Page 57 →3 “The Bind of the Digital” and Other Oversimplified Logic

In his The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), Theodore Roszak, encapsulated the nascent resistance to the amorphous entity/mindset he named “technocracy”: “Understood . . . as the mature product of technological progress and the scientific ethos, the technocracy easily eludes all traditional political categories. Indeed, it is characteristic of the technocracy to render itself ideologically invisible. Its assumptions about reality and its values become as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe. While daily political argument continues within and between the capitalist and collectivist societies of the world, the technocracy increases and consolidates its power in both as a transpolitical phenomenon following the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity” (8). Roszak’s formulation of the technocracy as “an umpire . . . the man who stands above the contest and who simply interprets and enforces the rules” (8) prefigures Pynchon’s notion of the overarching “Them” from Gravity’s Rainbow and echoes succeeding critics’ observations.¹ As the next three chapters will corroborate, Roszak not only identifies the ultimate target of almost all the subversive satires of the cold war but also precisely articulates the reason why it must be subverted: “The angry debates of conservative and liberal, radical and reactionary touch everything except the technocracy, because the technocracy is not generally perceived as a political phenomenon in our advanced industrial societies. It holds the place, rather, of a grand cultural imperative which is beyond question, beyond discussion. . . . While possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us by exploiting our deep-seated commitment to the scientific world-view and by manipulating the securities and creature comforts of the industrial affluence which science has given us” (9; emphasis added). As a totalized system or “a grand cultural imperative” impervious to Page 58 →criticism (or even dialogue), Roszak’s technocracy is a “disease” and his book unhesitatingly sides with the young “centaurs” opposing it. He does so because of the high stakes involved if the disease is allowed to progress: “The prime symptom of that disease is the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation beneath which we cower. The counter culture takes its stand against the background of this absolute evil, an evil which is not defined by the sheer fact of the bomb, but by the total ethos of the bomb, in which our politics, our public morality, our economic life, our intellectual endeavor are now embedded with a wealth of ingenious rationalization. . . . Whenever we feel inclined to qualify, to modify, to offer a cautious ‘yes . . . but’ to the protests of the young, let us return to this fact as the decisive measure of the technocracy’s essential criminality: the extent to which it insists, in the name of progress, in the name of reason, that the unthinkable become thinkable and the intolerable become tolerable” (47). The subversive satirists of the cold war collectively undertook the twofold process of diagnosing this “disease” and exposing of the “essential criminality” behind it.

Any social order predicated on simple absolutes such as those that constitute Hirshberg’s schemata or the “antiquated categories” (8) that Roszak claims are superficially operative in late 1960s politics is open to question by even fairly moderate skeptics, given the constant potential for cognitive dissonance. The oversimplified good/bad relationships that informed the official rhetoric of the cold war in the United States may have made good sound bites for domestic politics—President Reagan’s famous characterization of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” springs immediately to mind—but they were hardly based on honest appraisals of geopolitics, a fact that had become evident to a number of American satirists by the mid-1960s. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the intensification of the undeclared war in Southeast Asia, dissatisfaction with or even outright hostility toward government had intensified, most prominently (as would perhaps be expected) among individuals and groups associated with the broadly defined counterculture.

With satires such as Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove still fresh in American cultural memory, the period from 1965 to 1977 witnessed an explosion of satirical fictions that attempted to pierce the veil of the binary oppositions underlying the dominant cold war social fictions, both domestic and international. Two of the most compelling of such satires, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, were published within months of each other in 1966. Anticipating the dramatic expansion of digital culture that took place in the decades after its release, Pynchon introduces the concept of “excluded middles” to the literary scene as an undesirable ordering principle for 1960s American society. Borrowing his metaphor from the fundamental language of computer programming, Pynchon creates a divided society that largely functions along the lines of the ultrarational digital logic of ones and Page 59 →zeroes, thus marginalizing the excluded middles (in mathematical terms, the infinite range of nonwhole numbers in between these two integers).

Oedipa Maas, the heroine of the novel, is forced to undergo a bizarre and unnerving quest for reliable information in the wake of the death of her former lover, an eccentric millionaire named Pierce Inverarity. The more Oedipa becomes embroiled in the secretive and mind-bogglingly complex world in which Inverarity operated while alive, the less she can trust the various polarized concepts that previously shaped her thinking. Using either/or logic, she tries to make sense of the bewildering array of details she learns concerning the shadowy, seemingly countercultural Tristero organization: “She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided. . . . For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth” (Pynchon, Crying 181). As the phrasing of the final sentence above shows, Oedipa’s attempts to determine nature of the Tristero’s existence do not avoid excluded middles, in this case the range between “transcendence” and ordinariness. In fact her retention of strict either/or reasoning is even more limiting, forcing her to assert that the only possible explanations for what she has experienced are either paranoid delusion or an alternate reality that remains impenetrable to her: “Another mode of meaning behind the obvious or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For either there was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia” (182).

Thus Oedipa discovers the paradox of using binary logic to make sense of something that seems to exist beyond its means of explanation. Her situation is comparable to that of a dissenter against the political logic of the cold war, since the only readily acceptable stances in such an unqualified framework are those of friend or foe, plus or minus, for or against, us or them, one or zero. In the eyes of a system founded on a binary model, one cannot dissent against it in toto, only against one part of its constituent pairs.² The individual who claims to reject everything in a system implicitly rejects that which the system deems to be “good.” If the only options for classification are “good” or “bad,” then any form of dissenter becomes simply another enemy.³

Therefore Oedipa’s potential for salvation lies precisely in the “middle” that is excluded by the closed binary system of San Narciso, which symbolizes the United States as a self-venerating whole, as the two parts of the town’s name make clear. Neither the familiar version of America (“only the earth” or “just America”) nor the inscrutable alternative mail system of the Tristero presents her a viable option, seemingly suggesting that a third option that Page 60 →supersedes both of these is necessary if she is to break out of what Alec McHoul and David Wills term “the bind of the digital, the binary of the either/or, all or nothing” (75). As a sort of American everywoman caught in the cogwheels of social machinery that she finds difficult if not impossible to comprehend, Oedipa symbolically signifies the United States in a state of societal and cultural crisis because of its logical inflexibility. As Frank D. McConnell writes in Four Postwar American Novelists (1977), “Pynchon’s metaphor, however relevant it might be to its time and place, is deeply involved with the viability of human speech; for in the daylight, public society has produced a language whose prefabricated assurances do not admit the possibility of dissent, then society refuses to admit the possibility of the individual moral will—the will to say ‘No!’ if not in thunder then at least in a still, small voice. . . . The subversive communications network of Tristero, the language of the lost, becomes at once an escape from the tyranny of the daylight culture and an admission that the only human alternatives remaining are silence and apocalypse. For what can Tristero’s elaborate networks carry, except the word that the word is, indeed, totally lost?” (172–73). Although McConnell’s identification of the Tristero as “subversive” is accurate, he also succumbs to the same logical trap as Oedipa (and Rorty, for that matter). He retains the biases of the binary status quo by asserting that the Tristero suggests only two possible “human alternatives.” His options of “silence” or “apocalypse” are analogues of Oedipa’s choices (“orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero”), but the Tristero would only be apocalyptic to a culture that is threatened by the very existence of nonoppositional alternatives, as is any rigidly binary system. The Tristero is properly understood (and perhaps only participated in) by individuals who abandon the binary perspective that governs American technocratic society.

The Tristero’s motley collection of users includes representatives from myriad groups that are pushed to the edges of American life, whether for political, economic, sexual, intellectual, or other reasons. The Tristero’s radical diversity marks it conspicuously as an alternative to the more homogeneous America suggested by San Narciso’s suburban landscape. Moreover its unconventional pluralism reflects the Tristero’s inclination and ability to accept and even to incorporate paradoxes. As Maltby writes, “Pynchon indicates that the Tristero System is not a mirror image of that which it opposes by representing its communicants (real or imagined) in ways which conflate contradictory alternatives” (149). Oedipa’s investigation uncovers a wide range of apparent Tristero users: Mike Fallopian, a member of the zealously pro-American Peter Pinguid Society who scoffingly refers to members of the John Birch Society as “our more left-leaning friends” (50); Stanley Koteks, a somewhat bohemian engineer and disaffected employee of Yoyodyne, Inc.; Emory Bortz, a vaguely Dionysian literature professor; Winthrop Tremaine, who manufactures and sells swastika armbands and plans to market reproductions Page 61 →of SS uniforms “in teenage kid sizes” and perhaps “a modified version for the ladies” (149); and Jésus Arrabal, who quotes nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and preaches anarchic (that is, wholly subversive) revolution. These members’ seeming incompatibility is reconciled by our recognition that such incongruities hold true only within the existing binary American value system, divided as it is into left and right, liberal and conservative, radical and reactionary, and so on.

Thus the Tristero could be a model for an alternative social order; however, Oedipa never definitively discovers its ontological status and therefore cannot free herself from the binary trap. Near the novel’s conclusion, she formulates four potential explanations—still configured in an extended either/or binary—for the nature of the Tristero: “Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of a dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government system. . . . Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate . . . , so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull” (170). Oedipa claims that “she didn’t like any of them,” which is hardly surprising since they all still leave her with only the options of irrelevancy (she has only observed, not yet been allowed entry into the Tristero) or one of three forms of misapprehension. In the final scene of the novel, she refines her options further into the simple either/or proposition (“Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero”) noted above and continues her quest for “her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof” (183). Pynchon does not resolve this binary dilemma, however, ending the novel without a denouement—in fact, the event for which the book is named is still incipient as the novel closes. In doing so he gives the reader a metafictional dose of Oedipa’s medicine. Considering the pessimistic tone that pervades Pynchon’s next work (Gravity’s Rainbow), he may have despaired of finding such a solution on a larger social scale in time to avoid either complete acquiescent silence (irrelevance, or the effective state of nonexistence) or global apocalypse (the very real state of nonexistence).

