object of Jones’ hatred (there is nothing outside the army’s power) is Jones’ Derridean project (there shall be nothing outside my text). The residual modernism resides in Jones’s messianism: the world is not always already for the Word but it will be. (133)
The action in Alnilam, like that in Deliverance, takes place over a long weekend as Frank Cahill seeks to learn his son’s fate, finding instead his self-identity.This setting—the Latham Army Air Core Training Base at Peckover, North Carolina —depicts actual war or the training for it. Set in 1943, Alnilam reflects Dickey’s flight training in preparation for service in the South Pacific as well as his flight instructor experience when recalled during the Korean War. Alnilam concerns an event—the training and death of Joel Cahill—that occurs before the novel’s action. Dickey re-visits his World War II service in the Army Air Corps to examine illusions surrounding young men’s rites of passage in war.
In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard emphasizes the narrative deception involved in such privileging of the past. While a narrative’s historical reference belongs “to the past . . . it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation” (22). Such a narrative, according to Frederic Jameson, is a “way of consuming the past, a way of forgetting” (xii). While Deliverance, often called an adventure novel, certainly could have been written without Dickey’s service in World War II and the Korean War, Alnilam perhaps owes its existence to those two experiences and contemporaneously reflects Dickey’s mature understanding of war and the American psyche. Lyotard believes that the postmodern artist articulates “what will have been done” (81). Dickey’s aesthetic questioning, however, articulates what will be thought about what has been done. In Alnilam, Cahill pere and Cahill fils attempt to participate in and to undermine the narrative closure that would occur with the truth about Joel in his role as everysoldier; therefore, the search for the American war psyche approaches but does not achieve closure in this novel.
The protagonist, fifty-four-year-old Frank Cahill, is a pseudo-patriarchal figure seeking insight into twenty-year-old would-be warriors. His son, Joel, present only in oral and written comments and a brief moment (perhaps) on a military film, at nineteen or twenty represents the “boys” who are being trained for war. As Scott Fitzgerald desired to address the dichotomy of illusion and reality within the American dream, Dickey addresses the paradoxical concept of patriotic, or good, war through Joel who, being dead or at least absent, cannot see, and Frank, literally blind, who attempts to “see” the reality of the illusion. “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald wrote his college classmate Ludlow Fowler in summer 1924, has as its “whole burden the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false so long as they partake of the magical glory” (144-45)
The blindness of diabetes-stricken Frank Cahill and the almost mystical absence of Joel Cahil play out such an illusory theme: the glory of war. Simultaneously, the training of young men to be pilots, bombardiers, navigators who kill and die plays out a second theme: the realistic horror of war especially as it serves as young men’s coming-of-age ritual. Cahill’s thoughts and the visible (fictive) reality printed on the opposite page provide a false narrative of the glory of air combat. Also, each character has a personal version of the role he and others play in war, so that no real truth or one truth is possible. Captain Whitehall, the center of philosophic consciousness, has the scientific reality which undermines any spiritual content of the vastness formed by the starry heavens containing Orion and its middle star, Alnilam, which the young men adopt as symbol.
Cahill, blind for twenty years to his fatherly responsibilities but physically blind only a few months, seeks an identity newly centered around Joel, the son he has never seen, who has called his
Joel’s absence provides a life blow “that will have longer lasting and more serious consequences if there is no opportunity to communalize it” (Shay 39)—that is, hold the funeral games. Frank/Joel’s silent voice presents the young as enamored with patriotism but even more with secret societies, boys’ clubs. The multiple identities (blind but “seeing” father and “seeing” but absent son) are expressed illusions. As Dickey has commented,
Perhaps in the end the whole possibility of words being able to contain one’s identity is illusory; opinions, yes; identity, maybe. Perhaps the whole question of identity itself is illusory. But one must work with such misconceptions for whatever hint of insight—the making of a truth—they may contain: that fragment of existence which could not be seen in any other way and may with great good luck, as in the best poetry, be better than the truth. (Night Hurdling xi)
Such a fragmentation as Cahill’s into father and son obliterates distinctions between reality and illusion, security and insecurity, and approaches the chaotic abyss of postmodernism: disconnection of the self.
The fragments of truth in Cahill’s misconceptions are necessary for his own coming of age or new identity: When Boyd McClendon lets the blind man touch the “wild doar,” telling him the dead animal is a combination of boar and deer, Cahill says his illusory world is adequate. He explains that
“. . . when you’re blind, you get used to things like that. At first, everything that you thought you knew, and could use without no trouble, has got another side to it that you got to learn. . . . You start to put things together in another way and, just a little at a time, but more and more, you come to the notion that you can have the world be anything you want it to be, because it’s all in your head anyway. You’re all right, as soon as you tell yourself that you’ll keep on drawin’ the line between what you can use and what is liable to hurt you and this other place in your head that could be anything and can be anything; then you’ve got yourself a pretty good situation.” (51)
One false narrative of war, then, is the narrative of a blind man who can valorize war as Colonel Hoccleve does later. This use of language covers the truth about war. Paul Fussell comments about language and war that “One of the cruxes of war is the collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them” (qtd. in Shay xxi). Cahill’s temporary learning place in North Carolina is a cold shed where dead meat (metaphorically Joel and his comrades) hangs. In this shed the Alnilam members show and describe to Frank Cahill the military movie containing (they say) a glimpse of Joel’s face. Cahill’s dual search for his and Joel’s identity among the warriors and airplanes leads him to accept an illusion about young men and killing—similar to his acceptance of the “doar”—that he can use while he rejects the truth about his son that could hurt: the fact that Colonel Hoccleve believes that Joel causes his own death and the deaths of others. Jonathan Shay, speaking of Homer and The Iliad, emphasizes “the two common events of heavy, continuous combat: betrayal of ‘what’s right’ by a commander, and the onset of the berserk state” (xii). Cahill and the Alnilam boys who believe that Colonel Hoccleve is a betrayer reach the berserk state at graduation day.
