The Masculine Mode Author(s): Peter Schwenger Reviewed work(s): Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No.

4 (Summer, 1979), pp. 621-633 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343026 . Accessed: 16/04/2012 10:55
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The Masculine Mode

Peter Schwenger

"If we insist on discovering something we can clearly label as a 'feminine mode,' then we are honor-bound, also, to delineate its counterpart, the 'masculine mode.' " This statement by Annette Kolodny does not affirm that such a counterpart exists;' Kolodny instead is making a point about the difficulty of determining common traits of writing by women. To suggest a similar assessment of writing by men is to remind us that the rich variety of writing by either sex resists any attempt at limiting its nature by sexual characteristics alone. Yet in the remainder of her essay, Kolodny investigates certain traits of perception and style which, if not definitive of writing by women, are recurrently found in it; and she argues convincingly for the value of such investigations. Why, then, shouldn't there be a similar value in investigating the possible nature of a masculine mode? With us already is the social context out of which such an investigation would naturally arise; and it is similar to that which saw the rise of women's studies about ten years ago. As a men's movement begins to evolve, an increasing number of books are being published which analyze the nature of masculinity; magazines and newsletters proliferate; conferences are organized.2 Like the wom1. Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism,' " Critical Inquiry 2 (Autumn 1975): 78. 2. Recently published books on the subject include the following: The Forty-ninePercent Majority, ed. Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon (Reading, Mass., 1976); Warren Farrell, The LiberatedMan (New York, 1974); Marc Fasteau, The Male Machine (New York, 1974); A Book of Men, ed. Ross Firestone (New York, 1976); and Men and Masculinity, ed. Joseph Pleck and Jack Sawyer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974). The leading magazine of the movement is Brother, published in Berkeley.
C 1979 bn The L n\ ersit ( Chicago. 0093-1896/79/0504-0003$01.65

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en's movement, which provided both its model and its initial impetus, the men's movement is prone to dissension from within, misunderstanding and ridicule from without. Its course, however, is not likely to parallel that of the women's movement simply because the masculine role which it scrutinizes has configurations which are peculiar to itself. The most obvious point of difference is that the men's movement lacks the concrete rallying point of economic discrimination; it must necessarily address itself to the subtler psychological dynamics of the male role. It is here that literature, for several reasons, is liable to be called upon: literature provides experiences which, though artificial, may be the common property of millions; it contains insights which, though unsystematized, are still valid; it provides words for perceptions which, until named, may not even be recognized. The danger here is that books may be viewed merely as casebooks, a happy hunting ground for Men We Disapprove Of and Good Guys. It cannot be stressed too often that if these studies accept the literary nature of the works with which they deal, they must concern themselves with the relation between perceptions (sexual, perhaps, in ways that may not be generally recognized) and words. Yet even if this is the most fruitful approach to the study of a masculine mode in literature, it is not fruitful for the work of every male author. A writer's sexuality may underlie his work, but it may underlie it at such a basic level as to illuminate nothing about the work's uniqueness and special richness. Using sexual generalities to link one writer with another reduces each to a low common denominator indeed. Again, with writers of both sexes, we should take into account their tendencies to work against the sexual grain. We know that an author may neutralize himself so that he becomes, in Joyce's words, "invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Or the author may be protean, adopting masculine and feminine modes according to the characters whose vision he adopts. Such an author gives free play to what both Virginia Woolf and Coleridge called the "androgynous mind." If there is a masculine mode, then, it is clear that it is not simply made up of all male writers. It is better to limit the mode to writers who, rather than neutralize, contradict, or simply ignore their male sexuality, take it as their explicit subject. In this way we may consider with more certainty and subtlety the relation of this conscious preoccupation and the words used to describe it. Peter Schwenger, assistant professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, is currently completing a book, Phallic Critiques, which examines the relation between masculinity and literary style.