Each of Pynchon’s first three novels involves characters engaged in a quest. Herbert Stencil, the closest thing to a protagonist V. has, is on a quest that resembles Oedipa’s in attempting to solve a mystery left behind in a vague posthumous document. Stencil pursues and attempts to narratively reconstruct a nebulous figure identified only as “V.” in his dead father’s notebooks. Gravity’s Rainbow deals with a multitude of different searches, chiefly Tyrone Slothrop’s desire to discover the reasons for his unusual erections, several parties’ hunt for the missing V-2 rocket, and Tchitcherine’s pursuit of Enzian. Page 62 →Rarely, if ever, do these quests reach a conclusion, and such conclusions that we do get are usually either unsatisfactory, as is the case with the “Counterforce” in Gravity’s Rainbow, or knowingly ignored in order to continue the search, as in Stencil’s apparent discovery of the identity of his eponymous bounty in V. Pynchon’s myriad loose endings imply not only that “the bind of the digital” is extremely strong in the late twentieth century but also that it perpetuates itself through individuals’ willingness to maintain convenient fictions rather than to recognize potentially obscure or unpleasant truths. As Maltby writes, such recognition would involve subversion of the systems in which these characters find themselves, rather than simple opposition to them: “Pynchon denies the subversive value of opposition based on binary alternatives such as Left/Right or religious/secular. He suggests that a truly revolutionary movement would not be a reversal or inversion of the prevailing order of things because such options remain within the orbit of established oppositions; rather, the revolutionary movement must be radically discontinuous from the prevailing order” (148). Pynchon suggests in The Crying of Lot 49, however, that such a “radically discontinuous” movement is possible, and has Oedipa express this as she observes the W.A.S.T.E. mail system in action: “Here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated act of withdrawal from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent unsuspected world” (124–25). Whether or not the malcontents that make up the Tristero are themselves a desirable alternative is another question altogether, one that implicitly demands examination of the groups whose desires are preeminent in a society (that is, whose will is empowered). Their mere existence, however, represents a subversive challenge to the established order, since it reaffirms the legitimacy of an “excluded middle” independent of any official recognition, positive or negative.

I believe that Pynchon intends the Tristero not to be an idealized or utopian system in reaction to the status quo but rather a philosophical construct that at least allows a more polyvocal culture to exist entirely separate from it. The Tristero certainly stands in opposition to the status quo from the postal system’s perspective, but the Tristero users do not wish to take over the postal system’s role, as the typical power-based dynamic of binary logic would dictate. Instead they seek to deny the postal system’s authority to transmit (and thus to exert a measure of control over) the sort of socially marginalized communication in which they are engaging. In this way the Tristero also undermines the idea of dialectical advance from thesis and antithesis to synthesis, since becoming just an antipostal system would bolster the validity Page 63 →of the original binary thesis/antithesis opposition (given that synthesis can only result from the existence of an antithesis). The Tristero is fundamentally alternative rather than oppositional.

Pynchon harbors no illusions that achieving or even envisioning such an alternative system is a simple proposition. Oedipa’s inability to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion for her either/or propositions indicates that such solutions cannot be envisioned without breaking free from the “orbit of established oppositions.” Like any “typical” American, Oedipa will have to work still harder to overcome the culturally and logically undemanding⁴ background of Tupperware parties, television, and the Young Republicans in which she exists at the novel’s opening and that is even more pervasive in the fictional versions of California that Pynchon depicts in Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice (2009). In essence both of those novels show (Inherent Vice in the Nixonian 1970s and Vineland in the Reagan-era 1980s) the adverse effects of remaining within the “digital” ground rules. At best one can hope (as in Don DeLillo’s White Noise)⁵ for the mediated bliss of consumerist sedation, and at worst incarceration or outright extermination is one’s fate.

At virtually the same time that The Crying of Lot 49 was suggesting the subversive necessity of reintegrating marginalized values, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy considered similar topics in an even more metaphysical (and metafictional) context. Although the extent of its direct political dissent is debatable,⁶ Giles Goat-Boy is one of the most thorough satires of the fundamental cold war worldview. Within the copious space of eight hundred pages, Barth presents a thinly veiled allegory of the cold war, recast as an ideological conflict (the “Quiet Riot”) between two dominant colleges (Nikolayan and New Tammany) within a global university and the computers (EASCAC and WESCAC) that both control and threaten the lives of individuals there. Barth simultaneously weaves a bildungsroman into this allegorized setting, telling the story of Billy Bocksfuss / George Giles and his quest to redeem the novel’s dangerously divided world by becoming a “Grand Tutor,” a messianic archetype corresponding closely to Joseph Campbell’s monomythic hero. Barth’s refiguring of the cold war as an academic rivalry allows him to play out a number of arguments predicated on antithetical, flawed, and/or intentionally vague premises to their belabored and irrational conclusions.

At the chronological start of the narrative,⁷ Billy is a human child being raised as a goat in an artificial state of pastoral innocence by his mentor Max Spielman, one of the original developers of WESCAC. Spielman has exiled himself to a goat farm at the edge of campus as a protest against the way the computer is being used as a weapon in the Quiet Riot, making him a clear analogue for J. Robert Oppenheimer (among others).⁸ After a series of incidents that make Billy aware of his human nature, he begins unsteadily walking upright instead of on all fours and asks Spielman to treat him henceforth as a normal human being. Spielman’s faith in humanity has been so Page 64 →thoroughly shaken that he attempts to dissuade Billy from this course of action, and his justification for raising Billy as a goat instead of as a human demonstrates that this loss of faith stems from his belief that humans are unable to reconcile potentially contradictory aspects of their nature: “I’d watch you frisking with Mary’s [a nanny on the goat farm] kids, that were never going to hear what true and false is, and then I’d look at the wretchedest man on campus [Spielman himself], that wrote The Theory of the University and loves every student in it, but killed ten thousand with a single brainwave! So! Well! I decided my Bill had better be a goat for his own good, he should never have to wonder who he is” (107).

Spielman represents a viewpoint that, despite its seemingly good intentions, succumbs entirely to binary logic, especially an ostensibly absolute innate distinction between humans and animals. Suffering the emotional aftereffects of his role in creating WESCAC, Spielman ceases to wrestle with the ambiguities that fall between oversimplified binaries such as truth and falsehood or good and evil, and he tries to insulate Billy from them as well. Because the Quiet Riot as a whole is nominally predicated on such constructs, his self-exile from the New Tammany power structure is wholly consistent with this attitude. Spielman’s solution differs from that of the Tristero by doing precisely that which Oedipa can still question, if only parenthetically; he withdraws, but he withdraws into a vacuum that negates the possibility of an authentic alternative, since remaining there would force Billy to exist as something he is decidedly not, a nonhuman animal.

Spielman is not the only voice exerting formative pressure on young Billy, though. He is also visited by a woman he calls Lady Creamhair, who entreats him to rediscover his humanity, albeit by invoking the kind of binary logic that the novel’s overall structure eventually subverts. She tells Billy, “I want you to be a human being and Dr. Spielman wants you to be a goat, and you’re caught in between. . . . Here’s what I think: you’ve got to be one or the other, and Dr. Spielman and I must go along with your decision.” When Billy asks her why he must choose, she replies in terms that echo the inflexible concept of the excluded middle: “You just can’t, my dear: if you try to be both, you’ll end up being neither” (60). Both of Billy’s early mentors thus reinforce the notion that the world functions along exclusively dualistic lines, even if the particular dualisms (or the sides they take in any given opposition) do not always correspond to one another. In the case of the goat-versus-human dichotomy, Lady Creamhair’s argument ultimately proves more persuasive to the impressionable young goat-boy, and he insists on becoming human.

Despite his reservations Spielman eventually gives in to Billy’s wishes. He agrees to provide Billy with an introduction to the ways of the university, from which the young goat-boy has been shielded to this point. In the course of this education, Spielman tells his protégé the story of how Billy came to be his surrogate son. Billy was brought to the farm by G. Herrold, a janitor who Page 65 →discovered the infant Billy inside an elevator used to transport reels of tape containing data into WESCAC’s “Belly” (its core). How he came to be there is unclear, although Spielman surmises that he was the result of an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry and was left there to die for some reason by “someone high in the administrative hierarchy of the campus” (104). Finding the answer to this mystery becomes one of Billy’s chief concerns through the remainder of the novel. The mystery surrounding his origins is further complicated by the presence of a strangely configured and anonymous Prenatal Aptitude Test (PAT) card—WESCAC issues such a card for all newborns indicating what vocation their intelligence indicates they are best suited for—that bears the words “Pass All Fail All” (104). Given that the concepts of passage and failure are roughly equivalent to salvation and damnation, respectively, within the novel’s metaphorical setting, their obscure and paradoxical appearance on his card seemingly marks him for some higher purpose. Again displaying his inherently dualistic worldview, Spielman vigorously rejects such a metaphysical significance: “It don’t make sense how one student could pass everything and flunk everything too” (104).

Nevertheless the correspondences between the details of Billy’s peculiar beginnings and the stories Spielman and Lady Creamhair have told him about mythological heroes and religious figures such as Enos Enoch (the novel’s analogue for Jesus) ultimately convince Billy that he is indeed destined for something more than simple existence as either a goat or a human; he becomes certain that he is meant to be a Grand Tutor. In short, Billy uses fictions, or at least fictionalized versions of reality, in his attempts to define himself. This point is driven home by the fact that he literally devours (as befits a goat) the pages of the books of mythology from which Lady Creamhair—who later turns out to be his biological mother—reads to him.

Early in the book Billy realizes the difficulties of becoming a unifying messiah in a world that steadfastly chooses to define itself in terms of irreconcilable and oppositional differences. Spielman tells Billy of his erstwhile belief in “Student-Unionism” (that is, Communism), with which Spielman “like many intellectual Moishians [Jews] . . . had sympathized whole-heartedly . . . during Campus Riot I,” but goes on to explain to his young protégé that it ultimately differed very little from its sworn enemy, “Informationalism” (that is, capitalism): “‘It wasn’t until later,’ he declared sadly ‘we saw that the “Sovereignty of the Bottom Percentile” was just another absolute chancellorship, with some pastry-cook or industrial-arts teacher in charge. The great failing of Informationalism is selfishness; but what the Student-Unionists do, they exchange the selfish student for a selfish college. This College Self they’re always lecturing about—it’s just as greedy and grasping as Ira Hector, the richest Informationalist in New Tammany’” (93).

As Douglas Robinson suggests, Barth’s novel is a call for a new kind of hero who understands the irony of the cold war / Quiet Riot and who can Page 66 →accordingly help the world avert its potential self-destruction: “For Barth, the threat of apocalypse and the resultant societal anxiety are undeniable cultural realities that possess considerable potential for fiction. . . . Anxiety creates need, and need motivation; and the need felt by modern society for salvation from imminent apocalypse motivates the parody of the hero myth” (178). The novel is at once a parody of the mythic coming-of-age story and a recalibration of this genre and its attendant cultural goals—a state in which “life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space” (Campbell 29)—to the specific conditions of the nuclear age.