Cahill’s search leads him to Captain Whitehall, the navigator, who provides the blind man a philosophical, even mystical, rite of passage enriched by Dickey’s war experience: “From the wartime South Pacific,” Dickey says that he has
kept on remembering a few moments of twilight when I talked with bomber crews, and the navigators showed me their sextants and octants, mana-rich implements in which mirrors banked light back and forth between their slants in what seemed to me, even at twenty-one, certain proof of the relationship of human bodies to celestial: the complex star-angled keys to everything. (“The Starry Place” 19)
The “Navigator,” Captain Lennox Whitehall, introduces Cahill to just such a mana-possessing sextant, one that creates a longing in the blind man for an instrument that can locate a person and make the stars do what they are supposed to do: “The sun was available to the instrument he held,” he thinks.
There was in his hands a give-and-take fragility, a balancement of objects seen, a relation between them that could be controlled: controlled by the eye, the fingers, and the slants and angles of glasses: mirrors: lenses. He longed for whatever revelations he might be holding to his forehead: for the sun, for something in the sky, or beyond the sky, to appear there, among the long heartless flashes of his blindness. Behind the dark, he thought, his neck muscles stiffening against his collar: beyond it: beyond. His yearning broke; he brought the rubber eyepiece from his face. (443-44)
Behind the gold flashes of his diabetes-caused blindness, Cahill longs to see real purpose, to find passage beyond the drift of sad mid-life that Dickey describes:
With drift, habit, and the general sense of the purposelessness of life sets in a genuine malaise: the malaise that lends a gigantic helping hand to filling the alcoholic wards of hospitals, to filling the insane asylums and the divorce courts. There has never been, I expect, an unhappier people. And at the very center of this unhappiness . . . is the feeling, not only that we are not using our energies properly . . . but that we are hardly using them at all, in any significant way. (“The Energized Man” 163-64)
Cahill eventually departs the Air Force training base with his purpose renewed, determined to pursue his work and learn new work, though blind.
The sextant-located stars privileging the constellation Orion serve the novel well. The familiar description of the young Greek of huge stature and great beauty whose rite of passage includes loving Aero (sometimes called Merope) fits Joel Cahill, “a good-looking fair-skinned blue-eyed kid, full of energy and enthusiasm. He had more of what young boys ought to have than all the rest of them put together. And they tell me he was a damned genius in the air,” Major Iannone tells Cahill (649). Joel, too, loves “aero,” the air, and is, Iannone says, “somebody who seems like he belongs there, belongs up there in that strange new element that’s like nothing ever experienced before, who seems to almost everybody almost a . . . a . . . an inhabitant of the air” (651). Aero’s father blinds the masterful hunter Orion; however, an oracle tells him he can regain his sight by going to the east and allowing the rising sun to fall upon his eyes. In the end, Orion is killed and placed in heaven as a constellation in war-like attire: sword and club and a lion’s skin engirdled. The middle star of that girdle or belt is Alnilam.2
Here the reverse, or complication, of the myth applies to Frank/Joel. Frank is blind, but Joel was left blind through lack of his father’s presence; yet Joel is or will become, through his rite of passage, god-like, a star in heaven, symbolic of all young men sacrificed in war. Although the Air
To men who have completed the rite of passage in war and lived to talk about it, no time of life is better. When Cahill prepares to leave the air base, Whitehall, who is unwilling to part with his sextant, gives Cahill an E6B, a navigational calculator such as the one Joel had used both in flying and in preparing a secret code for Alnilam. The E6B, carried by Whitehall on a raid over Rabaul, and the sextant, he says, are “parts of my best life,” that is, his life in war as a navigator by stars: “Remember this about the stars,” he tells Cahill, “they’re just waiting for somebody to do with them what was built into them, that they don’t even know about.” Although Whitehall cannot bear to part with his sextant, he says the idea behind the sextant will help the blind Cahill, even though, “The actual instrument maybe won’t, but what’s behind it will. The idea—the truth that there is a place that the universe can’t deny you. The stars get together on you; there’s no other way. They can’t help it” (662). Cahill doubts the usefulness of the E6B or a sextant to a blind man; but Whitehall tells him, “It takes triangular eyes [the views through the sextant] to see heaven,” and Cahill responds, “Maybe I got the next thing to it” (662), that is, blind, illusory perception. Cahill thus begins to form a new world, one enlarged by his knowledge of Joel and Alnilam, the sextant, and an E6B.
The Air Corps’ ironic embrace of scientific instruments to empty heaven of all except constellatory gods requires that Joel, the missing flier, be transformed into the “other”; he must be ritualistically sacrificed. An All-American son who recognizes and calls for his male model, Joel is the Christ-like scapegoat whose passage is through science rather than through the old myth.
A major thrust of Alnilam as a war novel is the apotheosis of Joel as divine symbol of the rite of passage of all “boys” called to kill and be killed in war. As leader of Alnilam, an organization formed to resist total brainwashing by the officers, Joel contains the inherent mana or force of a god. He uses the cult of Alnilam (never without its connotations of Egyptian worship of Orion as Osiris and Sirius, or The Great Dog of Canis Major, as Isis [Bauval and Gilbert 58]) as an instructional device, a private communication to men bonded into a communal group. However, in the plan to disrupt the graduation ceremony and to fulfill experienced officers’ desires for wartime killing, Joel and his group question the values of the Air Corps and undermine the American military’s ideology. Cahill must separate the real truth of war from the apotheosized view of children’s becoming men through war—the truth of war as unquestionably tragic or as tragically ironic. Is Joel’s an Achillean, infantile hubris that rejects questions of right, or is he a warrior on the side of God and America.
Cahill’s calling Zack the dog of peace addresses such paradoxes of war. Zack defends Cahill from an attack by five dogs, four of which Zack kills. ‘“This here’s the dog of peace,’” Cahill tells McLendon, who inquires, ‘“How about them other dogs he killed, back in town?’” Cahill responds, “That’s just what I mean. You don’t see ‘em making no more trouble, do you. What kind of peace do you want?” (605). Thus, the moral is that peace results from killing enemies until one has no more enemies to kill.
