A search for the 'unfettered self
Baumann, Paul
MANY GORDON ON LIFE & LITERATURE A search for the 'unfettered self' PAUL BAUMANN PAUL BAUMANN is associate editor of Commonweal. "agreeable fantasy." But, as so often with people this writer...
...This unresolved tension between social roots and opportunity, between faith and freedom, family and self, deep emotion and spontaneity, pervades these essays...
...But even on these terms, a majority needs some unifying principle or antipathy...
...As Fiedler wrote, American men flee women and the civilization they represent for the greater purity and sublimated sexuality only the company of other men can supply...
...Rabbit wants the freedom to run as fast and as far as Mr...
...Until human reproduction becomes a factory operation, women will carry a disproportionate burden--and should be accorded a disproportionate regard...
...The people who are plumping for the reintroduction of Gregorian chant into the liturgy are also funding the contras in Nicaragua, and they're doing it for the same reason," she writes in "Getting Here from There: A Writer's Reflection on a Religious Past...
...Gordon's criticism is both moralistic and ideological...
...On a trip to Ellis Island she concludes that the custom-bound cultures of her immigrant ancestors introduced America to "fun...brought the good food, turned up the music, and taught everyone to dance...
...Gordon asks...
...These perspicacious sentiments, however, make her essays on abortion doubly curious...
...He has an oldtime journalist's ear for humbug, and he knows the importance of interests and power in political life...
...For when it comes to a woman's right "to choose," Gordon becomes as grim an apologist for the unfettered self as her worst caricature of the male American writer...
...Church politics must appear more Manichean from a judicious distance...
...Who escaping fate...
...Liberalism, willing to support energetic government, especially in economic life, hesitates to use government to promote civic virtues, and in fact is so fearful of seeming repressive that it appears to have WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS E.J...
...Gordon knows Woolf is an awful snob, but can't bring herself to hold Woolf accountable...
...Particularly galling is Updike's attempt to turn mere "physical characteristics" into spiritual qualities...
...IrishAmerican Catholicism, with its insensibility to the arts and its comical anti-intellectualism, is perhaps a burden...
...Our legitimate fears, our feelings of artificiality and loss, reflect a world where the most fundamental human relations are being relativized by an idealized rationality...
...Simon & Schuster, $22.95, 430 pp...
...It is something "I make up each day, and it changes each day as I go along...
...Dionne, Jr...
...A woman must "be confident that she need not pay [for] a failure of technology or judgment" if she is to have "a sexual life unriddled by fear...
...But apparently Catholicism no longer engages her in any authoritative way...
...In this context, abortion is implicitly an attack on all human particularity and diversity, for it proclaims that all moral authority must bend to one stand a r d - t h a t of interchangeability, or what is erroneously called "equality...
...American literature, at least as written by men, is the story of males who are in some sense terrified of domestic entanglement, even sexuality, and who turn to violence as compensation or out of frustration...
...Imagine what Updike's aunt said to him at his uncle's funeral...
...There is considerable honesty in that admission...
...Wilson Carey McWilliams no standard of the public good beyond the desire to conciliate conflicting groups, a kind of appeasement rather than an ideal of justice...
...And he argues that contemporary Americans hate politics because they are disgusted by the terms of debate, an "artificial polarization" defined by the contest between liberals and conservatives...
...We must make decisions on abortion understanding how people really do live," she writes...
...Besides, where is the demand for certainty really located in this question...
...But acknowledging uncertainty and embracing it as an ethical premise are two different things, and lead to very different moral conclusions...
...and they get in a boy's way," she claims...
...But behavior is not the point for the American innocent," Gordon writes...
...Following the example of the marketplace, we are now intent on eliminating all chance and accident from our private lives...
...Gordon's resentments can lead her to rather strained conclusions, however...
...A degree of unresolved rancor is betrayed in her conclusion, where she resorts to taunting Updike and others as pimply boys...
...It is a cliche to say that a childish fear of change is at the heart of our present dissatisfactions and insecurity...
...The Pill and legal abortion have given women the independence long supposedly enjoyed by men...
...The counterattack against abortion rights has come "precisely [at] the time when women are achieving unprecedented levels of economic and political autonomy...
...Uncertainty resides in the possibility of life and in our ambivalent, even antagonistic, relationship to that unwanted life...
...In a sense, sexual differentiation itself i s judged an historical and ontological anomaly...