In accordance with the archetypal mythic-heroic pattern that Billy has chosen to emulate,⁹ Spielman takes on the role of the mentor, giving him a new name (George Giles) and reciting the history of the college, WESCAC, and the Quiet Riot for him, simultaneously explicating this complicated allegorical structure for the reader. When Billy/George sets out to enroll in classes seven years later, he almost immediately meets Maurice Stoker, a demonic figure who controls New Tammany College’s energy supply and its police force. He also meets Stoker’s beautiful and sexually promiscuous wife Anastasia, with whom he immediately falls in love, like any good Campbellian hero in search of a “mother goddess” who will facilitate his mythic resurrection (in Greek, anastasis). The antagonism between Maurice’s egotism and Anastasia’s selflessness develops into George’s guiding metaphor in his quest to become a Grand Tutor. Anastasia becomes his symbolic ideal, and he divides the world cleanly into two classes of people based on how he perceives the couple’s respective natures. In essence he wishes to save Anastasia and people like her from Maurice and people like him. Having inherited the practice of dividing the world into neat halves from his two main mentors, he now applies it in his quest to become a Grand Tutor.

George matriculates and begins working toward enlightenment (refigured as “commencement” in this academic setting). He believes that achievement of this goal, which involves correctly answering a series of questions put to him by the omnipotent WESCAC, will affirm his status as a Grand Tutor, thereby affording him the rarefied messianic status he seeks and allowing him to overthrow entirely the established system of New Tammany College. His motivation for wanting to topple the status quo stems both from having absorbed much of Spielman’s resentment against the administration for the perversion of WESCAC and from his desire to save Anastasia from the evil he perceives in Maurice and, by extension, the “state” he serves.

A significant problem arises, however, in that a rival aspirant has arrived on the scene, a man named Harold Bray. He steals George’s thunder at a performance of a play, Taliped Decanus, by announcing himself to be the Grand Tutor. Specifically he claims to be the GILES (“Grand-tutorial Ideal, Laboratory Eugenical Specimen” [143]) that WESCAC’s programmers had wanted Page 67 →it to produce as part of the project that Max believes may have created George. Just as the play before the characters is a parody (for Barth’s reader, not for the characters themselves) of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Bray functions as a parody of the idealized heroic identity that George has conceived as his own destiny. The assembled crowd enthusiastically accepts Bray at his word, and he usurps the authoritative position George had planned to claim for himself.

Robinson claims that “as antigiles, Bray’s task is to thwart George at any cost; and in addition to linguistic tricks and direct violence, one of the ways he seeks to complete his nefarious task is by tempting George to give up his quest altogether” (225). Although Bray is not the genuine GILES, Robinson points out that he “is apparently an emanation of WESCAC” (225), making him the physical manifestation of a technological innovation designed to carry out a binary ideological conflict and thus the literal and metaphorical embodiment of the rhetoric that defends the power elites of New Tammany College against internal and external challenges. In the terms of the overriding historical allegory, Bray becomes the mouthpiece of American authority, which, like New Tammany College, is backed up by lethal technology. Because he couches his opposition to George in explicitly binary terms (that is, he is the “antigiles”), he essentially serves as a normative tool for suppressing dissent. This parallel is further enhanced by Robinson’s list of the three strategies Bray uses to confound George, since disinformation and euphemism (“linguistic tricks”), imprisonment or other material consequences (“direct violence”), and threats of ostracism (“tempting [him] to give up the quest altogether”) were at one time or another important components of U.S. domestic policy during the cold war.¹⁰ Undeterred by the presence of an unexpected rival, George continues with his plan to graduate, hopefully also exposing Bray as a fake along the way.

Upon matriculating George receives a list of seven “assignments” from WESCAC, and the latter half of the novel treats the two successive philosophical positions that George develops in response to his assigned tasks. Both of these schemata represent attempts to reconcile the ambiguous message (“Pass All Fail All”) previously noted on his PAT card and reappearing on his assignment sheet. This paradoxical “PAT-phrase” (Barth, Giles 383) and the list of assignments represent exactly the sort of logically problematic language from which Spielman hoped to isolate Billy/George. George’s initial reaction to his assignments shows, he only vaguely comprehends what he is being asked to do, much less how to do it: “Founder! Founder! Those I thought I grasped, I gasped at; most signified not a thing to me. . . . Fist to brow I told them over, faintful list, and struck at each” (384). As Robinson points out, George’s first proposed strategy for approaching his assignment does not arise from understanding it but instead from intentionally altering it: “Because paradoxical thinking does not come easy to George at first, the Page 68 →phrase seems like a contradiction in terms, and so he unconsciously amends it to make it easier to handle: he tends to think of the phrase with an ‘or’ in the middle . . . , and faced with a choice to Pass All or Fail All, George knows he must cleave to Passage. This tiny addition to the PAT-phrase distorts and simplifies its import, and helps George formulate his first position: Passage, he says is always Passage, and Failure is always Failure, and the two should be kept as far apart as possible” (287). To George the simple binary division defining the world is thus the product of a “tiny addition” that “distorts and simplifies” ambiguity by reducing it to an “either/or” construction. George applies this absolutist philosophy to the completion of all his assigned tasks, including answering a series of questions in WESCAC’s Belly as part of his “Finals.” Some of these questions do not seem to lend themselves to the “yes or no” answers to which George is limited (“ARE YOU MALE OR FEMALE?”) or even to be questions at all (“GILES, SON OF WESCAC”), yet George answers them all in the affirmative. He briefly believes himself to have passed, but Bray has concocted an elaborate ruse that reinforces the public’s belief that Bray is the true GILES. Rather than exposing his rival via his passage, George is himself accused of being an impostor and is about to be hanged when an alarm sounds, signifying an attack by the Nikolayans. Unaware that the alarm is false, the angry mob scatters and George is spared execution.

Disheartened by his failure and imprisoned under Maurice Stoker’s supervision, George overcompensates, swinging to the opposite pole. His new position argues that Passage and Failure, indeed all oppositions, are meaningless: “The way to salvation, he says, is to embrace all the opposites within yourself, and to give full reign to the innate and fruitful chaos of good and evil, order and disorder, wisdom and madness in the human soul” (McConnell 149). George again takes his Finals in WESCAC’s Belly, this time answering all questions negatively. The results are much the same as before, with the campus thrown into a state of chaos after it adopts his nihilistic principles.

These two antithetical positions prove equally unsatisfying; each, in fact, nearly results in the destruction of the college. The novel’s positive resolution occurs only after George rejects altogether the binary thinking upon which the adversarial world of the Quiet Riot is founded. As McConnell puts it, George “discovers the most nebulous of alternative positions to his earlier premises. In fact, it is not an alternative at all, but rather a resignation of alternatives . . . , a declaration that both rationalism and nihilism, order and disorder, are equally true, equally valid imaginations of the human conditions” (149). This reconciliation of philosophical opposites is embodied by the final scene of the main narrative, in which both thesis and antithesis are simultaneously dispelled: George “at once vanquishes Harold Bray forever and witnesses the execution of his old teacher, Max—a moment, that is, when the living forces of mockery and wisdom, negativity and culture are held in a precarious balance of mutual destruction” (149). Spielman’s death signifies Page 69 →that existence within a true state of paradox requires the sacrifice of something dear, specifically the tenuous security that comes from adherence to simple binary logic. Although Spielman rejects the dualistic thinking of New Tammany College after his retreat to the goat barns, his refusal echoes Weisenburger’s distinction between “transgressing and more properly resisting or dissenting practices” (Fables 258). Spielman does not subvert the structure as much as ignore it out of frustration at being unable to reconcile the existence of opposites. He still believes the world is divided into good and evil (or true and false) but feels oppressed by the existence or perhaps even the dominance of values that oppose his own, and he regresses into a sort of nihilism by default. The simultaneous disappearances of Bray and Spielman keep New Tammany in equilibrium by not allowing either the former’s rationalism or the latter’s nihilism to overwhelm the other.

Barth’s combination of cold war allegory and mythopoetic/philosophical inquiry results in a work that directs critical evaluation and, ultimately, satirical subversion toward all narratives (broadly defined) that claim absolute veracity, including the synthetic philosophical solution that finally allows George to achieve his goal in Giles Goat-Boy.¹¹ Barth undercuts any sense of prescriptive truth telling via the series of three brief framing devices that conclude the book. First George himself contributes a “Posttape” in which he appears to disown the precepts laid forth in his autobiographical tale. This is followed by a “Postscript to the Posttape” in which “J. B.” (the ostensible caretaker of George’s manuscript and himself a follower of its teachings) claims that the “Posttape” is a bogus document and should not have been included. Finally a “Footnote to the Postscript to the Posttape” is appended by the book’s fictional editor, in which he questions the authenticity of J. B.’s “Postscript to the Posttape.”

Barth’s intention is affirmation, rather than confirmation, of the existential paradox.¹² After all, placing an ethical value on what is ultimately a philosophical given—and paradox is still the status quo at the end of both George’s framed parodic hagiography and the framing postscripts of Giles Goat-Boy—would repeat the mistake of a fiction that claims itself to be true. Iser’s explanation for the differences in the intentions of “literary fictions” and “fictions of our ordinary world” is valuable in accounting for Barth’s seemingly self-negating ending: “The [fictions of our ordinary world] are assumptions, hypotheses, presuppositions and, more often than not, the basis of world views, and may be said to complement reality. . . . Fictionalizing in literature, however, appears to have a different aim . . . , [for literary fictions] are always accompanied by convention-governed signs that signalize the ‘as if’ nature of all the possibilities they adumbrate. Consequently, such a staged compensation for what is missing in reality never conceals the fact that in the final analysis it is nothing but make-believe, and so ultimately all the possibilities opened up must be lacking in authenticity” (Iser 5). The concatenated Page 70 →postscripts serve as the “convention-governed signs” that clearly and indelibly mark the fictionality of George’s story even as they comically purport to establish its veracity through a simulated editorial (that is, nonfictional) correspondence. In doing so they also help subvert the possible interpretation of George’s solution as a dialectic synthesis, and therefore a philosophical truth, since they destabilize or perhaps even destroy the reader’s faith in the authenticity of the entire narrative.¹³

Thus Giles Goat-Boy is not truly intended as a surrogate gospel, as its subtitle “The Revised New Syllabus” might imply. Rather it seeks, as Charles B. Harris argues, to subvert altogether the power of social fictions: “George has not answered WESCAC’s questions, he has invalidated them, denied their legitimacy. He solves his problem, which is finally linguistic in nature, by transcending it” (100). The “linguistic” root of George’s problem is specifically the rhetoric of binary logic, whether progressive dialectics or divisive antagonism. The novel’s “solution” is so complete that it even calls its own ability to tell the truth into question and, therefore, does what Harris sees as the next (and only) best thing it can: it “faces an ultimacy, an artistic dead end, turns it back upon itself, and produces art” (102).