Cahill finds in the aircraft noises at Latham Training Field a kind of menace, a “suggestion of pursuit even” (38), echoing Lewis’s fear in Deliverance of death falling from a godless sky upon unsuspecting Americans, punishing good and evil alike. McLendon explains that
“That’s what we don’t like . . . Nobody’s used to the noise. Same as with deer, you know: they never look up; they don’t have no enemies above ‘em, like in trees . . . the Corps of Engineers and the Air Corps told us that all this would be fine, for the town, but we don’t really want their money . . . all we want to do is what we’ve always done—farm tobacco, go to church, go to Fayetteville shopping every now and then, drink a little, hunt a little, look at the fields, look at each other, and sleep whenever we feel like it, especially in the wintertime. Now all we do is keep lookin’ up, and waitin’.” (38)
This destabilization of community pits the townspeople against nuclear fission itself, a movement from modernism in Deliverance, where Lewis and Ed return to stability with only nightmares to remind them of the possibilities of postmodern lostness. As Limon notes, the system, “The modern army[,] is too large for modernism; it is too large for the century, for the episteme” (130-31). Like Lewis, McLendon ponders whether there is a world without war, without death falling from the heavens.
The profound fear of evil destruction replaces the normal rituals of young manhood. Instead, their experience of self and the world may find the form in Dickey’s poem “Victory,” first published in Atlantic Monthly in August 1968 and collected in The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy. As Robert Kirschten notes, “Victory” is a “nightmare poem about one of the supreme evils of human experience: world war” (38). Having passed his own trial by fire in the Pacific, the narrator on Okinawa becomes drunk on whiskey sent by his mother and, leaving a shack that recalls a secret club built by boys high on a cliff above the Pacific, he ends in Yokohama on occupation duty. He emerges from his stupor in a tattoo parlor with a large snake “ . . . at my throat. / Beginning with its tail, cutting through the world / wide Victory sign moving under / My armpit like a sailor’s, scale / By scale.” The tattoo colors are being applied by Japanese artisans; therefore, peacefully, the “future lay brilliantly in / The needles of the enemy.” The snake crosses the breast, the belly, the small of the back, and “passed through the V between / My legs, and came / Around once more all but the head.” The snake tattoo coils around the speaker’s “right haunch,” and the head enters the anal orifice: “Forever surviving crushing going home / To the bowels of the living, / His master, and the new prince of peace” (“Victory” 38-41). The nightmarish world of war and man and his old enemy are one, as Edenic evil inhabits man and war. The serpent of mythic predecessors provides what unity occurs—victory—when death falls from the sky and evil is subsumed into good.
Latham Training Field at Peckover provides a testing ground for Frank Cahill’s passage into fatherhood, an unanticipated passage after not seeing his son since the boy’s birth. He accepts Joel as his son; however, Joel’s identity may also be Frank’s alter-ego, not only as “son” to mythic “father” but also as young Frank, whom old Frank seeks to comprehend along with the good and evil of war, or the serpent within. Because Joel’s mother leaves Cahill before the child is born, Frank’s fatherhood is based on hearsay and the evidence that Joel has named Frank as next-of-kin. Frank’s need is twofold: his passage into fatherhood and his understanding of his son’s passage into manhood in the father’s absence. Locating his son’s (and by extension his own) identity, Cahill learns that Joel is somehow responsible for the plane crash, has somehow become a new prince of peace with evil hidden inside good. Joel’s accident is suspect, for few accidents occur in the training planes, according to Hoccleve: “The only way a person could possibly be killed or be seriously injured short of flying straight into the ground is for two planes to run together. There has to be a considerable impact, caused either by contact with another aircraft, or with an object, or with the ground” (47).
Hoccleve embodies the army ideal; therefore, although he believes Joel flew illegally over a brush fire and caused a stupid, unnecessary death, the cadet’s action must be transcended, covered up. To
The quilt in which he is wrapped after the crash further supports Joel’s—and by extension all young men killed in war—apotheosis. At the home of his temporary rescuers, Adel Bledsoe brings out her homemade quilt, with its pattern of a many-windowed church. When unfolded, the quilt’s upper part is “solid with blood. On both sides of the main concentration there was other blood, as though flung and spattered; there was more of this on one side than the other. . . . It was possible to make out by the position of dried blood the form of an upper body” (272). The quilt, when shaken out, gives up a part of a tooth. With an artifact much like the Shroud of Turin and relics such as the tooth, a zipper from Joel’s boot, his goggles, and his notebook annotated with pseudo-spiritual aphorisms, the Alnilam cadets begin what amounts to canonization of the “son.” Joel’s rising from the Bledsoe bed amounts to a resurrection. Corporal Phillipson, Colonel Hoccleve’s clerk-assistant whose knowledge of Joel was slight but informative, also reflects upon the boy’s godliness or duality: Joel walks many punishment tours for rule infractions, but the tours do not tire him out because, he tells the corporal, “The Second Body did it” (295). Apparently Joel moves easily from one physical self to another, with a more sustained strength used by or against the dogs of war.
