"And the field was him," a sentence in Plus, a novel by Joseph McElroy,
warrants an inquiry into field and the novel. The novelty of McElroy's
fiction grows from the attempt to use the structure of a novel as itself a
field, presenting actions which occur within fields. He displays field as
aesthetic structure, and field as content of aesthetic structure. So within
the novel, events which occur within a field can also be seen as themselves
constituting a field. In both field as structure and as content, the hero
is intelligible as a region of a field, not as a sphere or core of
individuality which passes through a field in fulfillment of a destiny.
In an ordinary story, choices among possibilities reduce the number of
possibilities to probabilities, and choices among probabilities reduce the
probabilities to necessity. In a field-novel, instead of an order of
succession from beginning possibilities, middle probabilities, and
concluding necessities, possibility can be preserved as such, because it is
a quality of the field. A field provides a different and all-over
distribution of energy and attention from a structure with a hero or heroine
at the center.
When field is a structure as well as thematic content, field-fiction can
draw the reader into its field through diction and sentence structure which
evoke experiences in reading which are self-evidently different from reading
a linear plot. Any detail in a conventional novel is significant as it
bears or does not bear upon the life or destiny of the hero. But any detail
in a field-novel can have, as part of its meaning, its position in a
spatio-temporal field. Without the hierarchy of importance to the hero,
details cannot easily be arranged in hierarchies, and any hierarchies which
survive fluctuate wildly. Even triviality can become important when the
triviality of any detail becomes part of the theme.
The effect of the attention to details which are not fixed in a hierarchy
by their bearing on the success of a hero is part of the impersonal feeling
of field, in which parts are as they bear upon their field, not upon the
happiness of one character. McElroy requires his readers to look at events
alertly, and to question the theory or system of values which justify
elevating one detail over another detail because of relevance to a single
center of personal interest.
The concept trivial suggests unimportance or insignificance, but can also
suggest coordination of three directions—the three ways of tri-vium.
Stephen W. Hawking speculates that "one may describe the whole universe in
terms of a collection of overlapping patches." "In each patch, one can use
a different set of three coordinates to specify the position of a point"
(23). McElroy sometimes seems to require three coordinates to specify the
position of a speck of dust, but he has an explicit thematic interest in
trivialities. When he provides coordinates for trivial details, which are
after all within the field, he is correcting the distortions which can be
caused by a hierarchy arranged around a central figure on a path in front of
a background. In The Letter Left to Me, the father has written in his
posthumous letter, "I gradually got diverted by trivial things" (121). The
son, who has been told by friends of the family to emulate the very father
who has written the letter to tell him not to be like him, thinks to himself
at college, "I don't visibly see myself as not surviving here, there are so
many interesting and trivial things to do" (137).
McElroy's trivialities are not trivial, because trifles which cause one to
lose sight of one's objective can open one's sight to one's position within
the field. In The Letter Left to Me (23), three apparently unrelated
statements can be seen to bear upon each other because each mentions gaining
or losing a vista. Thus three views are triangulated within these three
sentences about visual fields. A four-year-old boy is looking up his
grandmother's skirt:
. . .so she said, He likes the ladies. "In retrospect," the letter says,
"I am appalled by my neglect of the vistas which life has opened to me."
My father, I knew without hearing it said, was pleased with this living
room of this fairly "new" apartment of ours.
The pleasure of this living room is that it has a vista of Manhattan. The
child, arising among vistas, can be expected not to neglect the vistas which
life opens to him, although his vistas will be field-like more than
figure-ground. McElroy's vision attempts sight without the piercing looks
which seek to penetrate distance in a patriarchal perspective which has a
single center of focus. The theme of this novel emerges from relations
between distant vistas and close-up blindspots.
In the image of vista, one can see in the distance a goal one might move
toward, like Manhattan seen from Brooklyn Heights. Focus on a goal makes
the present circumstances subsidiary to the goal. But a blindspot, as a gap
in or frustration of one's vista, can bring attention back from a distant
focal point, so that what might have been subsidiary is looked at for
itself. Then, when looked at focally, the background, now integrated with
the foreground, may yield clues to a different forward movement than has
been available so far. In Plus, "You could go upon what you were yet to
know" (121).