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Is there really such a thing as a masculine style of writing? What are its characteristics and why just these characteristics? Can we distinguish the masculine style from the explicit masculine content? The writers I will examine in this context are necessarily a selection from the number of those who might be included. They are all twentieth-century authors. Perhaps, as Woolf suggests in A Room of One's Own, it is because of the beginnings of the women's movement in the preceding century that "virility has now become self-conscious."3 At any rate there seems to be little explicit questioning of the male role, in literature or outside of it, until our own century. I do not mean to suggest, however, that these writers only question the received images of maleness; often they set out to validate those images or, through such images, to validate themselves. Their explorations of maleness are not abstract but intensely individual. They are not straightforward but riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. As a result, it is difficult to extract didactic points from their works. Always knowledge is rooted in experience and inseparable from it. The masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness of experience. This maleness of experience, at a primary level, must mean the infusion of a particular sense of the body into the attitudes and encounters of a life. I am not saying biology is destiny but rather, in James Dickey's words, that "the body is nothing less or more than the sense of being of a particular creature at a particular time and place. Everything he perceives and thinks depends upon his bodily state."4 More than obesity, emaciation, sickliness, or robustness, or any of the infinite variations of physical type, the underlying fact of one's sexuality must affect the perception not only of oneself but of the world. Yet, as with most other aspects of the body, the effect of this underlying fact may be rendered transparent, as it were, by simple habituation. If this is true in life, it is even more true in literature, as Woolf asserts in her essay "On Being Ill." Illness, for Woolf, is an instance of the body intensely asserting its power over human perception-a power which is always there but largely disregarded by writers. In English literature the body is either a transparent vessel for conversations and thoughts or is viewed from the outside, as an object. Seldom has a writer attempted to render the unique relations we really have with our own bodies. To oneself, as the phenomenologists have pointed out, one's own body is wholly neither object nor subject. True, one's body may be objectified: I may inspect my hand in the same disinterested way that I observe the grain of the table on which it lies. But this perception is only partial and momentary. Still more difficult is the attempt to view the body as completely subjective, to deny its vulnerability as an object in the world. Ultimately all the
3. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1928; New York, 1963), p. 105. 4. James Dickey, Sorties (New York, 1971), p. 59.

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paradoxes and complexities of being-in-the-world center on the body; but such complexities have generally been sidestepped by writers. They prefer instead to render the complexities of the soul, which, as Descartes once remarked, is easier to know than the body. In the masculine mode, though, the body's paradoxes operate with unusual force. Some social or psychological expectation in the male seems to push him, insofar as he accedes to it, toward the idea of his body as en-soi, partaking of the solidity and confidence of pure object. Yet the will to become such an object is itself an act of the pour-soi, the force that is conscious of itself and strives for itself. An extreme illustration of this paradox is found in Yukio Mishima's works. In Confessionsof a Mask Mishima tells us of his intense attraction, as a schoolboy, to the body of Omi, an older boy. He resists at that time every indication that Omi is other than pure object. The express desire to be Omi-that is, to be an object-is at the source of both his life's complexities and his death. Mishima's strenuous training of his body toward perfect physical development is really a pursuit of something abstract, something which he hopes to realize in himself. "If the body could achieve perfect, non-individual harmony," Mishima tells us in Sun and Steel, "then it would be possible to shut individuality up for ever in close confinement."5 In all his years of physical training, Mishima attained a precious few moments of release from that self-awareness which was antithetical to his idea of the male. But of course the very moment at which he knew himself to be released was also a moment of selfawareness. Such Gordian complexities, in the end, could only be resolved by the point of a dagger; and on 25 November 1970, Mishima committed hara-kiri. The moment of sudden death baffles all expectation before the event and allows no reflection after it. That moment was for Mishima the union of subject and object, of the knower and the known, in an ultimate gesture of virility. Mishima's statement that he sought "a language of the body" indicates the close relationship between his pursuit of virility and his art as a writer." At first, it is true, Mishima considered that the function of muscles was precisely opposite to that of words; and he was attracted by muscularity to the same degree that he was repulsed by the words which he saw as white ants, eating away at reality. The more "literary" these words, the more they encouraged and glorified the individual perceptions which Mishima sought to escape in the pursuit of his great abstraction. Yet as Mishima's body freed itself from words and gained its own power, he was increasingly able to turn that power back upon words in order to change their nature. He speaks of learning "how to pursue words with the body (and not merely pursue the body with words)." That
5. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, trans. John Bester (New York, 1970), p. 17. 6. Ibid., p. 7.