Alnilam, a masculine vision of the second half of the twentieth-century and the boys who fight and die, provides no ritual of manhood that could be called liberation of self, no full awareness of Joel’s human nature, or social facts. The novel questions history, the system, conformity, and causality. The children, the cadets, attempt in much the old way to originate a new prophet in Joel and Alnilam instead of embracing their own lives or even a belief in science. The Alnilam cadets accept as religious artifacts the alleged remaining traces of Joel. When the Alnilam members come to the shed to show/describe the film, Cahill hears some of the boys’ club maxims. Joel’s notebook provides the testament to war and violence: Cadet Blazek intones,
“When we move for full control we will be emerging from the war, called a World War, into the real one: the one that has never been fought, or even imagined. There is only one victory, and the main thing about it for Alnilam is that when we have it we will throw it away, and live in the silence and space and music where it has brought us. We shall be weightless, but still control the ground under our feet.” (581)
These mysterious statements indicate that Joel’s manifesto for “heaven” (whether it be in the air or in a new utopia where war cannot exist, a heaven on earth) the purple air fliers may inhabit, depends upon the constellations for secular and divine connections. Fliers’ heaven is
“A great field, with no flowers, and an extension of clear water within the city, glittering with our initials. For that field Orion was put into the sky, and Alnilam put into the center of it. No one who stays with me . . . and is not killed will fail to see that field. And some will enter it. Then we will see what is there for us, and the long music will start.” (581-582)
If the “long music” is the artistic or aesthetic principle, the conflict between male warriors and the more feminine principle of creativity will be ended; young men will be able to separate from their communities, to search, and to return with a mate and add to the community. However, the Alnilam cadets’ bond is built around the patriarchal assumptions that men, strong and aggressive, powerful and dominant, use force to solve problems. Such male bonds privilege meaningful relationships only
Cahill exemplifies war as a patriarchal exercise by his hearing (watching?) the cadets end the training that gives them adult-male status. Graduation day for the cadets occurs in a surrealistic landscape of surging airplane engines, whirling propellers, a blind man stumbling among the planes, and his dog barking and attacking. One Alnilam member deliberately panics a non-member who then panics the weak cadet Faulstick, broadsides his plane, and kills Faulstick (665). Cahill questions the occurrence that is, in fact, what Joel has brought him to Peckover to witness. The crux of war’s meaning is somehow at stake here. Shears, now the head of Alnilam, agrees that Faulstick’s killing was “maybe not necessary” but that “maybe in the long run it was. They [the officers] want life and death, we’ll give it to them” (666). When Cahill threatens to stop Alnilam, Shears insists that he cannot; in fact, he has become a part of war.
Alnilam, under the leadership of Shears, apparently justifies killing with its acceptance of an atheistic aphorism of James Thompson, a poet of despair, who wrote under the name Bysshe Vanilis (the B.Y. engraved on Joel’s goggles): “No hope could have no fear” (670). “That,” Shears says, is what Thomson said in the beginning. “That, and what we say together, is all we know about him. . . . Keep the words, Let’s keep all the words” (671). As Casey Clabough notes, “Thomson’s verse reinforces the group’s somber nihilism” (103). Cahill attempts to reconcile Shears’ giving responsibility for such a hopeless philosophy to a mere boy, but Major Iannone rejects all “cranks” and includes Joel, “all kinds of holy men, prophets, kings, . . . Hitler . . . and Jesus Christ included”; Major Iannone, the medical man, regards as “crack-brained” the leaders who have brought violent, unnatural death into the world (658). Captain Whitehall, bidding Cahill goodbye, emphasizes man’s violence: “There’s a deep bottom on this thing. Real deep. It comes out of the caves, and it’ll go on out beyond the planet, when it comes to that. It has to do with what’s part of the nature of people, and the ways they influence each other” (660). Giving Cahill the E6B calculator, Whitehall explains how man can locate himself at all times by the stars. Neither religious myth nor science, Dickey implies, is a cure for man’s blindness, and the truth lies somewhere between the cave and Orion.
Blind war in Alnilam, much as war-like adventure in Deliverance, marginalizes the creative principle represented by women, making women commodities, de-valued creatures excluded from that purple field or Valhalla. Her son abandons Florence Cahill, abandoned first by her husband. Hannah Pelham, “the wild mountain flower of the cotton mills” (231), brags about her multiple sexual escapades but blames her “clap” on Joel. Her sexual pleasure with Cahill, and with Joel before him, depends upon her being whipped “like a bad girl” with the slide rule that belonged to Joel (381). Even though Cahill invites Hannah to accompany him to Atlanta, she recognizes that he wants her as a replacement for Zack, as a new seeing-eye dog. Also dehumanizing Lucille Wick, the supply-room worker, Cahill accuses her of receiving Joel as well as Colonel Hoccleve behind her counter to roll “around with you and the sheeps,” and becomes himself aroused and attempts seduction (455) Rejected, he mentally categorizes her, thinking, “He had heard many sluts, all ages, talk like this” (457). She dismisses his accusations, correctly naming the fliers, their desires, and, by implication, his desires: “Them boys. . . . All of “em, him [Joel] and the rest of ‘em . . . they’re just little boys, come to play. . . . Go up yonder in the air to play” (456). Even Adel Bledsoe, the housewife who aids Joel is “all right” only “some of the time” (270).
The question here, as in Deliverance, is not whether or not the women are used and abused for they are; the question is whether the representation of women reinforces the war ideology. Does
Works such as Alnilam question masculine identity, where boys and men continuously fight, fuck, and drink while seeking true knowledge of the nature of men, rather than seeking reconciliation, love making, and community. Male bonding to the exclusion of women in Dickey’s three novels produces or reflects war games that do not lead to ritual passages into a secure cultural life. Whitehall, the novel’s philosophic center, holds little hope for the future projected in Alnilam: “Everyone of these boys is being taught to kill. . . . Cannons, thirty-calibers, antipersonnel bombs, general-purpose, white phosphorus—you name it.” He recognizes the eternal concepts of warrior-hood: “All these innocent-looking kids. That’s their stuff. They’re being raised on it. That’s their toy pile, their sandbox. They know what to do with those things, but they don’t know what they mean.” (645)
That missing or inadequate fathers, including Cahill, are part of the chain of failure, Whitehall has no doubt. Cahill left a gap in Joel’s life and “there’s a ‘call’ psychology working here,” Whitehall says, that caused Joel to name his father as next of kin. Children will, Whitehall says, “do ingenious things, desperate things, to get together with their parents, if the regular ways are not working out” (654). Cahill’s abandonment of his fatherly duties has brought Joel to “some school-kid thing.” Whitehall places Joel among “all these so-called leaders, Napoleon and Julius Caesar. Huey Long down in Louisiana,” who
“give people the notion that they can make life different in some way, and that the people who help them, who join in with them, will be different, will be made different, will exist in a new way. . . . There’s not a person in the world who really likes himself, the way he is; anything at all would be better for him than the way he is.” (655-66)
War’s cult of male identity, Whitehall insists, sanctions the basest of human instincts: misogyny, brutality, racism, and childish avoidance of responsibility. Group ritual and banding together against women provide sexual and social identity at the cost of cultural safety and community.