A blindspot, if one can see it, may mark precisely the point at which
one's sight must grow. In McElroy's fictions, one grows into the
blindspots. In Hind's Kidnap, a man grows as a character by searching for a
kidnapped child who is missing from view. Although he does not find the
child, he finds himself within a field which he has been unaware of.
Appropriately most of the other people in this field are named for plants or
trees, as clues to a vegetable love which is complemented by a love of
vegetables.
The task in fiction, as in constructing any unified work of art, is to
achieve continuities, or communications among parts, in order to show the
connections which the writer believes to be true or powerful, perhaps even
good. When a novel could be structured on the analogy of an organism, then
contradictions, inconsistencies, and discontinuities could be apparent as
faults in characterization or in plotting. Subsequently the structure of
novels has been propped up from outside by an external scaffolding—a
philosophic system, a cyclicity like the four seasons, an analogy with a
musical form such as symphony or sonata, or parallels with a literary
structure such as the Odyssey. When a novel is on its own as a structure,
without external support, then continuity is on its own. Many of the
apparent discontinuities of postmodernist fiction emerge in contrast with
the false continuities of earlier fictions which demonstrated a different
world-design. The search is for reliable and self-validating continuities
which can be demonstrated in a narrative. The trustworthiness of
continuities in the action in a novel has an ethical and political
dimension, because continuities in a plot are models for the continuities to
be looked for in existence.
The myths of a culture are stories of the continuities which it offers as
continuities with higher powers and forces—sometimes the will of God, the
flow of Nature, the outcome of Chance. These continuities, because they can
be consolations, must be tested in order to uncover falsifications. An
artist's tasks include working out the conditions of, perhaps the
foundations of, trustworthy continuities. If the most realistic picture of
existence is that we dwell within a field, or fields, and are not on a path
shaped either by Destiny or Chance, then the continuities of a field must be
proved by the narrative, which must show how a complexly interwoven field
differs from contrived or devised continuities. For fiction the process can
entail eliminating linear narrative, or weaving several linear narratives
into a field without a single center of interest to distort the field in a
figure/ground composition.
When a novel was likely to follow the career of a character from beginning
through the middle toward the end, then the end of the novel could mark the
beginning of a well-rounded life within a settled state of moral character.
Then the hero has been seen to have achieved the integration of separate
parts of self into complex interdependencies. In such a well-rounded story
of a character who is being rounded out, actions sprawl and curve away from
each other, but then the lines of action are seen to bear upon each other in
a reconciliation or resolution of apparent discontinuities and differences.
The end of such an action is likely to return one to the beginning of the
action, as the conclusion is seen to have been potentially or embryonically
there from the start.
In such an organic structure, the life of an individual can enjoy a feeling
of benignly fateful growth, as the acorn is destined to grow into an oak.
That is fine for seeds which providentially fall into fertile soil, but
"Some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up"
(Matthew 13:4). That chance prevents many seeds from growing through no
fault of their own suggests that the successful growth of the hero is not
owing to a special virtue or a special providence. The story of the hero
has too often shown him, or her, as one of the elect, with suffering
redeemed by contributing to a spiritual education which is presided over by
benign powers which are somehow initiating the hero into the sphere of the
elect. This idea of the hero as chosen and destined continues to work away
truthlessly in entertaining stories and popular entertainments. But popular
entertainment does not include the goal of liberating the reader from the
oppression of false consolations and false continuities. Today, few are
likely to write convincingly of a life as the object of a providence which
interprets random pain and suffering as contributing to fulfillment of a
goal, or even a mission in life, as a calling which could have been
prophesied. If our lives are unsponsored and foundationless, then only our
commitments to our own choices, made among people who think somewhat like
ourselves, will shape a foundation on which to construct such structures as
we can.