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is to say, the body is no longer merely a subject described by the writer's words; it "pursues" those words with the demand that the writer's style conform to the body's own qualities. Mishima describes his style as "something appropriate to my muscles."7 All excess ornament is stripped away; the pace of his writing is imperturbable, with no variations in speed; it has "the tension of the all-night watch," a watch that guards against imagination and sensibility. Mishima's style, he says, "was on the verge of non-communication; it was a style that did not accept but rejected." Nothing less can be expected when the body, whose nature is fundamentally wordless, becomes the model for words. Mishima's description of his ideal style is in accordance with a common notion of "strong and silent" masculinity. Also in accordance with this notion is the style of Ernest Hemingway, a conspicuously masculine writer. His writing, too, is "on the verge of non-communication" by virtue of a deliberate distancing from the sense of self-awareness. A first-person narrator like Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises observes the changes in his own emotions with as much detachment as he observes the weather or the lay of the land, and with somewhat less detail. This spareness has its own power, of course, in that it encourages the reader to flesh out the emotions using as clues the relatively minute variations in an otherwise noncommittal surface. Hemingway's discovery was that "you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted ... and make people feel something more than they understood.'"8 This discovery was a refinement after the fact, though: even in his high school days Hemingway was writing a hard-bitten prose. The origin of his style may be his early concern with masculine reserve, in life as well as in art. Nowhere does this concern emerge more fully than in the strongly autobiographical Nick Adams stories, which are in so many ways about growing up male. The central theme of masculine reserve is established in "Indian Camp," the first in order of composition as well as the first in the chronology of Nick Adams. Hemingway omitted, in the published version of this story, an introductory section which places the young Nick on a hunting trip with his father and uncle and which contrasts their expectations that "you don't want to ever be frightened in the woods" with Nick's newly discovered fear of death. In "Indian Camp" Nick accompanies his father, a doctor, when he is taken to an Indian woman who has been in labour for two days. With perfect efficiency, the doctor does what must be done-we are only informed later that this was a cesarean operation performed with a penknife and no anaesthetic. "Her screams are not important," his father says to Nick. "I don't hear them because they are not important." At this the woman's husband, in the bunk above, rolls over against the wall and is later discovered to have
7. Ibid., pp. 49, 46. 8. Ernest Hemingway, A MoveableFeast (New York, 1964), p. 75.

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slit his throat in despair. Nick's loyalty to his father is unshaken. The equation then is clear: those who feel emotion die; those who reject it are practical men. Thus when the story concludes with Nick feeling "quite sure that he would never die," this comes not from some redeeming epiphany nor from childish faith-for that faith has already been broken. Rather it is in the nature of a willed assertion, a choice. The young Nick guards against his emotions as he would guard against death. Tied up and threatened in "The Killers," for instance, he first tries to "swagger it off." Faced by the spectacle of Ole Andreson impassively waiting for death, Nick confesses his feelings to George: "I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful." "Well," said George, "you better not think about it." This practical advice ends the story, slamming the door on any further flow of feeling. In "A Way You'll Never Be" Nick recalls the moment he learned that he can die, when he finds himself observed with the same unfeeling practicality by "the man with the beard who looked at him over the sights of the rifle, quite calmly before squeezing off." Now, although he "noticed everything in such detail to keep it all straight so he would know just where he was," feeling pours forth regardless in a monologue that is a mad parody of dispassionate observation and practicality. Reserve is reinstated, uneasily, in "Big Two-Hearted River," the bestknown example of Hemingway's ability to convey feeling by omitting it. Hemingway called this a story "about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it."9 We nevertheless sense the thing left out, partly through passing hints and half-buried symbolical elements. The effect of the war on Nick is primarily conveyed by the varying rhythms in which Hemingway renders the masculine rituals of practicality. Serene, luminous, almost liturgical at one moment, sentences become staccato, nervous, and obsessive the next. These changes represent the shifting front of a continuing battle against the death that is implicit in feeling. Nick Adams must fight his battle in this way if he is to survive. Hemingway, however, can afford to be somewhat more ambivalent toward the practicality that cleanses-or merely empties-a man of his own feelings. "The Three-Day Blow" satirically attacks the male fetish for practicality by anatomizing a conversation between two men consciously devoid of emotion. Such an instance makes us aware that Hemingway's habit of dispassionate observation could extend far enough to include itself as object. If Mishima and Hemingway are reserved in style, they are less re9. Ibid., p. 76.