The kind of “life-and-death anomalies” that McConnell claims are raised in Giles Goat-Boy lie at the very heart of the cold war, which represented the most grievously threatening either/or choice ever put before the world. Neither Giles Goat-Boy nor The Crying of Lot 49 offer any palliatives for the “bind of the digital” that retain its basic reasoning, whether out of fear, naïveté, habit, or some combination thereof. Instead both novels subvert the validity of such binary constructs by showing the violence and self-negation that necessarily results from them. Both present alternatives that offer the temperate redemption of continued and more genuine existence, if not the elusive paradise of utopia.

Satirical subversion of binary cold war logic is not limited to American fiction. If anything the wide-ranging influence of such thinking in Russian history makes it an even more prominent theme in Russian literature and not just during this time period. Soviet rhetoric of the cold war has deep roots in several sets of cultural opposites that have persisted in Russian culture for centuries, some of the most important of which are East versus West, old versus new, and native versus foreigner, each of which serves to define who “we” are as Russians as compared to who “they” are as non-Russians. Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky note that these dichotomies arise from a cyclical process that can be traced back at least as far as the Christianization of Russia in the year 988: “The history of Russian culture in the period that we have selected [that is, before the nineteenth century] provides convincing Page 71 →evidence of the culture’s clear-cut division into stages that replace one another dynamically.” However, this dynamic replacement takes place within a system that is fundamentally polarized, which results in “new historical structures in pre-nineteenth-century Russia [that] invariably regenerate the culture of the past.” They argue that this process arises from the worldview of medieval Russia: “The basic cultural values (ideological, political, and religious) of medieval Russia were distributed in a bipolar field and divided by a sharp boundary without an axiologically neutral zone. . . . The Russian medieval system was constructed on an accentuated duality . . . , the division of the other world into heaven and hell. Intermediate neutral spheres were not envisaged. Behavior in earthly life could, correspondingly, be either sinful or holy. This situation spread into extra-ecclesiastical conceptions; thus secular power could be interpreted as divine or diabolical, but never as neutral” (32).

This “accentuated duality” repeatedly creates a “new” state out of ideological remnants of a past at least one step removed from the present: “Duality and the absence of a neutral axiological sphere led to a conception of the new not as a continuation, but as a total eschatological change. . . . Under such conditions, the dynamic process of change has a fundamentally different character [from the West]: change occurs as a radical negation of the preceding state. The new does not arise out of a structurally ‘unused’ reserve, but results from a transformation of the old, a process of turning it inside out. Thus repeated transformations can in fact lead to the regeneration of archaic forms” (32–33). Lotman and Uspensky argue that the result of this “consistently and cyclically repeated ‘negation of negation’” (33) is that genuinely contemporary variants (that is, not simple “remnants of receding cultural periods” [31]) of traditional value systems shape Russian history and culture in a way that is revolutionary in the short term but homeostatic in the broader historical context.

Among the most illustrative examples of this simultaneously subversive and normative dualism in Russian history are the Old Believers (starovery), who played a leading role in the mid-seventeenth-century schism (raskol) within the Russian Orthodox Church and later led the resistance to Peter the Great’s societal reforms (themselves an inversion of the most immediate “old” state). In the nineteenth century, the Slavophile movement partially took up the mantle of the Old Believers by vociferously opposing the introduction (past, present, or future) into Russian culture of any foreign ideas or values, among which they naturally included most of Peter’s innovations. Russian history of the past ten centuries is filled with violent clashes that center upon these kinds of seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies. Lotman and Uspensky emphasize the mutability of these binaries in Russian history, a factor that contributes to their longevity: “The activity and significance of [the opposition between ‘the old and the new’] is so great that from the subjective Page 72 →position of the ‘native speaker’ of the culture, it has at various stages included or subsumed other singularly important contrasts, such as: ‘Russia versus the West,’ ‘Christianity versus paganism,’ ‘true faith versus false faith,’ ‘knowledge versus ignorance,’ ‘upper classes versus lower classes,’ and so on” (33). The crucial innovation regarding the use of this dichotomy and others like it during the Soviet period is that the ideological conflict is predominantly focused outward on a global scale (as befits both a theoretically internationalist movement and a paranoid state that feels “encircled” by class enemies) rather than inward onto Russian society. Lenin’s pronouncement that “as long as capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace” (Lenin 398) makes clear the inflexibly binary philosophical basis of the Soviet state, even if the practical reality (during, for example, the NEP period or détente) was occasionally less absolute.

In Soviet Civilization, Sinyavsky discusses the exclusively dichotomous and chauvinistic mindset of the Soviet state: “The distinction between ours and not ours is part of the psychology and the official language. When interrogating a dissident at the KGB, they often begin by saying: ‘You’re not one of ours!’ Then, to push him to repent: ‘But you’re one of ours, aren’t you? Answer? Are you or aren’t you?’ One wants to ask: ‘Why do I have to be one or the other?’ But that is forbidden. Because humanity is divided into ours and not ours. And this is rooted deep in the subconscious in the form of that disjunctive question: ‘Russian or non-Russian?’” (261). Sinyavsky repeatedly points out that this binary approach is merely exaggerated by the Soviet system rather than created by it. He sardonically points out that the Russian language itself contains a number of words or phrases that subtly reinforce the ours / not ours split: “‘Ours’ [nashi] can only mean Russians. Whereas the German spirit is alien, inhuman. The Russian word for Germans (nemtsy) has the same root as the word dumb (nemy): the Germans are those who can’t speak Russian, ‘nonpersons,’ sometimes evil spirits. ‘Tatars’ are those who come from Tartar, from Hell. But we Russians, we are bright, we are good, we are Orthodox, we are Slavs” (260). Even though centuries of usage and the aggressive recontextualizations of Soviet idiom have largely effaced these etymological connections, Sinyavsky claims that the “distinction between ours and not ours persists, in a more diffuse, less precise form.” Ultimately, he contends, the “nuances tied to a specific historical period” (260) are not as important as the fact that binary logic is consistent in its presence throughout Russian history, even if the identities of the opposing sides tend to change. Such logic then serves as the foundation for a cognitive schema that is extremely resistant to counterschematic information, just as a collective sense of virtuous exceptionalism with its roots in the nation’s ostensibly Puritan origins (and the attendant Calvinist binary of election and preterition) fortified the patriotic schemata of the United States during the cold war.

Page 73 →In 1934 the strength of this dichotomous logic shaped the infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (Sektsiia 58 Ugolovnyi Kodeks RSFSR).¹⁴ This law was used to convict large numbers of political prisoners during the Stalinist terrors, especially during the purges of 1937–38. Although less frequently invoked after Khrushchev’s 1956 criticism of Stalin’s “excesses,” it fostered a simple pro-Soviet / anti-Soviet division used as legal justification for the imprisonment of such noted dissidents as Sakharov, Sinyavsky, and Daniel. Article 58 deals specifically with “Counter-revolutionary crimes” (Kontrrevoliutsionnye prestupleniia) and defines such activity: “‘Counter-revolutionary’ is understood as any action directed toward the overthrow, subversion, or weakening of the power of worker-peasant councils or of their chosen (according to the Constitution of the USSR and constitutions of union republics) worker-peasant government of the USSR, union and autonomous republics, or toward the subversion or weakening of the external security of the USSR and the fundamental economic, political, and national gains of the proletarian revolution.” Especially in cases involving writers and other members of the intelligentsia, paragraph 10 of this article proved to be the most useful tool of repression. This paragraph specifically treated published or otherwise explicitly stated counterrevolutionary thought: “Propaganda, or agitation, containing a call for the overthrow, subversion, or weakening of Soviet authority or for the carrying out of other counter-revolutionary crimes . . . , and likewise the distribution or preparation or keeping of literature of this nature shall be punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term not less than six months. The same actions during mass disturbances, or with the use of religious or nationalist prejudices of the masses, or in a war situation, or in areas proclaimed to be in a war situation shall be punishable by measures of social defense, indicated in article 58.2 of this code.” These “measures of social defense” included “shooting, or the proclamation as an enemy of the workers, with confiscation of property and with deprivation of citizenship of the union republic, and likewise of citizenship of the Soviet Union and perpetual expulsion beyond the borders of the USSR.” Paragraph 10 also allows for the punishment to be reduced “to deprivation of liberty for a term of no less than three years,” but only “under extenuating circumstances” (Cunningham, Article 58).

Article 58 thus codified the ours / not ours binary into the Soviet legal system, first by defining ideological dissenters as enemies of the state and consequently by deeming them unworthy to be a part of Soviet society by depriving them of physical freedom, citizenship, or life. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were indicted under this article and the extent to which this law was spuriously used to control and/or exterminate members of the Soviet population, especially those actively opposing Stalinist totalitarianism, indelibly etched its rhetorical structure into the memory of Soviet dissidents.

Page 74 →Although the terrible significance of Article 58 in the post-Stalin Soviet cultural conscience does not automatically transform any criticism of Stalinism or the Soviet legal system into a condemnation of ours / not ours logic, such criticisms usually contained a strong thematic undercurrent of this sort, especially since “enemy of the state” or “enemy of the workers” rhetoric remained a salient feature of official attempts to control dissent well into the glasnost era. In describing various pathways to dissidence among his generation, Sinyavsky singles out the labor camps as the most important: “The Soviet camps and prisons exercised the strongest influence. Primarily through the prisoners themselves, amnestied or rehabilitated after Stalin’s death. These were people of another generation, mostly old men, returning home after long terms to tell their own and other people’s stories, life experience that the young intelligentsia greedily consumed. . . . Very often these were old Communists or distinguished people once devoted to the Soviet power. But time in camp had forced them to change, to reconsider their ideals” (234–35).

Sinyavsky claims that these experiences propagated a subculture of opposition and became something of a dissident’s litmus test, ironically based on yet another version of the ours / not ours distinction: “Their hard experience had the advantage of pushing the younger generation into action. These older people were coming back from camp, to which they had been sent for no real offense, while the younger ones were about to be sent off: it is in this context that a sort of nostalgia for camp emerged: ‘Can I consider myself a man, an honest intellectual, if I’ve never been in prison? Can I judge life if I myself have never been through life’s chief experience, that of prison?’” (235). The bitter divisions among many émigrés of the post-Stalin era often reflect this attitude that credible dissidence stems primarily from personal hardships suffered at Soviet hands, a theme expressed in much of the period’s satirical fiction.¹⁵ In view of the degree to which domestic Soviet rhetoric was dominated by the struggle of “heroes of socialist labor” against “enemies of the state” (a binary opposition rife with social fictions designed to uphold the patriotic schemata of the state) it was perhaps inevitable, if also lamentable, that the supposed enemies would employ such binaries in their own processes of self-definition.