The foundation which is available to postmodernisms, following the
influence of Kurt Gödel, is not a foundation which is built with certainty
before a structure is built. Among the difficulties with thinking about
structures is the obsolete image in which a foundation precedes the
structure which is built upon it. Rather, if the structure does not
collapse, then the structure secures and validates its foundation
retrospectively or retroactively. That is, if the enlarging structure
stands, then as that structure has enlarged, it has constructed and
strengthened its foundation under itself, in a proof of principles and
values and methods. Such structure is not the imposition of timeless form
on undesignated matter; rather it is an arrangement of parts in a whole
which we are already dwelling in, any foundation for which always remains
yet to be further validated. The foundation is incompletable because its
truth will never quite coincide with its proof. Yet a structure can be
valid as a field which has proved trustworthy, in spite of immediate
undecidabilities and long-range futilities.
The organicism of an organic whole was thought of as having its parts
working in functioning reciprocities, as heart and head might integrate
their rhythms. An organic story might show a manly young hero getting his
heart and brain to cooperate as he achieves integration and perhaps
integrity (Tom Jones). But, with aptness and precision, the novel called
Women and Men shows two sensitive young men, each of whom might once have
expected a novel to himself, talking about methods of inserting themselves
in a larger field where thought and feeling are not either/or, but and/or:
"feelings, whether heart-rooted or not, must never be dismissed, especially
your own, and happened to be the basis of most thought (not all) and might
be more (than brain) why thought went on and on, though sometimes it was
hardly, you know, thought" (1066).
These two young men, sharing attention, don't each get a whole novel to
work out the relations of feelings to thoughts. In their novellessness they
are the objects of a different distribution of attention. They do not have
a privileged life-history in which an embryonic potentiality is fulfilled.
They are learning how parts communicate with parts, and how thought is not
linear, but is emotional and bodily, and, if only because bodily, fully
within a field of physical motion and conscious emotion. Accordingly, these
young men must and do accommodate themselves to the action of a novel as
field-action. They cannot expect to be, and as male feminists must not want
to be, the center of attention. Such a desire would be futile anyway,
because a field does not have a center. They dwell in a structure which is
a more adequate image of the human condition than a story of an isolated,
self-identical, and autonomous hero.
In a field-fiction, each character is not an organism on a linear path, but
is a region of field within a field. When I use the word is, usually I mean
"sets in motion." Here the idea is that a person as a region of field sets
in motion the larger field which includes other people as other regions of
the field. The relations among people then are much more complex, and
indirect, than the interdependencies of organic relations. Organic form
usually implies an interdependence of the parts as seen in cross-section of
a self-activating structure. But interdependence in a field differs from
interdependence in an organism. In The Letter Left to Me, a young man asks
his father to define "interdependence": "and he dictates out of his head an
airtight definition of that large (gray? blue?) 'term'" (101). That novel
doesn't offer the father's definition to the reader, perhaps because the
scene renders an example of interdependence when the son asks his father for
help. The limits of a field are the limits of animating interdependencies.
Independence, individualism, and autonomy are likely to be
misunderstandings or misrepresentations of the way one dwells in the world.
As McElroy's themes develop, a person is not an essence inserted into a
ready-made world, but is a region of field within the field the person
emerges in the midst of, constructing the field which constructs the
person. Thus claims of separateness falsify our actual relations among
others. Autonomy is a theory which suggests discontinuities with some of
the very forces which a physical and emotional individual is continuous
with. Sometimes a theory of individualism disclaims connections with the
ordinary world, but claims continuities with spiritual forces. Autonomy and
discontinuity can seem to entitle and to empower the hero, who is exempted
from the usual human responsibilities, and whose adventures are rendered as
myths, or at least mythic archetypes.
Myths in this context are stories about continuities and discontinuities,
and are supported by hierarchies which subordinate rather than coordinate.
But myth, as a story about participation in or communication with a
continuum, can be transposed to a field-story in which anything apparently
independent is narratively proved to be dependent upon a region of
interdependencies and reciprocities. The governing myth of our times, as I
read events, is not the quest, but rebirth, as starting to breathe and to
communicate again is like returning from the dead. A person dies to some
communications, but then resumes transmission among continuities on a
different plane. When mythic archetypes are renounced as distortions of the
naturalistic circumstances, then actions can be conveyed as occurrences
within a field which is complexly interdependent with other fields. McElroy
works with these ideas in images of rebirth, as feelings which have been
deadened are brought back to life in a graveyard.