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served in subject matter as they freely incorporate into their works many of the most intimate elements of their lives. This is going to be the case in many works of the masculine mode, since a man's relation to his own masculinity is always an intimate matter. A confessional element then must be considered and accounted for in an investigation of masculine style. A comment by Michel Leiris indicates one way of taking it into account. Following his Manhood-a work similar in nature to Mishima's Sun and Steel-Leiris writes an afterword on "The Autobiographer as Torero." There he claims that a writing style must show its greatest brilliance at exactly the point at which the writer is most threatened; and no confessional writing can afford to be without this element of danger, even death, which he calls "the bull's horn." To write about certain aspects of one's life is to change that life. The writing becomes not a passive reflection but an act in itself, full of risk and consequence. As with the sculptural flourishes of the matador's cape, the writer's cape of words coaxes a kind of death-conceals it-and at the moment of truth reveals it. A similar consciousness of confession is expressed by Peter Tarnopol, the purported author of the works presented in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man. Tarnopol's biographical statement reads in part: PresentlyMr. Tarnopol is preparing toforsake the art offiction for a while and embarkupon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavorwhich he approacheswarily, uncertain as to both its advisabilityand usefulness. Not only would the publication of such a personal documentraise serious legal and ethicalproblems,but thereis no reason to believethat by keeping his imagination at bay and rigorouslyadhering to thefacts, Mr. Tarnopol will have exorcisedhis obsessiononce and for all. 1 This dry prose explicates the nature of a "bull's horn" over which, elsewhere in the book, words glide with nervous urgency. The dangers indicated-legal, ethical, and most of all psychological-may also explain the book's structure, which is intricately refracted and reflexive. Two short stories by Tarnopol are followed by the autobiographical narrative which reveals the "sources" of these fictionalizations and is parodically entitled "My True Story." However, the truth of his story-that of his conflict-ridden marriage-is almost impossible to find. At every turn we are presented with different versions: in the two "Useful Fictions," in the comments of various characters in those fictions, in a psychoanalytic interpretation, in Tarnopol's own shifting attitudes and his shifts in style. And of course we speculate throughout on Tarnopol's relation to Roth. My Life as a Man, though, is not only about how difficult it is to render in words the truth about a past experience; it is also about how words and
10. Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (New York, 1974), p. 100.

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the expectations they set up may affect an experience before and while it happens. And at the center of all this is a question of male identity: the desire to "get to be what is described in the literature as a man."" No Bildungsroman, though, My Life as a Man is ultimately the chronicle of how the writer, entangled in the multiple relationships between life and literature, "squandered [his] manhood."12 The theme of squandered manhood has been treated by Roth before this, comically, in Portnoy'sComplaint. Though in this book there is nothing of the complexity of My Life as a Man, we may still sense an influence of the "bull's horn" on language. In Portnoy'sComplaintthe tang of spoken American expands hyperbolically to match the enormities Portnoy discloses on the psychiatrist's couch. So far is the brilliance stretched that it becomes burlesque, rebounding upon itself to imply clearly a theatrical Jewish self-laceration. Portnoy's Complaint is also interesting because of its treatment of a subject peculiar to the masculine mode, the penis. Sine qua non of maleness, instrument of the adolescent's awakening virility, center and symbol of his manhood to the adult-the penis has enormous importance in the life of the male and very little in literature. When not sublimated entirely, the penis is portrayed only as an object viewed in a general erotic context. Lawrence's rendering of "John Thomas" is in the end not a whit more satisfactory than the flowery similes of the pornography he so loathed. Neither reveals anything of the psychological relationship between a man and his own penis. Phenomenologists, too, who have explored the perception of one's own hand and foot and eye have been oddly demure where this part is concerned. Portnoy'sComplaint at least makes a modest beginning-though not a demure one-at rendering the male's relationship to a part which, especially at puberty, seems more obsessively virile than the whole. "Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd," says Portnoy's Yiddish wisdom; the part has a propensity to conflict with the whole and to domineer over it. An apt emblem of this state is provided by Alberto Moravia in the closing lines of Io et Lui (which has been translated as The Two of Us). The weary Federico, at the end of a fruitless campaign to sublimate the dominance of his penis, returns to his patient wife, penis swollen with pride and triumph: Fausta's hand undid the chain, the door opened, and she appeared on the threshold in her dressing-gown. She looked at me, looked down, saw "him" and then, without saying a word, put out her hand to take hold of "him," as one might take hold of a donkey's halter to make it move. Then she turned her back to me, pulling "him" in behind her, and, with "him," me. She went into the flat; "he" went behind her; I followed them both.'3
11. Ibid., p. 299. 12. Ibid., p. 95. 13. Alberto Moravia, The Two of Us, trans. Angus Davidson (London, 1972), p. 353.