The real enemy in theoretically class-oriented Soviet binary logic, though, is neither simply the ideas and values of the West nor someone, internal or external, who actually or allegedly espouses them, as was generally the case in the nineteenth-century Slavophile worldview.¹⁶ Rather the countries of the West themselves—the United States foremost—also became the Soviets’ enemies, since they represented territories ruled by bourgeois, empire-minded (and thus physically as well as ideologically threatening) capitalists. Despite the prominent role that proxies and satellites played in its actual conduct, numerous propagandists on both sides imagined the cold war pitting Misha the Russian Bear against Uncle Sam.

Page 75 →Although official Soviet authors used this dichotomy extensively during the Cold War (as they had during the 1920s and early 1930s)¹⁷ to satirize the United States as the ideological enemy against which the Soviet people virtuously struggled, many dissident writers produced works that satirically engaged the ours / not ours mentality instead. The official anticapitalist, anti-Western, and anti-American position was expressed in such works as Vadim Kozhevnikov’s Znakom’tes’, Baluev (1960; Introduce Yourself, Baluev!), Vsevolod Kochetov’s Sekretar’ obkoma (1961; Regional Party Secretary), and Alexander Chakovsky’s Pobeda (1980–82; Victory) in rigidly formulaic terms that adhere closely to the requirements of Socialist Realism from before the cold war.¹⁸ In contrast works such as Zinoviev’s Yawning Heights, Aksyonov’s Our Golden Ironburg and The Island of Crimea, Iskander’s Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, Dovlatov’s Nashi (1983; Ours), and Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (hereafter referred to simply as Chonkin), Pretender to the Throne, and Moscow 2042 all use satire to subvert the validity of the Soviet binary worldview as well as any system of thinking based on simple black-and-white divisions. Like their American counterparts, these Russian authors do not wish simply to ally themselves with the “other side” within the existing framework of conflict but to step outside that framework and discredit it altogether by pointing out its inherent contradictions, over-simplifications, and distortions.

Most of these texts achieve their satirical effect at least in part by parodying genres of fiction formerly used in Russian literary history to uphold some portion of the cultural philosophy informing the ours / not ours binary. For example Ryan-Hayes argues that Ours is essentially a parody of the family chronicle, a genre dating back to Sergei Aksakov’s novel Semeinaia khronika (1856; A Family Chronicle). She also argues that Rabbits and Boa Constrictors can be read as a parody of the traditional Russian allegorical fairy tale and that Moscow 2042 is simultaneously a parody of both utopian and dystopian fiction, especially in its science fictional variant.¹⁹ Clowes similarly asserts that The Island of Crimea is “framed in the popular genre of the international thriller combining adventure, romance, and intrigue” (177) even as it serves as a dark, often uncomic dystopian satire.²⁰ Nina Kolesnikoff argues that Our Golden Ironburg parodies the “so-called ‘industrial novel,’ which . . . offers accounts of work at construction projects, factories or research institutes” (195). Furthermore, Voinovich’s two Chonkin novels can be read as parodies of the host of novels, songs, poems, and so on that glorified the intelligence, bravery, and resourcefulness of the simple Soviet soldier during the “Great Patriotic War” (World War II).²¹ The parodic-satiric tendency is widespread in post-Stalin dissident literature and has been extensively documented in the extant criticism.

As the writers mentioned above began their careers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, these genres were either entirely absent from or only Page 76 →gradually reemerging onto the Soviet literary scene after more than thirty years of neglect stemming from the governmentally enforced emphasis on Socialist Realist writing during Stalin’s rule. The subversive potential contained within these novels is thus two-tiered, a trait that helps delineate their peculiarity as specifically cold war satires. First, the original genres being parodied in these works (with the exception of the Chonkin novels and Our Golden Ironburg, both of which parody the most dogmatic subgenres of sotsrealizm) are themselves already reactions against what Katerina Clark calls the “master plot [of Socialist Realism] that stitches together several significant layers of culture, including its history, its philosophical anthropology, and its literary presuppositions” (252). Many if not most of these “layers of culture” still appeared in official Soviet literature even after the Thaw, during which the variety of the Soviet novel slowly expanded from Clark’s catalogue of the six subgenres²² of Socialist Realism. Each of the genres parodied thus already represents a form of protest against the withering of Russian fiction under Stalin, either by rehabilitating a pre-Soviet genre (the family chronicle or the beast fable) or by imitating a Western, and thus ideologically proscribed, model (such as the “international thriller”).

The second and more significant form of subversion resides not in the parodic but in the satirical nature of these novels. As noted before the reforms of the Thaw had stopped well short of creating a literary atmosphere in the Soviet Union in which most forms of explicit dissent were possible.²³ The genres that resurfaced after the loosening of Socialist Realism’s strictures during the Thaw quickly took on the ideological tenor of the state, especially after Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev. Clark explains this phenomenon: “Although it is, de facto, no longer mandatory to use the conventions of Socialist Realism that were standard under Stalin, fiction [of the Brezhnev era] is not entirely independent of them. Even when writers advocate values they believe to be opposed to Stalinist values, they often articulate them against the old patterns. Thus those patterns still have some currency as a code through which meaning can be conveyed symbolically” (236). Later she explains these “patterns” and “codes” in terms of myth making, linking her analysis back to Iser’s concepts of literary and social fictionality: “Instead of doing what we have come to think of as the work of literature, Socialist Realism performs an essentially mythological task. It is mythic in the degree to which it supports and explains the main thrust of the politically dominant forces in its society” (252). She claims, furthermore, that the literary myths expressed in Socialist Realism and the societal practice reinforced each other cyclically, thereby assuring the durability of the system: “In the Soviet Union, the story in myth . . . informs the rituals of the culture in which it exists. There is a mutual interdependence between myth and ritual, and it operates dialectically” (253).

Page 77 →Clark’s argument echoes Iser’s notion of “masked” social fictions, especially his assertion that “the concealment of fictionality endows an explanation with an appearance of reality, which is vital, because fiction—as explanation—functions as the constitutive basis of this reality” (3). Socialist Realism—and the subsequent fiction that unironically retained elements of its system of patterns, codes, and/or myths—adopts a nominally objective and mimetic perspective on Soviet reality, as well as an oracular quality, given the inevitable future dictated by Marxist-Leninist dialectics. Yet such a perspective can only be achieved through dissimulation, thereby ironically creating an inherently fictive reality. It is this fictiveness that the four satirists treated in this section wish to expose, as doing so also undermines the validity of official Soviet reality. This course of action entails unraveling the rhetoric of the cultural context from which these novels arose, specifically the fallacies in the traditional ours / not ours division on which that rhetoric is based. In this way, their novels serve not only to satirize the Soviet Union, but the intrinsic pitfalls of binary thinking in general.

Written between 1974 and 1976, Zinoviev’s dense and fragmented satire The Yawning Heights was among the first cold war satires that explicitly attacked the language and logic of the Soviet Union. Zinoviev does not limit himself to parodying Soviet literary genres; rather, the wide-ranging satirical scope of the book creates the parallel society of “Ibansk,”²⁴ a parody of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union in toto. The mixture of vernacular and official language spoken by (and frequently commented upon, dissected, or otherwise metafictionally addressed by) Zinoviev’s huge cast of simultaneously allegorized and particularized characters²⁵ allows Zinoviev to satirize the Soviet system from a linguistic perspective. As Wolf Moskovich writes, “The real Russian language of Zinoviev’s understanding is that of Russian people (ordinary ones and intellectuals) as opposed to the wooden official Russian language. A liberal use of the resources of Russian argot, without official limitations, is a sign of protest against the official Soviet order of things. Used in such an unrestricted way, Russian becomes an anti-language showing protest against official Soviet norms” (91). Official Soviet language for Zinoviev is not only “wooden,” as Moskovich asserts, but also rife with logical inconsistencies and has become semiotically diminished by its constant attempts to mask reality (as the pun in the title makes clear). As Edward J. Brown notes, Ibansk is governed by an “official ideology that numbs the mind . . . [with] perverted logic” and Zinoviev’s status as a professional logician “magnificently equip[s him] to expose such perversion by linguistic mimicry.” The novel thus satirically tears down “the intellectual edifice built in Ibansk to domicile and legitimize the complex family of lies that govern Ibanskian life” (314).

The sarcastic “Author’s Note” preceding the novel suggests that Zinoviev’s goal is not simply oppositional protest but a more subversive invalidation Page 78 →of the illogic of Soviet society. The narrator introduces the novel as “fragments of a manuscript which were found accidentally—that is, without the leadership’s knowledge—on a newly opened rubbish dump which was soon abandoned thereafter” (n.p. [9]).²⁶ He notes that the dump’s opening was commemorated with “an historic speech in which [the Leader] said that the age-old dream of mankind would soon be realised, as on the horizon we could already see the yawning heights of soc-ism” (n.p. [9]). The narrator’s explanation of “soc-ism” (referred to also simply as “the Ism”) frames Zinoviev’s subsequent narrative in terms of the inherent irrationality of the society it describes:

Soc-ism is an imaginary social order which would come into being if individuals were to behave to one another within society in complete accordance with the social laws. It can in fact never be attained because of the falsity of the premises on which it is based. Like every extra-historical absurdity, soc-ism has its own erroneous theory and incorrect practice, but it is almost impossible to establish either in theory or in practice what the theory and practice of soc-ism actually are, and to distinguish between them. Ibansk is a populated area inhabited by no-one, and which has no existence in reality. And if by sheer chance it did exist it would be a pure figment of the imagination. At all events, if its existence were possible it is anywhere but here, in Ibansk. Although the events and ideas described in the manuscript are, all things considered, imaginary, they have a certain interest as evidence of the erroneous ideas of mankind and human society held by the remote ancestors of the people of Ibansk. (n.p. [9])

The fact that the narrator gives the dateline “Ibansk 1974” to this introductory section leaves little doubt as to Zinoviev’s satirical intent, since the parodic analogues to soc-ism and the various residents of Ibansk are readily apparent to readers familiar with the Soviet Union of the early to mid-1970s.