A field can be a literal meadow or a plowed field, a feld, a velt, with
many implications to be drawn from the image. The word field was borrowed
from meadow or pasture to suggest a region or totality or continuum of
rather uniform and interanimating parts through which forces are
transmitted, with some individual peculiarities or anomalies in the field,
but absorbed in an overall resolution or harmony. Early theories of
field—as in the work of Leonhardt Euler—suggest an image of a continuous
physical medium that is like a fluid through which mechanical forces and
pressures are transmitted. The limits of action-at-a-distance are the
limits of the field.
The fluidity of the medium is so much like water that a swimming pool
becomes a possible image of a field. The immediate suggestion is that the
swimming pool, or other body of water, is a field which would fully absorb
us within it, finally to be integrated in a whole, except that we cannot
breathe under water. The tension and the validity of McElroy's fiction
derive from the discovery of an image of a fluid field which would enclose
us in its totality, and the parallel discovery that we cannot live and
breathe in the place which is the most apt image of a field of immanent
forces. The pool is like the womb as a fluid-field from which we have
emerged, and to which we cannot return. Although we have begun life as
something like a fish in a fluid medium, in adulthood we are like fish out
of water who discover that, even if again immersed in water, we are no
longer fish. But regardless of the frustrations and the angers, the desire
survives to become fully assimilated to a field of mutual implications and
reciprocal modifications of parts. Integration within such a field blurs
the outlines of individuality, yet compensates with the feeling and thought
that one belongs to the field which is set in motion by one who is set in
motion by the field. At culminating moments one might see oneself as an
elaboration of the cosmic physical field into self-consciousness—as
"Nature, spied back through one of its own eyes" (Women and Men 1146).
When the forward linear path through a field, as background, is frustrated
or interrupted, then a tapestried field becomes more visible. Because of
the delay in launching Apollo 17, which McElroy experienced at Cape Kennedy,
the dramatic linear path of launching a spacecraft becomes visible as part
of a field: "when the curtain didn't go up and didn't go up, the attenuation
and burden of waiting brought into my mind's main view not some dramatic
necessity according to whose time-line one might have counted on being
overwhelmed at 9:53 P.M., but rather a non-narrative field of collaborative
functions much closer, I think, to what was really happening." "My time had
been changed by some contemplative shock into a three-dimensional grid of
dark starry moonless sky in which velocities became timeless fulfillments of
position" ("Holding with Apollo 17").
The field of collaborative functions allows the individual to exist less as
an autonomous destiny than as a region of intense pulses which can move
through a larger field with some stability and reliability and continuity.
Being not on a path but within a field produces different potential
connections with other people, because those other people are themselves
regions of field, not particles of single selfhood. The dimensions of a
field derive from the distances at which a person can act at a distance on
other people. In Ancient History the father of Gail and Al influences an
event he is miles away from: "Even at a gap of three or four or five miles
that day of the dive he was making his force felt in the buoyant water even
if, accelerating up some secondary blacktop in his pickup, he was unaware
that he was with us and unaware of the kiss and unaware of Al in his jeans
exploding into the water to come to somebody's aid" (269).
If the "hero" is the pulsing region of a pulsing field, then the hero is
more the ever-changing flux of relations than the self-identical person with
an essence. The vibrations of that individual can reverberate at a distance
from another individual, as repercussions pass as through a fluid medium.
If an individual is thought of as a region of pulses, then two such regions
can merge, or perhaps flow pulsatingly together, thereby becoming part of
the larger and more comprehensive field, which they are within, but which
they also are constructing. That field is like the Great Lattice of Plus:
"a lattice with glittering nodes for each angle of intersection: a lattice
that data went back and forth through" (160). "For here in this lattice
whose three-dimensional field was exactly as regular as Imp Plus now saw
(like more dimension) that it also lacked boundary—here in this lattice
that seemed impure only in motion visited upon it—the motion was no longer
the life of animal or vegetative or some wendo-zoan grip moving: but was
instead the lights whose pieces were broken conversely back into streams of
flow and bent and conducted into spirals of spirals by this lattice of
himself" (182).