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Much more than Gogol's nose, the penis has a quality of independence from the body: it has movements and moods, it sulks, it overbears, it overpowers. So it seems natural to find Federico having conversations and arguments with "him" just as Portnoy does with "his." It seems the literary version of a normal psychological experience. It is then a shock and a challenge for the reader to find, halfway through the novel, that the narrator, with whom the reader has been identifying, is not normal. In an interview with a psychologist friend, Federico admits that he literally does hear a voice from his penis and that both the animation of this part and his hostility toward it stem from an ambivalent sexual experience with his mother. Of course Federico resents this forced admission, resists it, and ultimately ignores it. Curiously enough, the reader ignores it too and continues to identify with the narrator as before. Only an undercurrent of strangeness remains as implied comment on the normal male's relationship to his sexual organ. What words, then, for the penis? What style is adequate to its nature? As Federico's penis points out to him, in a memorable monologue, the phallus is a god of dark and mysterious force. Yet the tone adopted when speaking of it is as often as not a comic one, whether in popular slang terms or, for example, in works like Robert Graves' arch poem, "Down, Wanton, Down!" Undeniably, there must be a comic aspect to something which-as Molly Bloom observes-looks at one moment like a turkey neck and gizzards and at the next like a hat rack. This comic aspect is not necessarily at odds with the idea of the penis as a dark and awesome power. Comic and terrible meet in the style, of all styles, appropriate to the penis: that of the grotesque. The grotesque, of course, is not to be summed up in a single definition any more than is the penis. But in listing some of the grotesque's possible characteristics, we note how appropriate they are to this subject. The grotesque, for all its comic element, implies an underlying terror arising from the sense that things are out of control. There is a force behind the grotesque that is inhuman, both stupid and vital at the same time. It is a force strongly bound up with the physical; it is a force that goes to extremes. By virtue of its excesses, it deforms proportion and classical contours. In this respect, it is allied to caricature. But whereas caricature exaggerates features which express individual character, the grotesque absorbs individuality entirely into the inhuman. The part which in caricature reveals the nature of the whole, in the grotesque actually usurps the position of the whole: de Gaulle's nose is no longer just an identifying mark in Levine's later drawings of him; it is an enormous, vigorous force which the general follows dazedly. Similarly, Beardsley's illustrations to Lysistrataand certain of Picasso's erotic engravings present us with a male grotesque. They express, in another medium, the same kind of extreme state rendered by Roth and Moravia. Such writers demonstrate that there is room within the masculine

