Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 1974); originally published 1956.
In his utterly unique and strange novel The Plains, Gerald Murnane imagines a mysterious place somewhere in the inland of Australia (a stand-in for the Outback, perhaps, but unlike the real Outback in several key respects). Though arid and largely static as a society, this great empty wasteland nonetheless regards itself as the cultural center of the nation: so much so, that it has even divided itself into militant factions in strife with one another over the exact reason and justifications for the region's title to civilizational preeminence.
The piece is, among other things, a satire upon the chauvinism and parochialism of every cultural bloc. Even an empty barren country in the middle of nowhere, Murnane seems to be saying, regards itself as the center of the universe.
Having recently moved to a great empty Plains myself, however-- the Great Plains of the United States-- I have begun to resemble the plainsmen of Murnane's novel to an eerie extent. Attending school in Iowa, I was at first concerned that I might be traveling to a spiritual and cultural desert. A region defined above all by being empty and flat does not, after all, seem particularly promising in this regard. But the longer I have stayed here, the more I have come to believe, in Plainsman-fashion, that the geographic center of America is the true cultural center of America too.
Hear me out; I don't think this is as far-fetched a claim as it might seem. Look over the list of winners of the National Book Award from the past half century, for one. Generations of them made their way through the Iowa Writers Workshop, did they not? Then, if you are still not convinced, scroll over to a list of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners. Even before the University of Iowa's program came to dominate the American novel, you will still find a disproportionate share of early winners who came from and primarily wrote about the Plains.
Of course, "MFA fiction" and the Pulitzer both have their detractors; but one cannot deny their centrality nonetheless. And I challenge anyone to say that Richard Yates or Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver didn't write great literature, and all found their way at one time or another in Iowa. Then there is that other great luminary of the Plains, albeit from one state over: Wright Morris.
Now, Nebraska is not Iowa, as they will be the first (or possibly the second, after Iowa) to insist. The two contiguous states have the kind of vicious rivalry with one another that only intense proximity and remarkable similarity can breed (the "narcissism of minor differences" in action). As two claimants to being flat, empty, grassy, corn-growing states, Iowa and Nebraska would risk collapsing into one another if they did not fiercely strive to assert their separate and sovereign identities. Hence the bitter combats over football and the rest of it.
But if we accept that this rivalry, like so many, is in fact founded on an underlying kinship, then I can claim Wright Morris as a spiritual brother-- even, or perhaps especially, is he is forever associated with Nebraska. He was, beyond dispute, a Plainsman, after all (and were not factional disputes among different types of Plainsman key to the Plainsman identity, in Murnane's novel, much as Iowa and Nebraska must forever be frères ennemis?). So it was in this spirit of settling into my new adopted homeland-- of becoming more of a cultural Plainsman myself-- that I opened one of Morris's most celebrated novels, The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award the year it was published.
The novel's reputation is not undeserved. It is one of the most richly symbolic novels I have ever read, without ever straying too far from Nabokov's dictum that symbolism, if it is to be tolerated at all, should be relatively obvious. One could easily squeeze a masters dissertation out of what symbolism Morris provides (I'm sure others have already done it), but this symbolism never departs from its legitimate purpose: to illuminate the inner lives and relationships between its characters.
Nor is the symbolism so obvious as to be literal-minded. One of my beefs with Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, for instance (otherwise an outstanding and irreproachable novel) is that it insists on deploying symbolism according to an obvious Freudian script. The novel's central characters-- son, mother, father-- play out their Oedipal roles with programmatic literalism. And when the son finally scores a moral victory over his father, the latter is seen treading beneath horns-- for he has been symbolically usurped, cuckolded, and castrated by the son.
The Field of Vision uses horns to symbolic effect as well-- but here they are worn by characters who relate to one another in a far more mysterious and unexpected way than any Freudian generalities could predict (Nabokov would be pleased by this insistence upon "individual vagaries" as the true stuff of literature, rather than the abstract roles in which Freudian generalizers would cast every family). Indeed, the precise nature of the relationship between the central characters is the great puzzle that Morris's novel unfolds, and if it were so obvious and predictable as a Freudian "family romance," the book would scarcely hold our interest.