...All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self...
...Gordon calls this the "search for the unfettered self...
...One might meanly call it an intellectual suburb: she stays close enough to commute, but doesn't have to worry about staying over night or paying taxes...
...Something has to seem important enough to justify setting aside other differences in the interest of victory, a principle that contemporary conservatives have applied much more successfully than their liberal rivals, and that is the greater part of Dionne's story...
...In both cases, she objects so strongly to the surface sexual politics that she settles for wildly reductive interpretations...
...Who is insisting on the primacy of the self...
...For Updike, women are messy...
...Rabbit...
...We are, it seems, back to the dream of the u n f e t t e r e d self...
...Her essays on Edith Wharton and J.E Powers and a review of Mary McCarthy's Cannibals and Missionaries are masterly, combining balanced advocacy with acute analysis...
...But whatever the future holds, ultimately we cannot escape the chains--and one is sex--that fasten us to nature as well...
...Of course, ideological incoherence is not always a disadvantage in American politics...
...This fine account of the development of present-day conservatism shows that political coalitions are like geological formations, built up stratum by stratum out of the sediment of advocacy and events...
...She was as brave as a saint, sexually chaste, yet unmistakably marked with the racial and social prejudices of her place and time...
...But she is right about the larger cultural forces reflected in the work of American male writers--temptations Updike accepts as givens, not ideals...
...What Gordon denounces as an appalling moral failure in American literature, she regards as a source of female emancipation in society...
...O'Connor is peculiar, and her "circumscribed life," with its aggressive provincialism and terse, unapologetic Catholicism, poses problems for Gordon...
...None of these traditional social ties are based on equality in the strict sense BOOKS of the term, however...
...It is not a happy marriage...
...Gordon, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood on Long Island, tells us that but for the grace of God, or a good Bamard education, she too might have ended up mumbling Latin among these unreconstructed triumphalists...
...My own prejudice," she confesses elsewhere, "is that to lose the identification with the small community is to lose irreplaceable riches...
...Art is an unforgiving god...
...It will always be crucial to try to separate genuine moral concern from phobia, punitiveness, superstition, anxiety, a desperate search for certainty in an uncertain world...
...This seems especially troublesome for someone as dedicated to liberal values and as selfconsciously upwardly mobile as Gordon...
...That's an awful lot to attribute to plain chant...
...So where does Gordon finally land on matters sacramental...
...True, abortion levels the field...
...Despite Mary McCarthy's many impressive attributes, few have ever, as Gordon does in another piece, called her critical ministrations "tender...
...It seems an odd, even an unimaginative question, like asking what Louis Armstrong might have become if he had been born white and grew up in West-chester...
...How does unrestricted abortion, with its hyperindividualized and overly rationalized morality, fit into Gordon's more humanitarian vision...
...But 1.5 million abortions a year is a strange manifestation of equality, individual liberty, or sexual realism...
...It is certainty that abortion promises, and complication that it removes...
...Flannery O'Connor's failings are less subtle, and arouse Gordon's concern...
...The story of America is the story of the escape from fate," Gordon writes...
...Still, her feminism, her suspicion of masculine motives, and her sense of historical injustice push her to a dogmatic defense of abortion rights...
...from nature here...
...Most significantly, as Gordon sees it, equality and the demands of self-fulfillment require that men and women bear the same consequences for the same sexual acts...
...I'm not sure this distinction adds up to a difference, but certainly Gordon is right in judging art a paltry substitute for religion...
...Good Boys and Dead Girls is largely about writers and the qualities and moralities of art...
...Legal abortion ensures that equality of consequences...
...Are even the most sophisticated American writers ignorant of this possi328: Commonweal bility...
...One wonders if most working-class Methodists or Baptists, or many others, had it much better...
...But you don't believe her...
...Blessed are the coalition makers J. Dionne, now of the Washington Post and formerly of the New York Times, is what a political D reporter ought to be, a relentless seeker of that kernel of meaning that is the heart of fact...
...She wants to hold people to enlightened and universalistic standards yet allow room for the license and fierce discriminations of artistic vision...
...But Gordon will not pursue the implications of this equation...
...But at what cost...
...Gordon became "properly irreligious" at fourteen, she writes, relinquishing a preVatican II childhood fascination with sainthood for the "world of literature and art...
...Apparently so...
...To be sure, O'Connor is not an easy case...