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mode for styles entirely different from the reservedly "masculine" ones of a Mishima or a Hemingway. A style is, to a considerable degree, a strategy; thus, there are strategic reasons for some writers to approach the subject of maleness in a style apparently at complete odds with masThe title characculinity. Such a style is Alfred Jarry's in The Supermale.14 conceals his remarkable gifts beneath the life of an idle ter, Marcueil, socialite with an unprepossessingly average exterior. Only the young daughter of an American magnate suspects his true nature; and to win her love, Marcueil, incognito, displays his physical prowess in a fantastical bicycle race and a record-breaking sexual marathon with the lady herself as partner. These exploits are recounted in a style which is wholly that of the dandy: it has his polished, overcivilized diction, his penchant for absurdity and ludicrous exaggeration, his moments of languor. The Supermale'sstyle is thus one which most people would call effeminate. More attention to the dandy as a type, however, might dispel or at least modify this notion. Recalling only Beau Brummel's fastidious concern with dress, we tend to pass over the style of that dress. Its elegance was the product of a new restraint which still dominates our notions of male clothing. A corresponding restraint of emotion may well have been the invention of the Regency dandies. Far from condemning a man's display of emotion, the eighteenth century made it fashionable to be a man of feeling. But the dandy is now deliberately impassive and without emotional depth. He offers only his coruscatingly brilliant surface; and, in the purest versions of the dandy, there is nothing beneath that surface. In the creation of his facade, the dandy creates his entire life as a work of art built over a void. Baudelaire, who projected a work on literary dandyism, called dandyism a "cultede soi-meme";it has its affinities with such male types as the Don Juan and, yes, the bodybuilder, in a version as sophisticated as Mishima's. The dandy is above all a man striking an existential posture, a species of Camus' rebel. He disengages himself from all that is not of his own designing. He scorns even the society which is his milieu and which he manipulates with consummate skill. For that society's adulation he returns only an arrogant disdain, itself the mark of his eminence. The dandified style of The Supermaleaccordingly hurls a kind of challenge in the teeth of society, in language that is a heightened version of its own. It is language not opposed to the characteristics of the supermale but parallel to them. For Marcueil's virility is also a heightened version of characteristics which society favors. But carried to such an extreme, these characteristics rebound with almost apocalyptic force on the society which encouraged them. At the novel's close, Jarry's hero is destroyed by society, which takes advantage of the supermale's momentary lapse into the emotion of sentimental love. But
14. Alfred Jarry, The Supermale (1902), trans. Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright (New York, 1977).

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the ironies with which Jarry recounts this defeat establish beyond it the triumph of style. For all its ostentatiously civilized quality, then, the "effeminate" style of The Supermaleis masculine in its suppressed capacity for destruction. No more effeminate than the style of Ubu Roi is childlike, it operates as a kind of ferocious negation of itself. As a strategy of style this self-negation is complex but not unique in the masculine mode. Lincoln Kirstein does a similar thing in his Rhymesand More Rhymesof a Pfc, which uses experiences of World War II to bring out the underlying mechanisms of masculinity.15 Kirstein has little sympathy for the masculine patterns which are his subject but still does justice to their subtlety. For the work's style, though, he chooses the most unsubtle of possible models: the "rhymes" of Rudyard Kipling and Robert W. Service. The effect of this choice is surprisingly intricate. Viewing World War II through the lenses of earlier wars results in a disquieting awareness of disparities. Jog-trot cadences and hearty personae evoke nostalgia but also a sense of ludicrous naivete. The style which once expressed a bluff confidence in the manly virtues is now made to communicate the questioning of those virtues. The irony of the situation turns the style upon itself. An added irony is the fact that Kirstein is a homosexual and makes no bones about it; so is Mishima, for that matter. Homosexuals, of course, are by no means to be excluded from the masculine mode, any more than lesbians are to be ignored by feminist criticism. As a male who is himself fascinated and attracted by the nature of masculinity, the homosexual is fully capable of insight into that masculine nature. He may tend to see men in isolation from women and to define men's sexuality exclusively in its own terms. But in that he is no different from heterosexual writers. Women, when they do appear in ostentatiously male works, are reflectors of masculine sexuality; or they threaten it; or they only stand and wait, excluded from the male redemption in Hemingway's fishing excursions and Dickey's canoeing trips. Generally the male gauges his own masculinity not by women but by other men. Masculinity becomes reflexive, both perceiver and perceived. It is perhaps for this reason that one so often feels, in the works I have been discussing, a despairing sense of sterility beneath the richness and the vigor. This is the frequent accompaniment of a life that turns in upon itself instead of opening outwards to the world and must to some degree be the familiar of every man who pursues his own nature. Within the masculine mode, though, the despair that shadows a reflexive life becomes peculiarly intensified by its subject matter. To think about masculinity is to become less masculine oneself. For one of the most powerful archetypes of manhood is the idea that the real man is the one who acts, rather than the one who contemplates. The real man thinks of
15. Lincoln

Kirstein, Rhymes and More Rhymes of a Pfc (New York, 1966).