Dickey’s third novel, fifty years after he began his own experience in World War Two, completes3 a trilogy of war and its paradigm of escape from masculine boredom through the violence of war and war-like action. While the first novel privileges personal excitement over self-identity through community, and the second novel searches for personal truth through science and myth, To The White Sea suggests that the Enlightenment search for a moral universe has failed. The setting—Tokyo and points north to Japan’s northernmost island—is a personal as well as war battlefield, a journey, a quest. The firebombing of Tokyo with which the novel begins foreshadows the nihilistic outcome of the journey. Sergeant Muldrow, a machine gunner whose airplane is shot down just before the napalm bombing of Tokyo, is a violent man who embraces war; however, through an almost unarticulated process he becomes aware of the vulnerability of man facing annihilation.
Muldrow qualifies as Dickey’s man energized through the adrenaline-pumping violence of hunting and war. His background in Alaska produces the warrior who depends only upon the excitement of the hunt and removes from his psyche any tenderness toward the other, and everyone is the other. In his barracks the men who should be buddies, bonded comrades, see Muldrow as frightening in his “otherness.” They, “others” to Muldrow in this instance, resist the dehumanizing of war and choose to emulate their civilian lives, carrying on as they can without change; Muldrow,
Unlike Ed Gentry, who returns to community even though he remains fearful, and Cahill, who seeks community in a relationship with Hannah if she will return with him to his swimming pool and building, Sergeant Muldrow forgoes his humanity, thus symbolizing mankind’s loss in war’s annihilation. Interpreters often address the Van Gennep5 myth of separation and return in Dickey’s work, especially its application to the adventure story genre; however, in To The White Sea Dickey’s narrative strategy denies—in postmodern fashion—closure of a heroic journey and return to share knowledge with the community.
War as nihilistic, with man as doomed victim, appears when Muldrow, a machine gunner, becomes the only survivor of a plane shot down over Tokyo. The master of the strategy, history’s Major General Curtis LeMay, called the bombing a boiling and baking “to death” of Tokyo (Dower 41). The intensity of the chaotic hell Muldrow finds himself in enforces the horror of human behavior in war. Muldrow and the citizens run “from the conflagration” reported to be “so intense that in some places canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames” (Dower 41).
Dickey’s fictional account of war in the Pacific benefits from the fifty-year interval between the firebombing in Tokyo and the writing of To The White Sea. In modern, post-World War II America, Japanese soldiers were regarded as technologically and spiritually inferior, barbaric savages likely to torture a captured soldier before putting him to an agonizing death. Therefore, as John Keegan posits, against such an enemy the use of a revolutionary weapon such as napalm was a logical outcome “of the industrialisation of war in the mid-nineteenth century, and both a logical and inevitable extension of the revolution in war which preceded it” (578). Postmodern opinions, however, became qualified by American actions in Vietnam and by a global capitalist commodity that dictates political correctness. That the ability to promote savagery and barbarism as stays against savagery and barbarism is not limited to a certain people has become clearer through the use of nuclear fission against Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States and its use of napalm on civilians in Vietnam.
Muldrow’s involvement in the napalm attack against Tokyo provides a vivid culmination of the death that rains down from the sky described in Deliverance and from the noise and fear in the sky above Peckover, North Carolina. The mature Dickey demonizes not only the Japanese with American language common then but shocking now, but also he provides balance by demonizing American jingoism as well.
Dickey’s construct of Muldrow as end exemplar of American military training dramatizes a postmodern reaction to modernity. The American military male as hero, once an adored historical figure, comes into question, much as the war in Vietnam has come into question. At first Muldrow appears a typical American war hero; soon, however, his solipsistic inner landscape re-identifies him as ruthless rampant killer as he moves across the Japanese islands destroying traces of community as he goes. As Leszek Kolakowski argues in “The Demise of the Historical Man,”
being human and nonhistorical is inconceivable; that a mankind robbed of historical consciousness is a monstrosity . . . that collective memory as it was crystallized in historical knowledge is not only a necessary condition but the very foundation of our self-identity as beings that live in a human, that is communal, way. (461).
The failure of collective memory, however, occurs as tribes of man cease to live in a communal way. Just such a being, Muldrow refuses personal or communal history and is both human and non-historical. His memories, like random snapshots of the past, appear in the story merely to adumbrate the present and its imagery. Miriam Marty Clark states that in such cases “even the illusion of organic unity between past and present, mediated by memory and distorted or obscured by symptoms, is gone” (83). Muldrow’s childhood signifies America’s childhood, a past consumed in the present, and serves to flatten historical time in the present, “appropriating its imagery . . . while repudiating its depths” (87). Muldrow’s and war’s savagery exists at the root of failure to sustain humanity in any culturally secure way. Labeled a “consumer society, post-industrial society, society of the spectacle, postmodernist society,” etc. (Sarup 143), the social existence Muldrow experiences occurs within postmodernism itself in its lack of unity, of stability. Muldrow demonstrates the postmodernism that has uncovered the “hedonism, the lack of social identification, the lack of obedience, narcissism, the withdrawal from status and achievement competition” of cultural modernism (Sarup 144). His is the chaos theory; randomness, surprise, and dysfunction that are, if not as valuable as orderly experience, the expected. Muldrow’s solipsistic qualities—his sense of alienation, of loss, the elevation of his unconscionable loneness over social man’s conscious unity, the fragmentation of his life into historical discontinuity—motivate him beyond his Alaskan childhood.