Once the novel itself begins, Zinoviev continues to present immediately recognizable examples of Soviet language that completely frustrate readers’ attempts to make sense out of them. In other words Zinoviev shows how the forms of official language lack content. In the novel’s opening chapter, the people of Ibansk are described as exceptional in ways that echo the Soviet self-image conveyed first by Marxist-Leninist theory and then by decades of monological reinforcement by the Soviet leadership: “[The inhabitants of Ibansk] are taller, not by reason of any reactionary biological superiority . . . , but because of the progressive historic conditions in which they live and the correctness of the theory for which they have been the guinea pigs; and thanks too to the wisdom of the leadership that has guided them so brilliantly.” This exceptionalism extends to their very lives, described as “epoch-making experiments” that Ibanskians carry out “even when they know nothing Page 79 →about them and take no part in them, and even when the experiments are not taking place at all.” The whole text is circumscribed by the curiously self-negating statement that “this book is dedicated to the examination of one such experiment” (13). The description of both the name and methodology of the experiment reveal the satirical intention unmistakably, even as the language continues to use the “codes” (for example, acronyms and references to Marxist-Leninist theory) of official Soviet language:

The experiment under consideration is called STACMLFTC, from the initial letters of the names of its principal participants. The name was composed by Colleague and was first used in the scientific literature by Thinker, who took this opportunity to publish a series of articles on another and more compelling theme. The articles were written on a high dialectical level, with the result that no-one read them, but everyone applauded them. . . . Two groups of people took part in the experiment; the experimenter group and the guinea-pig group. These groups were composed of one and the same people. . . . Thanks to the principles which have been set out there was an increase in the flow of useless information . . . and, like every well thought out and logically conducted experiment, it ended in nothing. (13–14)

The apophatic nature of Zinoviev’s satirical parody essentially reproduces the strategy of Soviet rhetoric by ascribing sociological and historic significance to a narrative about an idealized society. The main difference is that Zinoviev’s narrator openly acknowledges that his narrative is “imaginary,” set in a place with “no existence in reality,” and he recounts a potentially nonexistent experiment that “ended in nothing.” The irony, of course, lies in the fact that Zinoviev’s admittedly fictionalized text is more rhetorically valid than the supposedly truthful official Soviet version. As Zinoviev and his readers are well aware, the place he describes by parodic association unmistakably does exist, neither “by chance” nor “as a pure figment of the imagination” but because of the deliberate fictionalization of history by the Soviet power elites.²⁷ As a satirical parody, The Yawning Heights unmasks the social fiction behind Soviet logic as it unmasks its own status as a literary fiction.

Although it is problematic to assert that binary logic in particular is a primary target of Zinoviev’s satire in The Yawning Heights—if anything, the novel’s fragmentary complexity²⁸ deliberately routs any attempts to make comprehensive thematic pronouncements about it—the novel does contain numerous sections in which Zinoviev discusses the relationship between Ibanskian ideology and its opponents, both internal and external. The characters divide (as is the case with their real-life analogues) into such officially acceptable figures as Artist and others such as Dauber, who either proclaim themselves to be dissidents or are considered such for lack of alternative categories. They engage in extensive discussions about the nature of the Page 80 →Ibanskian state and the social logic that informs it. This technique accentuates Zinoviev’s metalinguistic commentary by offering him opportunities to engage in a complex parody of certain official Soviet rhetorical styles. The second section of the novel, for example, opens with a chapter heading that grandly promises a “Treatise on fate, freedom, truth, morality, and so on” but almost immediately undermines its own coherence and credibility through a series of logical contradictions and by acknowledging its lack of significance: “In this treatise which aims to be both exhaustively incomplete and rigorously unsystematic, it is my intention to set down everything which I do not know on good authority about the emergence of the guardhouse in the Ibansk School of Military Aviation (ISMA) and about its early period of development which was omitted from the official history because it had no consequences” (24).

Zinoviev’s views on the disguised authoritarian nature of Soviet language are made clear in an exchange between Member, a devotee of the state, and Chatterer, a dissident: “Member said that language was given to man for the purpose of expressing his thoughts. Chatterer remarked that Member said this rather as if language were handed out by the government in the same way as they hand out work, accommodation, bread, and trousers” (104). Although Member’s comment suggests freedom of expression, Chatterer’s rejoinder, especially when viewed in the historical context of the food shortages of the mid-1970s zastoi period, suggests that the reality is that language has become simply another poorly made government-issue commodity.

Nearly 350 pages later, Zinoviev illustrates the innate folly of such language. In a chapter titled “A page of heroic history,”²⁹ Zinoviev satirizes the rigidity of Soviet society by refiguring the conformist policies of Socialist Realism under Stalin as a standardization of pants under “the Boss”: “During the era of the Boss a pan-Ibanskian standard was laid down for trousers. There was to be one type of trouser for all ages and sizes, for all professions and all circumferences. They were wide at the waist, at the knees and below. The crotch hung down to the knees. They had well delineated flies and pockets down to the heels. They were ideologically consistent trousers. Ibanskians were unfailingly recognised by their trousers throughout the world. Even today on the streets of Ibansk one can still sometimes see examples of these living memorials to the glorious epoch of the Boss” (464). The origins of these ridiculous pants are explained by the narrator in terms that are distinctly binary in nature and directly parody Soviet rhetoric of the early 1930s: “The pan-Ibanskian trouser was developed in the context of the bitter struggle against deviationists and class enemies. Leftist deviationists wanted to make the trousers even wider waisted and bring the crotch down to the ankles. They were counting on realising the total Ism in the next six months and stuffing the starving workers with food. . . . The leftist deviationists were liquidated by the rightist deviationists. These wanted rather to widen the Page 81 →trousers at the knees and eliminate the flies. They had no faith in the creative potential of the masses and put all their hopes in the bourgeoisie. . . . The rightist deviationists were liquidated by the left” (465). In both instances the Boss steps in to correct the ideological positions of the “deviationists” (presumably those left after the internecine warfare mentioned by the narrator). His pronouncements are not only presented in dialect that marks them as the product of a provincial hick but also with farcically facile logic: “‘T’leftists,’ he said, ‘’av made wun ov them theer typickle errors. They’ve coot’emselves off from t’masses and gon’ agate rushin’ ahead o’theer selves.’ . . . ‘T’reight deviationists ’av made a typickle error. They’ve coot’emselves off from t’masses and gon’ agate rushin’ back’ards’” (465).³⁰ In short, the Boss’s Ibansk is absurd not only because it tries to foster “ideological consisten[cy]” among its citizens by requiring everyone to don utterly impractical pants, but because the rationale for such a policy is formulated by and debated over by dimwits.

Zinoviev’s satire does not end with the Boss’s demise. He continues by extending his metaphor of the pants into “the Period of Perplexity,” his analogue for the Thaw: “When the Boss had died and the Ibanskians had got over their drunken rejoicing, rather narrow trousers began to appear. They were followed by really tight drainpipe trousers. A merciless battle was launched against the drainpipers. Their trousers were hacked to pieces in public, they were expelled from the universities, fired from their jobs, fined and denounced in the press. But on the other hand they were no longer shot. . . . It wasn’t the narrowness of the trousers themselves which caused such terror. Indeed, the fashion was advantageous, since it led to an immediate doubling in the country’s textile output. But narrow trousers were a sign and symbol of a growing intolerance of authority, of self-assertion and cynicism” (465).³¹ Zinoviev’s satirical metaphor has a clear nonmetaphorical analogue in Soviet history. Soviet industry often made absurd adjustments to meet production quotas that were pegged either to gross weight or units produced. Marshall Goldman’s The Soviet Economy: Myth and Reality (1968) cites instances when overly pragmatic responses to nail and shoe production quotas flooded Soviet markets with nothing but Lilliputian or gargantuan units, depending on whether those quotas were based on quantity or weight (92–95). Thus the “immediate doubling in the country’s textile output” that is touted by the narrator as a positive side effect of the new style of trousers is an unambiguously ironic reference to Soviet reality for readers familiar with the sight of nothing but ludicrously sized commodities. However, the reaction against the trousers by the “drainpipers” extends this from a simple economic joke to a broader political and metaphorical satire of the philosophy behind this absurd production system.

Zinoviev thus reinscribes the revolt against political orthodoxy in literature by such prominent writers of the late 1950s and early 1960s as Aksyonov, Page 82 →Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Bondarev, or Viktor Rozov as a change in sartorial style. Rather than belittling their intentions, this technique heightens the sense of incompatibility between rigid ideology and aesthetic fashion. As Clark notes, style and content were both potential sites of dissent in Soviet literature. Zinoviev’s argument does not reduce the dissident works of the Thaw to simply stylistic revolts, either. The fact that the ideological rebels’ narrow pants actually serve the purpose of pants more effectively than the state’s grotesque garments speaks to their superior “content” as well. Style essentially becomes content. Not only does Zinoviev imply that the state has bad taste in such matters—the official pants, like Socialist Realism, are aesthetic disasters and are wholly impractical for any purpose other than marking ideological uniformity—but he also insists that their attempts to control self-expression will ultimately be unsuccessful anyway, since creative minds will always be a step ahead of dull minds who attempt to legislate style: “In the end, however, narrow trousers, like cybernetics, were purged of all ideological deviationism and recognised officially as corresponding with all the ideas of the Ism. By which time, they had already passed out of fashion” (465). As with attempts to reassert control over literature after the Thaw, Zinoviev argues that co-opting the outward forms of dissidence in the service of the state is bound to be unsuccessful since genuine dissent will find new means of expression.

A point perhaps lost on the majority of Western readers is that Communism is not in and of itself the target of Zinoviev’s satire. Rather it is the unquestioned status of ideology of any form that draws his ire, whether in the form of fictional satire or nonfictional invective, and Soviet Communism is, for obvious reasons, his most familiar example. Indeed, since his 1978 emigration Zinoviev has stated that “Western ideology, like Soviet ideology, is destroying the bulwarks of civilization built up over the centuries which were designed to, and did in fact, constrain the spontaneous forces of people’s social environment.” He has singled out “the propagation of sexual depravity, the propagation of matrimonial infidelity, coercion, gangsterism, [and] parisitism” (quoted in Kirkwood 56) as mores inherent in contemporary Western culture that have resulted from unexamined adherence to ideology (that is, belief in the innate superiority of Western culture). While Zinoviev’s pronouncements in this regard are admittedly somewhat overgeneralized and occasionally even shrill, they remain logically consistent with his satirical treatment of the simplistic philosophy of Ibansk. Soviet Communism is abhorrent to him in large measure because it seeks to obscure its patently absurd reasoning beneath an intentionally hollow rhetorical façade, a figurative metaphor that Zinoviev literalizes in his next novel, The Radiant Future.³²

Iskander’s Rabbits and Boa Constrictors similarly exposes fraudulent utterances but widens its satirical scope by directing its opprobrium toward the producers of such social fictions as well as to their willfully ignorant receivers. As Clowes persuasively argues, the book “alludes to the tradition of the Page 83 →revolutionary fable, while more broadly addressing habits of reading and thinking that have been fostered in the Soviet era.” Despite a number of intentionally superficial correspondences, Clowes asserts that the overall structure of the book and the narrative tone serve to undermine the “Aesopian approach to interpretation assumed by Iskander’s implied reader [that] seeks out simple, one-to-one correspondences between the characters . . . and real people and conditions in Soviet society and politics. . . . [Rabbits and Boa Constrictors] tackles readerly habits such as simplistic allegorical thinking and an unexamined didactic response, that is, an expectation that the text will furnish a simple and concrete moral. The kind of mentality that Iskander’s story supports in its implied reader is specifically meta-utopian. It encourages an ability to weigh several kinds of ideology, among them that of the realized utopia, to see ideological structures individually and together in their relationship to sources of political power” (184). Iskander’s technique in the novel involves suggesting analogous symbolic associations and then invalidating them, either by casting doubt on his narrator’s veracity, by including contradictory associations within the same character, or by parceling out associations with one historical figure among several characters. Thus he exposes and undermines glaringly simplistic interpretive rubrics and challenges the readers to exercise their mental capacity more vigorously.