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practical matters rather than abstract ones and certainly does not brood upon himself or the nature of his sexuality. To think about himself would be to split and turn inward the confident wholeness which is the badge of masculinity. And to consider his own sexuality at any length would be to admit that his maleness can be questioned, can be revised, and, to a large degree, has been created rather than existing naturally and irresistibly as real virility is supposed to. Like MacLeish's perfect poem, the perfect male "must not mean but be." Self-consciousness is a crack in the wholeness of his nature. Literature itself, of course, is a species of self-consciousness. The words for an action are something other than the action itself and reflect upon it as a thing past. They create an equivalent for a certain shape or form of real experience-an equivalent so insidiously powerful that it tends to usurp the place of reality. Thus when Mishima bursts out with it "Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!"''16 is an expression of his equally fierce longing simply to be in a state of male wholeness, without the corrosion of wholeness that is his self-consciousness. Mishima's battle against words is parallel to his battle against selfconsciousness. To win against self-consciousness he had to become one who "sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing"; to win against words his style also had to sacrifice, almost to the point of noncommunication. This mistrust of words is perhaps characteristic of the masculine mode. The works examined here are written in styles that to various degrees annihilate themselves; they are self-consuming artifacts. We see this in the stripped-down, noncommittal styles of Mishima and Hemingway more readily than we do in the stylistic extremes of Jarry and Kirstein. Yet both the art that conceals art and the art that flaunts itself arise out of the same mistrust of words. By going to an extreme, the style of writers like Jarry and Kirstein calls attention to itself as a style, implies its own artifice and falsity. The reader feels a sense of disparity with the subject-a sense which, upon further analysis, is seen to be itself the subject of such works. I have been speaking of self-annihilation in regard to style, but it may go beyond that. Mishima's suicide was to a large degree the inevitable outcome of his lifelong pursuit of masculinity. Having cast himself in the role of warrior, he found his muscular body merely decorative, and therefore effeminate, unless it lived up to its implicit purpose, to confront death. Likewise in fiction, when masculinity is intensely pursued this is often done at the risk of self-annihilation. The masculine rite of passage described in Dickey's Deliverance results in the death of one member of the canoeing party; and those who survive are humanized to the degree that they are haunted by the specter of physical destruction. Even the purely mental sport of Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball
16. Mishima, p. 66.

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Summer 1979

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Associationresults in self-annihilation. Following the classic pattern noted by Warren Farrell, a man with a dull job, in this case an accountant, fulfills his masculinity by identification with the heroism and drama of the game. Henry Waugh's game is entirely self-created and consists of statistics, history, picturesque lore--common counters in masculine conversation. So absorbed does he become by the game that he is ultimately destroyed by it, though the game itself continues on a mythological plane. The game (to pick up that metaphor) is seen as continuing in all the works I have dealt with here. After the male dynamic has worked through to its own destruction, there remains a stable social context. A patient psychiatrist or wife takes in hand the sexually tormented. A tender memento and a placid marriage replace the crucified Supermale. Deep waters cover the deep terrors of Dickey's canoeing trip and offer choice new lakeside lots to a new generation. And Nick Adams, in "Fathers and Sons," sees his child eager to continue the life pattern of his father and grandfather. The very stability of the social context, which seems so opposed to the male destructive element, ensures its continuation; for it is in social expectations that the male mythology has its origin. Like war, masculinity may be nourished by society until it has grown to a point where it turns to destroy that which brought it into being. General observations like this last are encouraged by the very nature of studying a masculine mode in literature. Yet each of these works finds its own terms to express the dynamics of manhood; and it is on its own terms that it must be approached. Literary analysis should not fall into the error, common in social revolutions, of overthrowing old patterns only to establish new and equally rigid patterns. It would be unfortunate if general observations on the relations between masculinity and literature were used in a way that hindered perception rather than aiding it. Such observations are properly used as a ground from which figures detach themselves, and against which they may be more clearly perceived. In literature and in the masculine mode especially, the individual vision is as important as the social mythology, the variations as important as the theme.