To The White Sea pursues to the ultimate the Alnilam group’s motto of despair: “No hope could have no fear.” When men are committed to die in war, they are already dead; fear only hurries death. Muldrow’s similar lack of mythic or human hope seems, at first, based in the absence of the mother as well as the father’s failed parenting so similar to Cahill’s parenting of Joel. After the death of the mother, Muldrow’s father takes his son to Alaska’s Brooks Range (18). He teaches his son to shoot before the boy is big enough to hold a rifle, and he teaches him a primitive way of life much like that of an animal in a savage wilderness, unlike the life Lewis imagines where women and children are protected in the wilderness. As Lawrence Broer notes, the one bit of color in the icy whiteness of the Brooks Range is a cabin wall painted red, symbolizing the father’s aggression (6). Muldrow sees the “wild red” wall as a trap, “no place to go,” and as “part of the ‘other.’” (218). The red wall, “the far wall of my father’s cabin” was “as red as any blood in the snow” (40), revealing the feminine principle so absent in Muldrow’s life, later recalled when he is hiding in the pipe in Tokyo where further evidence of the feminine appears in “unnamable” stuff. When he reaches young manhood, Muldrow enlists in the Army Air Corps where his failure to survive war or to achieve a heroic warrior’s death brings his end as a death-dealer, a raptor, that falls from the sky.
Even before Muldrow parachutes into Tokyo, he rejects the mid-twentieth-century concept of wartime male bonding. The airmen in the Tinian Island Quonset hut sharply contrast postmodern Muldrow and modern soldiers, with the latter attempting to recreate a home-like atmosphere. The men’s photos—their wives, children, mothers, and girlfriends—are, to Muldrow, just “pictures of people, mainly women and children, little children, and mostly ugly,” and he sees no reason “for Betty Grable to be up on the wall in a white bathing suit, with her fat ass in your face” (10-11). He prefers the isolation of the Brooks Range, thinking that not one of the gunners knows the real feeling of home, “like it used to be when I came in off the snowshoes . . . and look[ed] right straight into that red wall” (11). The red wall images Muldrow’s alienation and solipsism, further evidenced in his description of the snowshoe hare’s hiding in the landscape (70-71). These two lyrically descriptive
Opening the novel, Muldrow’s colonel briefs the men on the upcoming napalm bombing, articulating the dehumanizing of gender and race. The colonel intones: “Fire . . . We’re going to put him in it. . . . We’re going to put it in his eyes and up his asshole, in his wife’s twat and in his baby’s diaper” (1). Muldrow, at the end of the Colonel’s speech, says, “That had nothing to do with me” (2). However, Muldrow represents imperialistic power just as much as Conrad’s Kurtz does. Later, from his hiding place in the Tokyo sewer pipe, Muldrow calls down the fire.
The firebombing of Tokyo annihilates human qualities, uncovering the bestiality just under the skin of terrified beings. When the fires begin and Muldrow leaves the security of the pipe to run through the burning city toward water, he, too, is threatened by combustion:
Tokyo didn’t need any more fire . . . . It was so hot that I kept looking at the arms of the coat I had on to see when they’d take fire. And then it got hotter, goddamn it, and hotter than that. I didn’t think my clothes would catch . . . . I thought I would take fire myself, inside the clothes, and that the clothes, shoes and all, would bum up after I did. (59)
Killing for clothes, shoes, and safety as he goes, Muldrow works
crossways through the main push of people, all of them going for the water. It made sense to them, I guess, though I’d reckon as many drowned as were burned up. The water seemed to turn them against each other, and a lot of them held the other ones down and tried to get on top for a second. That was a bad mistake, I could have told them—those poor bastards trying to stand on top of their own kids, just for one more breath of smoke. What if they’d got it? (60)
There are no heroes here, no vignettes of courage and resistance among the dehumanized parents and children who evoke the family pictures on the Quonset hut walls. Now Muldrow realizes what Ed in Deliverance realizes, that killing is man’s choice:
. . . the idea of the war—any war—had more or less left me when I was in there shoving through the streets with the people trying to get out, or in the water with them, or even when I had hit the three of them I’d killed. War was in back of the things I’d done, sure, but when I’d done them, the war didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. I was not carrying out anybody’s orders, that’s for sure. (67)
Muldrow understands the nature of nihilistic man, thinking: “the war was not the main thing. It might have been to them, to the Japs, but it was not to me. There didn’t need to be any war. There were not any rules, except the ones I made. Everything would ride on that” (69-70). The “Japs” are others, and Muldrow, rejecting all distinctions in moral values, kills because he rules that he can.
The physical search for passage to the north parallels Muldrow’s inner passage through a personal landscape. By the end of his first day out of Tokyo, he has observed and learned about the Japanese, wondering how “Nip men can tell one [woman] from the other. They all had flat dish faces and round shoulders . . . and walked with little steps” (76). He works on “words,” trying to pick up a few in Japanese, and on eliminating his American gestures.
During his fourth day of travel Muldrow begins to outfit himself for his death, which will find him newly uniformed as nature’s soldier: a bird of prey. He kills hundreds of swans on a park lake,
Muldrow’s emotional journey as he studies nature in Japan—and in Alaska in his memories—resembles an Emersonian concept of nature as soul; however, he arrives at a startlingly different conclusion from that of the transcendentalist. His spiritual thought crystallizes through an encounter with an American who has lived in a Buddhist monastery for six years. The monk offers to hide him and attempts and fails to teach Muldrow the Zen concepts by which the monastery lives. The American monk whose pantheist concept the sergeant refuses betrays Muldrow to the Japanese, and he arrives at a final, nihilistic decision. The monk says that “God is everywhere. . . . God is in this snow,” and Muldrow thinks, “I should have come back to him and said, ‘No, the snow is in the snow’” (217). The snow evokes the losses of his childhood and its discontinuity in the present:
I remembered my father, now, as part of all that in a way he never really was. It was that red side of the cabin that hit me, the one whole wall of blood red, but brighter than blood: brighter and brighter. When my father painted the inside of the cabin, and made the wall that way, he said it was because you got starved for color up there in all that snow, and craved it like elk and caribou crave salt. I believed him then, believed that was the reason for the paint, but now I had come to think, without any notion why, that there was another reason. The red was more than the color you were starved for. It was something else. Something real definite happened when you opened the door and came in out of the snow and faced into that red wall. Whatever it was hit you like a hammer right over the heart—not in the head or the guts but the heart. (217)
Before he fully establishes his own nihilistic code, Muldrow had accepted his father’s explanation of the red wall. Taken to primitive Alaska when his mother died, the boy was taught to hunt, to shoot, and to live a totally masculine existence, without recognizing the wall as creative, artistic, feminine—the hammer over the heart.