The rabbits who follow the advice of Ponderer and his young protégé Yearner attempt to transgress the system established—apparently in concert with the Great Python, leader of the rabbits’ sworn enemies, the boas—by the king of the rabbits. They ultimately (and perhaps inevitably) fail to subvert it because their vision is limited to improving their lot within the established system instead of fundamentally altering it. In doing so they submit to the rules of the status quo without recognizing that these rules are heavily skewed toward self-perpetuation rather than progress. Iskander’s metaparody involves his readers by making them complicit in this process, since acceptance of the text’s simple allegorical interpretation duplicates acceptance of the deceptively simple social fictions that the leaders of both the rabbits and the boas use to maintain their power. The novel thus points out how unscrupulous rulers exploit their subjects’ credulity, thereby accomplishing Iskander’s stated goal of “trying to analyse the way that power works in general, and the way that those subject to it—whatever nation they belong to—connive in their powerlessness” (quoted in Laird 20).

The interactions within and between the societies of the rabbits and the boas (they are technically not yet boa constrictors at the start of the novel, since the plot ostensibly explains how boas developed the technique of strangling their prey) provide Iskander with numerous opportunities to demonstrate how the ours / not ours division produces absurdities. For example, in the opening chapter of the book, a boa named Squinter recalls an incident in which he swallowed a rabbit who, unlike all the other rabbits that boas had Page 84 →ever swallowed, refused to be digested. The rabbit stood up inside Squinter’s stomach and hurled insults at Squinter and his whole species, a fact that got Squinter into trouble when the Great Python arrived on the scene. From his first appearance, the Great Python’s character suggests associations with Stalin. As a different species of snake, he is an outsider ruling over the boas, just as Stalin was a Georgian ruling a predominantly Russian country. Furthermore he is an inveterate self-aggrandizer, using language filled with the kind of nationalistic bombast that marked Stalin’s reign. The narrator informs the reader that “when the Great Python appeared among the boa constrictors, he uttered the battle hymn, to which all the boas listened, their heads raised as a sign of loyalty”:

Descendants of the Dragon,

Glory’s heirs, victors,

Disciples of the Python,

Young Boa Constrictors,

Bear the sweet burden of rabbit ingested,

This the future hath requested. (11)³³

In six short lines, this battle hymn parodies several of the most prominent tropes of Stalinist propaganda (linkage to a glorious distant past and a more glorious near future, the cult of youth, militarism, and fealty to a single leader) as well as making the destruction of the rabbits a necessary duty for collective advancement of the species.

After the pomp and circumstance die down, the rabbit inside Squinter directs his ridicule toward the Great Python, which causes the Great Python to accuse Squinter of being a traitor because of his supposed ideological complicity with the rabbit inside him:

“Your stomach has become a rabbit’s soapbox,” he said ominously, “but you’ll pay for this, you miserable invalid.”

“Oh, my Lord,” poor Squinter pleaded.

“I’m not your Lord or your Tsar,” the Great Python replied severely. “Any boa who harbors a talking rabbit is not the kind of boa we need.” (19)

Squinter is dragged off to be trampled by elephants, a punishment that (like being sent to the Soviet labor camps) is not explicitly intended to kill him but to squash the rabbit inside him. Squinter appeals to the guards who are leading him away, saying, “Brothers, . . . have mercy, you know that the elephants will trample me along with the rabbit.” They refuse him mercy, though, gruffly replying that he has “no brothers but the rabbits” (20). Every aspect of Squinter’s treatment parodies the ways in which Article 58 was used in the 1930s to ostracize or even eliminate anyone suspected of dissent against the state.

Page 85 →Following Squinter’s removal, the Great Python tells the assembled boas a riddle/joke that puts the relationship between boas and rabbits into the kind of materialist, quasi-scientific terms that marked Stalinist rhetoric as well. He asks, “When can a rabbit become a boa?”³⁴ It is a question that, like its allegorical analogue (“When can the enemy of a communist become a communist?”), has no possible answer in a binary logical framework. Many of the boas refuse to answer, suspecting that “the Tsar was trying to ferret out future traitors with the aid of this riddle,” and instead demand the answer emphatically from their leader. The Great Python replies with logic that clearly prefers ideology over either biology or ontology: “A rabbit that has been swallowed by a boa can become a boa . . . [because] a rabbit processed and digested by a boa is thus transformed into the boa. That means boas are actually rabbits at their highest stage of development. In other words, we are former rabbits and they are future boa constrictors” (21). To lend further credence to this assertion, the Great Python states that it is “all according to science,” a shibboleth that he invokes repeatedly in the novel to persuade the credulous boas, just as Stalin and other Soviet leaders pointed to the “science” of Marxist dialectics as support for their policies. The boas’ society under the leadership of the Great Python is thus presented in the early sections of the novel as unmistakably Stalinist.

As Ryan-Hayes points out, Iskander almost immediately begins to undermine the seemingly tidy interpretation that his “allegory that is subject to instant decoding” (25) invites. He presents the reader with a society of rabbits that considers itself opposed to that of the boas, but, as Clowes points out, “both boas’ and rabbits’ states are recognizably Stalinist”: “The rabbits think of their state as a kind of elective monarchy, with the king ‘democratically’ chosen. In fact, the tenor of political life is conditioned by the rather Byzantine court of the Rabbit King, which functions on a system of favors and rewards for service to the throne and increasingly caves into [sic] the paranoia of the king and his army of surveillance operatives and informers” (184). The parallel between the rabbit king and Stalin is made most clear through the king’s constant invocation of the future happiness that will be the rabbits’ lot upon the completion of experiments that will allow them to cultivate cauliflower. The language of his utopian promises parodies the general tenor of Soviet propaganda about the “radiant future” under Communism, but the somewhat sinister manner in which the “great dream of having cauliflower helped the King to keep his multitude of rabbits in fairly compliant submission” is decidedly more sinister and Stalinist in tone:

If the rabbits had any aspirations or yearnings that the King found objectionable, and if he couldn’t put a stop to those yearnings in the usual way, the King in the last resort relied on his favorite means, and that of course meant invoking the name of cauliflower.

Page 86 →“Yes, yes,” he would say to his rabbits in such situations, when he thought their ideas were unacceptable, “your aspirations are justified, but they’re inopportune, because precisely at this moment, when the efforts to grow cauliflower are so close to fulfillment. . . .”

If the rabbit who had the yearnings continued to be stubborn about them, he disappeared unexpectedly, and then the other rabbits came to the conclusion that he had been spirited away to the secret plantation. This was quite natural, since some of the best and smartest rabbits exhibited these tendencies, and these intelligent ones were of course needed most of all for the work on growing the cauliflower. (29)

Mirroring the ways in which Marxism-Leninism served as a corrective (or bludgeon, depending upon circumstances) to divergent “aspirations or yearnings” in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the king appeals to the universal ideology that motivates the society in order to suppress any potential threats to his power.

The last sentence in the preceding quote illustrates how subtly Iskander begins to undercut his direct parody of historical allegory, because the members of the intelligentsia targeted by Stalin’s purges were often publicly vilified as counterrevolutionary enemies of the state rather than simply being removed from society without any clear pretext (although simple “disappearings” became more common as the purges progressed). The gullible response of the rabbits demonstrates the totality of their belief in propaganda in much the same manner as the majority of the Soviet population accepted (or at least appeared to accept) the accusations leveled against those purged in the late 1930s. Because Iskander’s narrative departs from direct historical correlation here (as elsewhere), the satirical critique is directed not only at the rabbit king for using propagandistic language to control his subjects as Stalin did, but also at the ordinary rabbits for acceding to this control so willingly. As Iskander introduces his various potential dissidents into the novel—Ponderer, Yearner, and the upstart boa named Hermit—he subjects them, as symbolic representatives of an educated class that should know better, to an even greater measure of criticism for being unwilling and/or unable to engage in genuinely dissenting practices.

When Ponderer discovers that the boas’ supposed power of hypnosis over the rabbits—the means they have used to catch and devour their much quicker prey—is a sham and announces this fact to the entire rabbit citizenry in the Royal Meadow, a genuine change in the order of the rabbits’ society seems possible. Ponderer announces that the boas’ hypnosis is simply the result of the rabbits’ self-instilled fear of the boas, a conditioned response reinforced by lifetimes of identical deadly interactions with the predatory snakes. However, when Ponderer overhears Squinter telling the story of the rabbit who actively and successfully resisted being swallowed, he learns what Hirshberg would identify as “counter-schematic information” and attempts to Page 87 →impart it to his initially jubilant fellow rabbits.³⁵ What Ponderer does not seem to realize is the extent to which the king is complicit in maintaining the myth of hypnosis. The narrator, though, with insight into the king’s thoughts during the celebration that follows Ponderer’s oration, explains the extent to which this fear is the result of the king’s largely rhetorical manipulations:

Yes, the King was right when he sensed the tremendous danger inherent in Ponderer’s words. All of the King’s activities were tied to the fact that, together with his aides among the courtiers, he personally decided how much fear and caution the rabbits should experience when facing a boa, depending on the season, the atmospheric conditions in the jungle and many other factors.

And suddenly this cunning system for controlling the rabbits, which had been worked out over the course of years, was on the verge of collapse, because the rabbits, you see, didn’t have to fear hypnosis.

The King knew that by using hope (the cauliflower) and fear (the boa constrictors), he could direct the rabbits’ lives in an orderly way. But you can’t stay alive for long on cauliflower alone. (31–32)

The hope/fear combination that the king employs closely resembles the dichotomous cognitive schema that governed both U.S. and Soviet society for much of the cold war, in which the ruling classes sought to retain power through a balance of utopian domestic hopes and fear of the ideological enemy. The “tremendous danger” that the king senses is oriented toward neither his person nor his subjects but toward the perceptions that allow him to remain in power. The king goes so far as to collaborate with the boas in order to keep the system (and himself) in place, a detail reflecting how U.S. and Soviet power elites reaped mutual benefits by conducting the cold war as they did. Like McCarthy and Stalin, the king has directed “paranoiac fear of the enemy” (Clowes 185) at his own society, making the absurdity of the existing situation even more apparent. As in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), this detail emphasizes that ideological differences, including ostensible oppositions, do not necessarily manifest themselves in social realities.