A field has odd relations to the observer of the field. The field-worker
can aspire to be within the field in order to understand it. Yet belonging
to the field even as one represents it is difficult. Henry Adams provides a
classic statement of this anguish for American literature: "The universe
that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection of his own unity,
containing all forces except himself" (475).
The interest of this sentence is that the writer or artist has attempted to
represent the universe as a whole, but the act of representation places
him outside the whole which is represented. The problem is that our
representations of physical forces, as with statements which can be true or
false, don't seem to be containable within the physical forces. A
representation of a field is not integrated with the field which it
represents—even as the theory of the physicist might not include the
workings of the brain or mind which conceives and commits itself to that
theory and holds it to be true.
The truth of the representation or judgment of the Universe is something
additional to it, so that the One, and the representation of the One, add up
to two. The point here is that acts of representation and of judgments are
alienations. McElroy thinks about both the Earth, and Skylab, as "those
self-renewing life-support systems," and then suggests that self-renewing
life-support will come "not through wresting secrets from what lies around
us—whether that be conscious or not. Rather it will be through some
reciprocal economy by which we come more deeply to belong to the universe"
How can we belong? Yet how can we not belong? Any belonging, a variant of
the themes of continuities, is rarely taken for granted in McElroy's
fiction. His characters can doubt that they belong even in rather ordinary
social fields: "We sat in his room, Paul and I, in his dorm, and enjoyed a
conversation—and the freedom to do so, in a society where we presumably
belonged" (The Letter Left to Me 97). Sometimes one can seem to belong in a
room, but as smoke pools into a field, the familiar problem of difficulty in
breathing in a place one seemingly belongs in returns. The problems can be
transposed into each other: non-belonging, breathlessness, pathlessness, and
fieldlessness.
Judgments put the judge outside the field. McElroy, interpreting and
representing the structure of experience as a field, and finding himself
excluded from the field insofar as he judges it, devises a strategy to
enable him to belong within a field and to remain there: he will not judge
events in ways which put him, as judge, out of the action. He will
construct representations which can be used to point with at something in
experience, but those same representations cannot be used to point to him
making moral judgments.
If judgment deems that a character commits an act which is wrong, the
judgment isolates the judge; but the judgment also is superfluous, because a
wrong act puts the character outside the sensitive emotional human field,
hence is its own punishment. The philosophy is to leave justice to the
workings of the field. Women and Men shows a man whose errors exclude him
from the human field in which he would have thrived: unfielding oneself is
the offense for which fieldlessness is the punishment. Thus, while the
judgment and the punishment remain implicit, as the man improves in conduct,
he is as though born again within the beneficent field he aspires to belong
to. At their most emancipated, McElroy's characters can see that an offense
against others is an offense against themselves, and that not only the ones
who do wrong, but also the ones who judge, can injure themselves by
separating themselves from the field. In 1988, the novel Women and Men asks: "So must we resist the temptation to be judgmental?," and answers itself from within the field, "Yes" (421).
Some activities are to be judged, but by self-set standards, not imposed
standards. The judgments of diving and of swimming arise within the
activities, as intrinsic or immanent, as success within or under water.
Transcendental moral and religious judgments have been conveyed by images of
water in which being under water is a judgment or a punishment. The Fallen
World, under Divine Judgment of its sins, is represented by the Flood, which
is the human condition after disobedience of the will of God. The Flood,
which represents the condition of preferring one's will to the will of God,
thus represents the godlessness, lawlessness and earthly futurelessness of
humans who have fallen from grace. Of a woman Women and Men comments, "She
was a fallen woman, but she did not care now" (1141). Where Christian
literature has taught how to transcend the Fall, and the Flood—as in Jonah
in the whale, or Jesus walking on wate—McElroy attempts to show how to
learn to breathe, or at least get oxygen, within water or other apparently
alien fields.
To prefer one's will to the will of God is already to imply the death of
God, which, while no more than the death of scholastic theology, has seemed
to take ethics with it. The questions of foundations for ethical judgments
arise: is everything and anything permitted? What are the grounds of
restraint, and what are the legitimations of laws and governments? With the
imagery of field, the questions of the grounds of restraint return to be
thought through with the image of field. One can shrug and ask the great
vernacular question which shows up in Women and Men: "—well, why not?"