The book is neither linear nor plot-driven; the entire action, such as it is, unfolds in the course of a single bullfight in Mexico, in which five spectators who traveled together from Nebraska describe in turn the events of the fight from their own point of view, and reflect on their interlocking pasts. In the style of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, say, the novel tells you the whole plot, such as it is, up front (a kiss on a porch long ago, a child named after a friend, an attempt to walk on water, a descent into failure). Its suspense and dramatic tension, therefore, derive not from the revelation of further events, but from the gradual elaboration of the details of the initial story upon multiple retellings, as what was glimpsed first in outline is steadily filled in.
Without spoiling too many of these details and thereby ruining the effect, we can say simply that if one of the characters is left literally and symbolically wearing horns in the end, it is because of a cuckoldry more spiritual than real. Likewise, we can say that if one of the characters has "touched bottom" in more ways than one-- even the vulgar double entendre is not overlooked-- the symbols and allegory serve to illustrate his character and heighten our interest in his story, rather than tease us with unnecessary cleverness. He may not have been able to walk on water, despite his attempt, but his "touching bottom" in the attempt is nonetheless (perhaps?) a poignant prelude to a resurrection. The symbols succeed in moving us (or at least, me).
Like most great American literature, The Field of Vision's central theme is failure (I owe the insight of failure's centrality in our letters to William Gaddis, particularly his The Rush for Second Place). Only such a success-mad culture as our own would be so haunted by the prospect of failure, and so failure has haunted all our best authors. Morris's book, like many other American classics-- Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, say-- concerns a man who started out with great promise, but who came to nothing. Setting his sights on failure, he therefore undertakes to succeed at failing -- or, as Gaddis would put it, to at least "fail at something worth doing." His deepest fear in the novel is that he has failed even at that.
The idea of touching bottom therefore represents both the worst terror that can befall an American as well as the enduring hope that it could set one up (in much the way "touching bottom" figures in AA redemption narratives) for a reemergence. If one sinks so far down that one touches the bottom of the lakebed, one can then use it as a springboard to push oneself back up again. So, in Morris's novel, when this character attempts to walk on water and literally sinks to the bottom-- he is able to push himself up again. Symbolically too. That is what I mean about Morris's symbols being the right kind of obvious.
Since this book deserves a more central place in American letters, just as its region of origin-- the Great Plains-- is geographically central to the country, I offer a handful of copy edits I spotted, as well as marginal observations on Morris's literary allusions and echoes, to the extent I could spot them. I hope the latter may be of interest, and that the former might assist future editors. May this novel long remain in print!
p. 59 "This golden eye would reflect, like a mirror, every gaze that was directed toward it" -- a reference to T.S. Eliot's "Lines for an Old Man," perhaps? The relevant lines (which Carson McCullers and Ian Fleming alike would later echo) read: "Reflected from my golden eye/The dullard knows that he is mad./Tell me if I am not glad!"
The theme of how a single bullfight carries such different meanings for different spectators-- enough to amount to an entirely different event for each person watching it-- may be a trite enough theme for a novel of shifting viewpoints. But the echo of Eliot's line which is enclosed in the passage reflecting on this theme, if it is indeed an intentional allusion, adds a further layer of potential meanings: who is the dullard who is seen through the golden eye? McKeen? He certainly is judged dull and oblivious by both his wife and Boyd. Who is mad? Boyd? McKeen certainly believes so.
p. 71 "down and out in Paris" -- a reference to Orwell?
Ibid. "tour to the end of the night" -- reference to Céline.
p. 82 "I'm putting it in a book,' said Boyd." Missing initial inverted comma.
p. 118 "Trailing along behind them, like clouds of glory," -- reference to Wordsworth.
p. 120 "In the dream, that is, began the irresponsibility." -- reference to Delmore Schwartz.
p. 167 "'There is the record of a sale, he continued." Missing closing inverted comma.
p. 210 "as if he'd been down to the bottom of it and then pushed off" (see above for analysis)
p. 250 "I'll buy myself a pair of these real horns" (see above-- a symbol of McKee's spiritual cuckoldry?)
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