Muldrow now sees his father’s intent with the wall as a threat to his fragile achievement of a unified self. “Now, in Japan,” he thinks,
. . . after all those years, I thought I had it. I had what the wall really did. It was nothing but this: you had to stand out against it. In the snow, on the muskeg, the animals and birds blended with what was there, with what they were in. The tern did, the ptarmigan and the winter weasel and the lynx did, and I did my best to do the same thing. But when I came in from the white and up against that wild red, I couldn’t do it anymore. I was trapped, you could see me, and there was death in that. There’s no other way to put it: there was no place to go. The background, the world, was against me. That’s why the change came when I moved from white to red, moved against the red and stopped. Or maybe you could say I was stopped. (217-18)
The alienation of the feminine entraps and insures present as well as future death, especially for warriors who “stand out” against it. The wall figures prominently in the portrayal of women as objects of use to hostile males, a gender disconnection that operates at a considerably more metaphorical level in To The White Sea than in the first two novels.
After parachuting into Tokyo and hiding in a sewer pipe until the firebombing begins, Muldrow’s rejections of even photographic reminders of women prove mere hints of the depth his misogyny reaches. His rejection of things feminine applies to every aspect of women; for safety Muldrow goes further into the pipe and steps “amongst the squishing shit and other stuff” (33), through “the shit and God knows what else” (38). As Sandra Durham points out, the “stuff” is “Probably menstrual blood and related sanitary products” (5), which, though literally unspeakable by Muldrow, provide him “shit and safety” (33).
At all levels of intimacy Muldrow uses women as objects. Perhaps because she has enjoyed the intimacy of sex with him, an act that requires language he is unwilling to utter, Muldrow, while still in Alaska, kills a college girl from Kansas who was “working with the Unuluk Eskimos one summer”; while talking to the American monk, he mentally opposes the power of “the bend of the creek” where he has buried the girl’s body to the religious power the monk senses in nature (193). In Japan, killing a Japanese woman who might give an alarm, he decapitates her, putting the head in a water bucket on a turning water wheel. The horror of his act means no more to Muldrow than the idea of jellied gasoline in a woman’s vagina or a baby’s diaper, for he embraces war: “Everything about it was enough to drive you crazy, but you like it. . . . You? I? Who?” (143). When he sees through a window a naked woman at her bath he believes she “lifted her arms straight up and shook herself—that was for me. I’m damned sure” (132). His interpretation of her innocent gesture reinforces the male idea surrounding Bobby’s rape in Deliverance and Cahill’s dehumanizing of Lucille Wick when she refuses him: women are sluts who deliberately draw voyeurs and rapists.
The ultimate image, however, of woman as other is that of the red wall. Blood-colored, reminiscent of the “God knows what else” in the sewer pipe he uses as a refuge, Muldrow will be trapped and helpless, out in the open with mythic woman against the red wall. Without a true human relationship, a community that includes mothers and wives, Muldrow becomes his father “who wanted his son to be independent from others just as he has been” (213). Muldrow turns, as his father taught him, to nature and animals.
A proof that animals are preferable to people is in Muldrow’s encounter with an Asian Eskimo tribe, “the little bearded people, the bear people” (261), who feed upon and worship the bear. Although the tribe accepts him and tends his wounds, their caging a bear in preparation for its killing is an epiphany:
I had been wrong. I had been dead wrong about them. No matter how friendly they were, these were men like all the others, and they did the same things as the others . . . . The animals are a lot better than any such. Better, a lot better, than the people. My heart turned around and locked. (250)
Muldrow completes his transformation from reality into images of reality, arriving at nihilism for the human race. Two possibilities remain. He is familiar with the first: like an animal to hide, to blend into the snow.6 On the Brooks Range, Muldrow
had seen the snowshoe hare lie down, lie down in a bunch of low bushes, and make an outline of himself. First there’s an outline in the snow. and then there’s not any outline. I’ve seen that. The only thing left is the eyes, and I’ve seen the hare close his eyes, and I could have walked over the place where he was, and unless I stepped on him I never would have seen him, or known that he was in the world, either. Most of the time I never saw the hare close his eyes, and I couldn’t find him. But once . . . I saw the eyes closing, I saw the whole thing, the whole disappearance. I’ve seen that; that’s what I had. I had it. I was there with it. (71)
The second possibility, annihilation, occurs when he can no longer hide and becomes visible against the red wall.
Muldrow’s tenuous safety, reinstated only briefly with the old Japanese man, follows the track that leads from the “down hawk on a down rabbit” (260). Muldrow has an intense, violent experience
As Madan Sarup notes in his discussion of totality and fragmentation, some critics deny that one can grasp what is going “on in [postmodern] society as a whole”; thus, “postmodernists stress fragmentation—of language games, of time, of the human subject, of society itself” (147). Coherence and autonomy become lost in this dissolution of unity, dissolution echoed in Muldrow’s death.
His physical death occurs after he has met, lived with, and provided food for an old man who “was about a thousand years old, or sure did seem like it, with the kind of oldness that only oriental people have” (261); he depends upon the old man to teach him how to survive. The very old but very strong hermit communicates with Muldrow in the only language they share: an understanding of nature encompassing only themselves, animals, and birds. The old man gives Muldrow a Zen-like knowledge of the raptors trained to hunt for him, drawing the net tightly around Dickey’s thematic portrayal of war as raptorial undiscriminating death that falls from the sky. Muldrow begins to transfer “his feelings—or soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it—to them [hawks: raptors] because they did more than any other creatures for the wish I had that was most like me: not only the need to attack but to fall on something. from above” (265, emphasis added).