(636). "Why not?" is the question as writers look for legal or moral
constraints stronger than the reckless human will, and find little but
foundationlessness and uncertainty.
The abstract questions of how we know and justify the right actions are the
same as the question asked in the waterfield imagery: How are we to stay
afloat? What are the conditions of spiritual buoyancy? McElroy puts
characters under water, where they cannot breathe, and he shows what they
do, or are willing to do, to survive. Buoyancy, as recovery from falling or
sinking in water, includes the vital feeling of entering swimmingly the
field which one might otherwise have drowned in. Surviving under water
becomes an image of autonomy as obedience of laws which one sets for oneself
in the spirit in which one accepts practical rules when learning to swim or
snorkel. Such rules or laws are not deduced from a priori principles like
Natural Law, or from prophetic revelation; they emerge self-constructingly
from experience and experiment, and begin not with the imposition of
transcendentals, but with the affirmation of immanences.
Diving and wrestling are different experiences of discontinuities, and are
different images of being in the world. In Hind's Kidnap, the young man,
Hind, is shepherded in his schooldays by his guardian: "What you really
wanted was . . . basketball, but the guardian urged gymnastics and/or
wrestling so hopefully that you went out for and in for diving, and he was
sympathetic" (510). Here is the claim to desire cooperative and compatible
relations with other people—to belong within a team, as in basketball,
where teamwork can be a critique of one's illusions about oneself. But the
desire for teamwork is adapted to being on a diving team, where one belongs
to the team, yet more even than in wrestling, one is isolated from other
people.
To choose diving over basketball and wrestling is to choose an
interpretation of one's world. A diver is isolated, yet competes within a
field of divers, so is not alone and unbelonging. In this image, because
one is going to be thrown willy-nilly into existence anyway, the wisdom of
diving is to seize some control over being thrown into the field by choosing
to throw oneself into a dive. Some dives are compulsory, but others are
dives of one's choice. Such freely chosen dives convert being thrown into a
self-motivated activity, following self-set rules and standards.
In diving, one wrestles with the forces of the gravitational field, using
one's magnitude to move oneself in a certain direction in order to enter the
water without making a splash: "dive after dive I took off the worn, coldly
raw cocoa matting of a too-stiff, one-meter springboard weekday afternoons
to slip into the water as straight or secretly as I could—slide slow as a
ship or great being into a wintry pool thronged with the belly-slap and
chugging din of my teammates, and, somewhere in my split-apart
concentration, that overwhelming man-made ocean-factory noise of death" (The
Letter Left to Me 67).
When diving and swimming are pursued with a commitment which carries one
through increasing difficulties, with difficult relations with other people,
who conceal so much, anger can add to the difficulties. One can be angry
that so much is concealed, and then one can conceal one's own anger. A
diver is exposed where people can see him, but where no one can take care of
him. The implication for the diver is that no one cares enough to make a
difference to his feelings of indifference. The loneliness of the diver
justifies the suggestion that the water into which one dives is dry and
indifferent. The diver, among such indifference, and angry about death and
indifference, might as well do what he does, which is to choose with
commitments how he dives into the indifferent water. Within the water he
can open his eyes, and then speculate how he can help himself climb out of
the water and survive in air.
The diver, diving into uncertainties, attempts mastery of movement which
cannot be illusory or illusionistic. The dive and the diver must satisfy
the unforgiving criteria of trustworthiness and validity which inhere in the
field of diving. A dive is implicitly opposed to magic and entertainment,
or to any event wherein effects are produced which falsify their dependence
on material causes and on the working lives of other people. A diver,
fortunately for truth, performs a feat with an inherent ethic of honesty; a
diver is not in a position to deceive or to cheat, and must necessarily
present an image of trustworthy effects produced by freely chosen
disciplines. Even clowning around on a diving board differs from clowning
in wrestling or in basketball. A diver knows that he can be invalided for
life, and that the less one sets oneself in motion, the less one becomes a
region of that field.