...Where have Gordon's "irreplaceable fiches" gone...
...True, reason and technology enable us to manipulate nature to much benefit...
...Her writing on the natural, deeply satisfying bonds between mothers and children ("Having a Baby, Finishing a Novel") pays tribute to the primordial and humanizing value of the traditionally fettered self...
...In some crucial way, it is not serious: it has no stake in the future...
...In large part, Gordon mistakes Updike's exploration, even obsession, with sexual themes and the social and existential realities they illuminate, for gynophobic excess...
...Her admiration for path-breaking women writers such as McCarthy and Virginia Woolf is intense...
...All the certainty lies, in fact, in the act of abortion...
...My subject as a writer has far more to do with family happiness than the music of the spheres," she writes...
...perhaps we are doomed to want different and opposing things from life...
...therefore it is incapable of yielding much meaning and is inevitably without hope...
...Like a suspicious cleric, Gordon pedantically~ rejects Updike's attempt to touch upon religious motifs through sexual relations and description, judging them "overly transcendent and metaphorically unsatisfactory...
...In fact, the sexual relationship between men and women is asymmetrical...
...The great increase in conservatism's strength, however, grew out of the turbulence and failed promises of the 1960s and '70s, which cast a shadow on the moral title of the state...
...But if her indictment is true, even scintillating, in its particulars, it seems almost willfully obtuse in its synthesis...
...Admittedly, Gordon has a sharp eye, but shooting ultra-ultramontanes in a fish barrel is more a carnival trick than a measure of marksmanship...
...In the beginning, however, were shared aversions...
...But she won't admit that Updike and others have an ironic and complicated awareness of these very problems...
...Both ideologies, Dionne indicates, contain a contradiction...
...Besides, the causal connection between the kind of freedom Gordon prizes~"the exhausting effort of living fully andjustly"--and the making of literature is dubious at best...
...but Dionne also recognizes that at bottom, politics is speech, a quarrel, more or less civil, about the just and the unjust...
...The same ideological limitations lead her to savage Dennis Potter's ingenious TV movie, "The Singing Detective...
...The seemingly purer, less encumbered relationship with other males is held out as a possible salvation...
...Among others, she writes on Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Updike's Rabbit novels...
...And yet there is no other human act to which it comes closer...
...Doubtless Gordon feels she paid enough spiritual taxes in childhood for a lifetime...
...It is another method of stamping out ambiguity, and should make any novelist as good as Mary Gordon suspicious...
...Each of us cuts our own private accommodation with the church...
...ordon has endured tragedy in childbearing herself, and she is a strong, if nuanced, voice for the so-called traditional feminine sphere...
...Conservatism defends the free market and the autonomy of the private sector, but it upholds a whole set of "traditional values" that stand in need of public support, not the least against the corrosive effect of the market itself...
...Who, it might be asked, is running awa3...
...But Gordon's formulation probably crosses some negotiable but necessary boundary into arbitrariness...
...She believes in the vocation of the artist, although not in the religion of art...
...Freedom from necessity is not always a prescription for creativity...
...Human dignity, emotional depth and authenticity, however, inhere in what is given, what is unearned, what is passed on--like the care one bestows, literally without reason, upon children...
...Is this how we should think of new life...
...Unrestricted abortion, Gordon suggests, is an effort to equalize risks, to rationalize the outcomes of sexual life, and to use technology to ameliorate the inherent evils of sexual difference...
...This is noticeably true in the schematic reading given American fiction in the title essay ("Good Boys and Dead Girls"), and especially in its extravagant deprecation of John Updike...
...She praises Ford Maddox Ford for understanding "the work of domestic economy as utterly critical to happiness, indeed the very future, of the race...
...She went to the Lefebvrists looking for Balmain's, she tells us, but found only Kresge's...
...It is the most insidious expression of modernity's delegitimization of all inherited affinities and valu e s - s u c h as those between a woman and her unborn child...
...The freedom and autonomy that America is meant to stand for is the attempt to define the self outside of the bruising authority of fate...
...Gordon's patronizing tone, her educated consumer's confidence, is just as evident in her efforts on behalf of the allegedly enlightened faction of the church...
...Aiming to harmonize the right, the "fusionism" of the National Review focused on the negative commonalities uniting free marketeers and traditionalists like Russell Kirk: anticommunism and the agreement that capitalism is preferable to the "creeping socialism" of the welfare state...