Alone after the old man’s death, much as he was alone after his father’s death, Muldrow becomes “able to see into the snowbank; into the stone. To see beyond what any human, any man who has ever been born, could see. Like I tell you, out of the snowdrift, into the snowdrift, into the stone” (272). With this sight into or illusion of the nature of things, Muldrow articulates man’s total destruction: death from the sky, falling on beings good or evil from above, becomes man’s inheritance. Coating himself in blood and then swan feathers, Muldrow meets death:
I walked out and I knew I had found it, what I had been looking for all my life, in all the blood and the fucking and the right arm and the fast move, in everything I had done and everybody I had to deal with. . . . In the wind the swan feathers fluttered on me, and I could have flown. (274)
Muldrow exults, for he has gotten everything, the “landscape and the weather,”” until “There it was. A red wall blazed” (275).
The epigraph to Alnilam—from De Natura Rerum—locates the novel’s philosophical thrust in nature’s invisible world of atoms—the blood, the bird, the man, the stone—where man’s essential loneness in the universe becomes a blend of his atoms with it. The importance here of the anatomy of the world—the fragmentation, alienation, and dehumanization that replace yesterday’s spirituality—is the moral ambiguity that confounds culture today. Such ambiguities did not exist in 1945, when napalming Tokyo was thought exactly the right moral military procedure to protect American citizens, an irony that some military supporters defend even today.
Deconstructing the link between history and the real, Derrida argues that “Before being the object of a history—of an historical science—writing opens the field of history—of historical becoming” (27). Such statements indicate to some an ontological and epistemological skepticism that makes history pure fiction, with little or no references to events of the past. Dickey’s fictive paradigm, set in an American past that echoes the Romantic movement from innocence to forest to violence to death, enters the time line at violence and death. Perhaps the three novels are an unburdening of Dickey’s fascination with the activities and roles assigned him in wartime.
Through Gentry’s adventurous encounter with killing and Cahill’s blind questioning of it to Muldrow’s death (as well as the deaths of fifty million “others”), the philosophical movement seems toward a search for meaning beyond the fragmented world symbolized specifically by Muldrow with
To say that the past is only known to us through textual traces is not . . . the same as saying that the past is only textual, as the semiotic idealism of some forms of post structuralism seems to assert. This ontological reduction is not the point of postmodernism: past events existed empirically, but in epistemological terms we can only know them today through texts. Past events are given meaning, not existence, by their representation in history. (81-82)
The empirical evidence of the Tokyo bombing and the meaning that Muldrow achieves as he escapes the burning city evoke the existence and meaning J. G. Ballard achieves in Empire of the Sun in two of many relevant passages. When Jim, the boy separated from his parents and interned, stays behind the forced march with Mrs. Victor (who has befriended him) so that she can die where she is, he sees beautiful colors in the sky and murmurs, “Mrs. Victor. Mrs. Victor,” believing that her soul is ascending. Reunited after the war ends with his mother, he tells her that it was not Mrs. Victor’s angel soul, but instead a huge flash [actually the atomic bomb exploding], like “God taking a photograph.” After Mrs. Victor’s death, when his male protector kills the young Kamikaze pilot whom Jim has befriended, saying, “He’s only a Jap,” Jim protests, crying, “The war is over.” Muldrow’s same inability to discern meaning outside of violence, especially to those he calls so round-faced he cannot tell them apart, is discontinuous with Muldrow’s time but not with his war within.
Muldrow’s personal Oedipal narrative of achieving manhood by fighting in the war serves only as a Sisyphean process of doomed circularity that includes Gentry and Cahill. Although Muldrow confronts the red wall as he is killed by the Japanese, his story survives, for it is the story of these men and all men, as Whitehall says, from the dark of ancient and modern war, training to kill and be killed. The irrationality of violence, Dickey’s novels stress, governs the post-war world and exposes the god-like male principle as dangerous rather than as civilization-preserving through exalting the female. With women absented from the tribe, the issues become simpler: how males can create illusion among themselves to assume power, identity, and security. In such bonded groups, the penis becomes the major referent. War is more, however, at the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era. Dickey’s novels demonstrate that it is unexpected death being rained down from the godless heaven upon good and evil alike.
1 Baum, applying concepts of Dominick LaCapra’s History and Criticism, contributes valuable insight into my own study, for few literary critics have commented on Dickey’s fictional presentation of man’s violence as a war behavior. As she emphasizes, the entire complex of physical, social, and psychological factors, as well as “contemporaneous time and place,” becomes “dialogized” in a historical sense and, citing LaCapra, the dialogue, undergoing different interpretations, “employs self-critical reflection about its own protocols of inquiry, and makes use of modes such as irony parody, self-parody, and humor, that is, double- or multiple-voiced uses of language” (36). Baum also applies Jack Zipes’ insight into the process that has constituted civilization of the western world.
2 Robert Bauval’s and Adrian Gilbert’s The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids provides an excellent discussion of the Orion myth’s ancient roots.
3 Dickey’s death in 1997 ended his work on a fourth novel with the working title of “Crux,” which, he said, was to be his final statement on these themes. Casey Clabough, in Elements: The Novels of James Dickey, provides an interesting discussion of the fragment.
4 H. L. Weatherby’s “The Way of Exchange in James Dickey’s Poetry,” an early and important recognition of Dickey’s use of poetic insight as “The light [that] seems to come from some rather mysterious process of exchange between a man and his opposites” (21). Casey Clabough extends this concept further in his Elements: The Novels of James Dickey.
5 An informative discussion of Dickey’s use of Arnold Van Gennep’s rites de passage, or separation, transition, and incorporation, may be found in Robert Kirschten’s James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth: A Reading of the Poems (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987).
6 Casey Clabough, in his recent work, Elements: The Novels of James Dickey, bases his excellent discussion upon Dickey’s use of “merging,” noting Dickey’s belief that humankind is part of the world’s whole atomic field. Clabough remarks that since Dickey’s “method calls for him to know things on all levels—or even from the inside out—, much of his art is marked by attempts at becoming the essence of nature itself—not contemplating the natural world but assuming or being, to the best of his artistic ability, some aspect of it: a tree, a rock, an animal waking up in heaven” (6). Clabough’s critical approach accurately portrays important aspects of the novels in the present time. Also, however, Dickey demonstrates that “merging” or the ability to merge necessarily excludes the violence of war and man’s alienation from principles of birth and re-birth symbolized by the feminine principle.
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