A dive can so show a person, and relations with other people, that it can
be a self-portrait: a woman "with the composure of one who has already been
swimming," asks Hind to dive. "Hind did not risk a statuesque compulsory
like a front or a half twist but took a severe high hop on his third stride,
took the board straight up with his approach, motion to carry him outward,
and in an echoing wash of silence so vast he would hear above the board's
quivering recoil the guardian's heartbeat, he tucked into a one-and-a-half
so snappily he could have made two and so he sloshed his calves over and
ruined his entry axis. But then swam twenty-odd yards under water, to
tickle Laura's leg self-depreciatingly as he came up" (216). The dive
always asks the question of the degree of its difficulty, as a degree of
commitment to one's freely chosen self-disciplines, and the degree of its
success.
A question arises within the choice of diving, which is difficult, of
the meaning of self-imposed degrees of difficulty. Why can't we be lax, and
breathe easy? A character who "didn't believe in making difficulties for
himself" becomes a psychoanalyst "dealing with folk who make difficulties
for themselves," and whom he advises to take "A Breather" (Women and Men
663). Many scenes in McElroy's novels bear on difficulties in breathing: a
sick father in "the cellophane-like oxygen tent," "my father's preoccupation
with breath" (The Letter Left to Me 51); a wife in labor as her husband
times her contractions: "(breathing quick and regular, hhh—hhh—hhh—hhh,
as she and Shay had been shown at the natural childbirth sessions)" (Women
and Men 5); and sections of a novel which offers, according to the titles,
"BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING," "BETWEEN US; A BREATHER STILL AT
THE BEGINNING," "BETWEEN US: BREATHING BEGINNING TO BE HEARD," "BETWEEN
HISTORIES: BREATHERS THICK AND FAST," and "BETWEEN US: A BREATHER TOWARD THE
END." So breathing is associated with diving and swimming, but also with
birth and rebirth—rather difficult tasks each with their peculiar pleasures
and joys. Just as some athletes select diving, and within diving select
degrees of difficulty, so the readers of these fictions are self-selecting
by their freely chosen discipline to learn to fathom a field-fiction.
Breathing as an image of movement—in and out—has connections in these
novels not only to the length of sentences, and to swimming under water, but
to rhythms of loosening and tightening, as in Plus: "contraction and
release, contraction and release" (209). Several actions are similar to
breathing, like a hand gripping and letting go, or a vagina alternately
gripping and ungripping, or like a stressful pattern of aggression—not
knowing when to let go—alternating with surrender—not being able to hold
on. The grip, in McElroy's world, is most dangerous if it cannot open up
and let go. His central characters have the problem of not gripping tight
enough to hold on, and conversely of gripping too tight to be able to let go
when they should: "for what did he get from this will to grip? or what did
it touch or do up among the tangled backward-tending tendrils?" (Plus 86).
Such a character, self-sufficient yet seeking to combine with something
beyond the self, might have to learn how to grip on to others, or how to let
others get a hold on him, so that energy can be transmitted from one to the
other—tying one to others. A goal is "taking power in process, other
people's ongoing energies and tying into them, that's the way I express it
but I got the idea from someone else and that's appropriate too" (Lookout
Cartridge 419). The correct relations with others are like positions in a
field of knotted energies. In The Letter Left to Me the grandmother has a
hold on her son, which sounds unhealthy, but can be part of belonging within
the field of a family (61). The hold can be a strangle-hold, but it can
also be love.
The rhythms within a field are frequently stress and unstress, like
"serious men smoking in a room talking hushed or angry" (Women and Men 612).
Or like the alteration of the air, which "expands and contracts" (Women and
Men), constructing the weather. This stress pulsating with unstress is the
sucking movement which McElroy recognizes as the pattern of life. From the
infantile gripping and letting go of the breast to the contractions and
expansions of the atmosphere, life is imagined as a field with pulsations:
"our semi-amorphous, multicellular shrug-forth that draws along from behind
our lengthening, contracting proposition" (Women and Men 615). The logic of
this postmodernism seems an elaboration of the rhythms of organs like the
lungs, which imply affable fields of breathable air.