...Gordon is also right about the American --essentially the modem longing for "the unfettered self...
...American fictional heroes usually do try to flee women and the domestic fate they embody...
...Somehow the sexual irresponsiblity of men--indeed men's biological immunity from childbearing--has become the basis for a woman's unqualified power over the unborn...
...James Madison's familiar argument instructs us that in a large republic, majorities must always be coalitions, full of implicit tensions and patched together by compromise, unable to take a consistently high moral tone or, ordinarily, to last very long...
...The rationalizing impulse tells us we can lethally intervene in the creation of human life--minimizing uncertainty and ambivalence-and still preserve a belief in the sanctity of life...
...Gordon employs these useful if limited archetypes to expose the lethal effect on women of male domination and violence...
...For McCarthy," observes Gordon, "terrorism 17 May 1991:327 is disturbing in the same way that sexual promiscuity would have been for Emily Bront~: it is political activity without manners, without form...
...And the love received in return...
...The maturing process is not one that deeply interests a certain kind of American writer," Gordon writes...
...it sounds more like fiction than Catholicism...
...The upshot is that liberalism and conservatism, in their different ways, are engrossed with the defense of their favorite individual and group "fights," seeking to exclude politics from large areas of life, so that we "hate" politics, in part, because so often it is unable to solve, or even address, the things that matter...
...Possibly...
...For one, she has better taste...
...She further ignores how seriously Updike takes incamational paradoxes, and how perverse his determinist Calvinism can be...
...Escaping the mystery and limits of that condition is what abortion too often promises...
...indeed, necessity is often a spur...
...if her faith was certain, her art and temperament were quite enigmatic...
...This, I think, puts her in the position of defending the very forces of dehumanization she abhors in other contexts...
...It is a pervasive intoxication, and one that often leads to carnage...
...they are slow...
...She is as appalled as any contra supporter at the trivialities infecting the reformed liturgy ("on the whole a botched job"), and has fled many a Mass "for my own protection...
...Well, that is unobjectionable enough...
...O'Connor of course lived almost her entire adult life at home as an semi-invalid, dying of lupus seemingly without much complaint at thirty-nine...
...It's all "fish sticks and Velveeta...
...But how we decide about abortion determines how a good many people actually live...
...To compare abortion to murder is at best naive," she writes justly...
...Clear, penetrating, and sure-handed...
...But few particulars about the "moral" context in which the decision for abortion takes place are forthcoming...
...Abortion on this scale should discomfort someone with Gordon's professed abhorrence of "abstraction," for it is a chilling extension of the modem world's belief in rational mastery and social engineering...
...There is nothing particularly new in Gordon's analysis of the misogynist undercurrents of American fiction...
...The same years, moreover, 17May 1991:331...
...This occasionally leads to miscalculation...
...Much of the argument was developed, as she acknowledges, by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel...
...When the going gets tough, the tough "light out for the territory," as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn liked to do...
...What would she have written in Iowa or in Connecticut, living a freer life...
...From the severe certainties of preVatican II Catholicism, she has taken much aesthetic nourishment: a love of language, story, and beauty as well as a regard for mystery...
...Abortion is not a simple question, and Gordon's essays are a compelling examination of the inconsistencies in the anti-abortion position as well as a sobering reminder of how mixed the moral and legal status of abortion has been historically...
...As far as Gordon is concerned, Updike is simply sacrificing the women in his novels on the altar of Rabbit Angstrom's dubious spiritual quest...
...L iterature is where her heart lies...
...In discussing Thomas Hardy she suggests that the relationship between the sexes "may be a tragic one...
...If we are interchangeable--as we are in the market330: Commonweal place--we are replaceable...
...More important, she argues that "the decision for abortion can be made responsibly in the context of a morally lived life by a free and responsible moral agent...
...O'Connor's stark parables, taste for violence, and conviction of judgment run counter to Gordon's more cosmopolitan moral tolerance and interest in manners and sensibility...
...Gordon rightly senses that a human life of real variety and emotional d~pth requires organic connection, particular attachments, and perhaps even parochial authorities...
...But, as so often with people this writer finds wanting, "they are frightened by change...they want to be told what to do...
...Dionne does justice to the New Left's crazy-quilt of radical democrats and countercultural individualists, but he points out that the theme and legacy of that complex movement was suspicion of institutions and of authority...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