The opposites or alternatives to the movements in a pulsating field are
anything that is inert or incompatible. The prose sometimes seems to mount
to anger when combining with a field is impossible because of
incompatibilities. But McElroy's field, at its most intense and
magnanimous, is a field of incompatibilities. The incompatible parts at
first work against unity and coherence, but they eventually are to be
integrated in a field which is the larger for the rendering of incompatibles
into a higher compatibility. Then the differences which seem irreconcilable
contribute to the complexity of the whole when reconciliation is achieved
without denying the differences. Often a part or a detail stands out
separately for an instant before it subsides into the larger articulated
whole—the well-earned wholeness of incompatibilities achieving compatibility.
In an action that occurs in a sea of incompatibilities, in which ordinary
breathing becomes difficult, the field is enlarged, and pulsating movement
is enhanced, by a shift from the impasse of either/or confrontations to the
compatibilities of and/or or both/and: "from the either/or system-switch . .
. to the twain egal individualized screens seen both/and" (Women and Men
1132). Either/or is like a blindspot or other impasse, while "and/or" or
"both/and" open passages to intellectual and emotional movements.
One of the irreversible movements of thought which prompt some
postmodernisms are the separation of proof from truth. Sometimes a
statement which is proved to be true is thereby rendered false. As proof
and truth separate, we are launched from puzzles to mysteries, from riddle
to enigma, and from belief (in facts) to faith (which is without
foundations). Belief becomes faith when it sees that its truths cannot be
proved to be true: "faith's threatening argument relied on such jumps as
dreams are laid on" (Women and Men 1113). The leaps of faith, like dives
into the uncertainties and indifferences of water, are not toward a
transcendental God outside the world, but toward a field which is the world.
McElroy extrapolates the image of field to cosmic proportions, evoking the
Tao in terms close to those of Joseph Needham: "The whole idea of the Tao
was the idea of a field of force. All things oriented themselves according
to it, without having to be instructed to do so, and without the application
of mechanical compulsion" (293). In Women and Men, McElroy can be
discovered thinking with the Tao: "which should mean 'the way' but in
practice embraces like the whole show/flo as if Nature, spied back through
one of its own eyes, was stratified ocean or at least successfully
liquified" (Women and Men 1146).
At the end of The Letter Left to Me, McElroy offers a moment of impasse:
"Will I know more about my state? I am wild, in my haste, and I will live a
new life. The letter is everywhere and I can't answer for it. I'll answer
the letter. I can't. But I will" (151). With these final sentences of the
novel, McElroy accepts the undecidable relations between proof, with facts
which are to be believed, and truth, which is upheld by faith. He makes a
statement—"I can't"—which he must believe to be true, but which he must
hope will not be proved to be true. So the young man says, "I can't," and
then he modifies that with the bootstrapping troubleshooter's resolve: "But
I will." The "I will" is a promise to prove his own prior statement to be
false. In a model of how we think now, the perplexity is that the narrator
states two propositions which he believes, both of which cannot be true at
the same moment. Thus the narrator is propelled forward in the action by
moving toward that which is always yet to be proved to be true, and which
will enlarge the field as it enlarges himself.
In the novels of Joseph McElroy, fully to be, as fully to set oneself in
motion, is to take lunges or leaps of faith which plunge our lives into
alien fields which we long to belong in, and can somewhat adapt to our
desires. Here, to live is to move in and out of fieldlessness, with the
moral challenge of submerging one's anger at the indifference of events to
one's desires for friendly enfieldments. But that one can survive
immersions in fields, and thrive, is demonstrated in Lookout Cartridge when
a man who must have gone under, because he is named Sub, speaks words which
any diver might speak upon returning to the surface from uncaring depths:
"and I hope at some point in the future to be able to look back and say that
I have come through." Sub seems to find the power to continue through the
blindspots and obstacles to attention, even demolishing a television set as
an impasse of vision. So McElroy, trying to pool his powers with the Cosmos
by writing field-fiction, moves himself forward by means of an impasse
which, paradoxically and subversively, sets him in motion: "I can't. But I
will."
Works Cited
William S. Wilson is an art critic and the author of the story collection Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka (The Ecco Press) and the novel Birthplace (North Point). He lives in New York City.
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