The king, however, has a strategy for dealing with Ponderer’s introduction of counterschematic information and puts this into motion immediately. First he asks whether Ponderer would require the rabbits to give up the practice of “remov[ing] the excess produce” (33–34) from the gardens of the local humans, since from the humans’ point of view that is an injustice as great as the swallowing of rabbits by boas is from the rabbits’ perspective. Then, with the help of a rabbit named Sharpie, the king twists Ponderer’s meaning in order to question his patriotism. In response to the king’s leading line of rhetorical questioning, Sharpie asserts that “if Ponderer’s right, then it turns out that all our ancestors who perished heroically in the jaws of boa constrictors were simply fools and cowards, it means they perished because of their Page 88 →stupidity!” (37). Ponderer parries the king’s rhetorical thrusts at first—so successfully, in fact, that one rabbit “thumped his forehead with his paw, and fell dead” because “his poor mind couldn’t face the thought” (40) that the hypnosis is a fabrication. The narrator, in fact, states that all the rabbits sensed that “there was something tempting in Ponderer’s words, an inordinately alarming truth, but that the King’s message contained the boring, but comforting truth” (40).³⁶ Their unwillingness to break free from this “boring, but comforting” fiction masquerading as truth ultimately allows the King to dupe them into reaffirming his control, and thus the predatory influence of the boas, over them. As Iskander says in his interview with Laird, “[The rabbits] have to bear a great part of the blame themselves. That’s what the book’s about. They’ve adapted to their situation and don’t want to change” (quoted in Laird 20).

Despite his rhetorical victory over Ponderer, the king still feels himself threatened by the potential for insurrection that his rival represents and arranges for the rabidly loyal Sharpie to betray Ponderer to the boas. Sharpie is an ambitious functionary desiring little more than entrance into the elite society of courtiers known as those “Admitted to the Table,” a group whose sycophantic behavior throughout the novel parodies the Soviet party cadres. The king orders Sharpie to go to the forest and read aloud a poem whose thinly disguised symbolism will disclose Ponderer’s whereabouts to the boas, who are equally, if not more, interested in suppressing any knowledge about the nature of their hypnosis. Sharpie, as the king notes, “has a conscience” (57) and understands the consequences of his appointed task. He tries to change the wording of the poem to make its symbolic meaning less apparent, but ultimately sublimates his conscientious objections to his ambition and does the king’s bidding. Rather than simply ordering Ponderer’s death, an action that belies his benevolent reputation and contradicts the rabbits’ law against capital punishment, the king sets up a situation that will not only allow him to remove his political adversary but also to enhance his own standing in the eyes of his constituency, for his plan is to expose Sharpie as the sole orchestrator of the treacherous betrayal of Ponderer to the enemy. This episode echoes Stalin’s behavior in eliminating potential rivals such as Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov in 1934³⁷ as well as the complicity of the intelligentsia, especially the literary intelligentsia, in carrying out the wishes of the leadership, since Sharpie only wishes only to disguise the text carrying Ponderer’s betrayal rather than to condemn it genuinely.

The numerous instances of the king’s paranoid behavior satirize the extent to which the distrust inherent in the ours / not ours division makes life logically absurd and practically unworkable. For example the king makes an elaborate sequence of adjustments to his royal guard that illustrates the illogic of power based on adversarial distrust. Initially he decides to “augment the royal guard, in order to free up some time and strength for those matters Page 89 →which were the goal of his striving for power” (60). Before long, though, this noble goal recedes because of his paranoid fear of losing power to an overly large and powerful guard. Accordingly the king “made the guard even larger, and he gave these new guards the secret assignment of protecting the King from the older guards” (60). The fact that this new guard would become an alternate and potentially unchecked power of its own because of its authority over the old guard leads the king to issue a secret order to the old guard to maintain surveillance of the new guard as well. This process continues, ultimately resulting in a situation that not only makes the king devote considerably more time to maintaining his power than before, but also results in a ridiculous state in which everyone is under surveillance by someone else:

“I don’t even exclude myself,” the King said to the Chief of the Guards. “If you discover that I have joined a conspiracy against my own legitimate power, then punish me, as you do with the others.”

“Just try and get involved in such a conspiracy,” the Chief of the Guards replied threateningly, and this calmed the King. (61)

The king’s suspicion thus becomes a self-justifying sentiment that spins out of control, just as Stalin’s unpredictably paranoid behavior helped instigate and maintain the purges and terrors of the late 1930s.

In keeping with Iskander’s feeling that the rabbits are still partly culpable for their plight, the narrator claims that the rabbits’ nature allows this system to thrive. In fact, he argues, their psychology readily allows them to concoct and to accept outrageous charges, especially against the most innocent rabbits: “By not giving any real details of enmity, he forces the rabbit checking up on him to ascribe to him, sooner or later, a certain baseness. And not just a little villainy. But why ‘not just a little?’ That’s how the rabbits’ psychology is structured. Ascribing to a rabbit who must be informed on, the concealment of an extra carrot from the royal storehouse? That would be silly! In order to justify somewhat the baseness of a report, the informing rabbit makes the imagined villainy sufficiently significant, and that helps him to preserve a feeling of his own dignity” (63). This mindset is so ingrained in the rabbits’ psychology that the narrator argues “that it’s simpler for the informer to demonstrate that an innocent rabbit has formed a conspiracy against the King than it is to show that an innocent rabbit is pilfering a royal carrot from the storehouse.” The reason for this apparent contradiction lies in the reluctance to ask for evidence in the case of an accusation of conspiracy against the king. Such a question would be considered indiscreet, exposing the questioner to “an outburst of patriotic rage” that might implicate him or her by association with the conspiracy: “In the rabbits’ kingdom, the most frightening thing of all was to be under fire because of patriotic rage. According to the rabbits’ customs, patriotic rage had to be always and everywhere encouraged. Every rabbit in the kingdom, at the moment when he displays his patriotic Page 90 →rage, instantaneously occupies a rank higher than the rabbits against whom his patriotic rage is directed” (64).

The narrator’s comment that the only “weapon against patriotic rage” was “to become superpatriotic and rage even more than one’s opponent” (64)³⁸ underlines the facile nature of the rabbits’ worldview and links Iskander’s satire with any society in which patriotic discourse substitutes for reason. Despite the fact that the rabbits’ society on the whole is clearly modeled on the Soviet Union, such an accusation can be directed at the United States and the Soviet Union, especially during the most intense periods of the cold war. The rabbits’ willingness to believe fabricated charges works satirically in the context of the House Committee on Un-American Activities much as it does for the Stalinist show trials, even if the punishment was more severe in the latter. Exact verisimilitude with a particular historical analogue is not Iskander’s goal; rather, he intends to demonstrate the flaws of any voluntarily oblivious society.

Returning to the society of the boas after the chapter in which Sharpie is tried and banished for his betrayal of Ponderer, Iskander once again confounds the reader looking for a perfect allegorical parallel between the rabbits and the Stalinist Soviet Union. First Iskander describes the luxurious underground palace in which the Great Python lives. In addition to the plentiful reserve of live rabbits stored there for the Great Python’s nourishment (he no longer hunts), there was also a sculpture gallery commemorating some of the noteworthy animals swallowed by boas in history. The narrator’s comments about this gallery echo the workings of the cult of personality that surrounded Stalin, and to a lesser degree Brezhnev:

It must be said that certain of these outstanding swallowings, the sculpted commemorations of which were exhibited here, had been performed by other notable boas. But when the Great Python was named Tsar of the Boas, for some reason he quarreled with these notable boas, after which they disappeared, though the exhibits remained. And lest an outstanding feat in this area, which had educational significance, be lost, it became necessary to attribute them to the Great Python.

More precisely, it wasn’t even necessary to attribute these outstanding swallows to him. His closest aides and advisors ascribed these feats to him directly. (118)

The history of the boas is thus distorted because of its “educational significance,” that is, its utility in maintaining the ideological and political status quo, a process that the boas are so conditioned to carry out willingly that their leader no longer even needs to prod them to do so.

Things begin to change somewhat, though, after a messenger from the king of the rabbits arrives with a message for the Great Python. Among other news, he informs the Great Python that the king is upset because the boa who Page 91 →responded to Sharpie’s summons and swallowed Ponderer had “violated the inter-species agreement about the humane swallowing of a rabbit, had conducted mocking conversations with his prey, had applied torture in the form of caprice and uncertainty, and had finally refused to swallow the mortally tormented rabbit” (121). The Great Python is so enraged at this breach of protocol that he gathers all the boas and relates the “shameful behavior” of the boa who swallowed Ponderer. The boa, who will soon take on the name Hermit, tries to defend himself by using a version of the Great Python’s materialist logic, claiming that he had “deprived the rabbits of their wisest member, [and thus] he had removed a leader and at the same time acquired that rabbit’s wisdom” (123). The Great Python denies the validity of this defense, invoking inflexibly binary logic in claiming that “all wisdom has an intraspecific sense. . . . Wisdom for the rabbits is stupidity for [boas]” (123–124). No one among the gathered crowd seems to care or mind that this contradicts the Great Python’s earlier pronouncements—the boas are as conditioned to accept the truths given them by their leaders as the rabbits are—and the boa is sentenced to be banished to the same desert to which the rabbits exiled Sharpie.

While in exile Hermit meets Sharpie, who engages in a verbose and intricate attempt to justify his betrayal of Ponderer. Hermit listens but fails to understand any of Sharpie’s elaborate rationalizations, finally losing his temper and lambasting Sharpie: “‘Oh, you’re just talking nonsense!’ the Hermit Boa interrupted him. ‘Even before I swallowed the wisest rabbit, I could have told you what stupid things you were saying. Who could have stopped you if you’d never told anyone about your treachery? Still, you’re a real bastard! You’ve woven all these words in order to hide their true substance’” (130). After exposing Sharpie’s linguistic fabrication, Hermit expresses the desire to swallow Sharpie, who immediately points out that he believes Ponderer’s revelation that the boas’ hypnosis is a fraud. Denied his usual technique of hunting, Hermit becomes enraged and involuntarily feels his muscles contract, which leads him to state that he feels “that [his] hatred is giving birth to some rather fruitful thoughts” (130). He encircles Sharpie and suffocates him, thereby “discovering” the boas’ new, more deadly means of killing their prey. Hermit returns to the boas’ society and regains the favor of the Great Python because his new technique promises to put an end to the famine that has afflicted the boas ever since Ponderer’s revelation diminished the myth of hypnosis. The Great Python is so impressed with Hermit that he names him his successor and puts him in charge of teaching the new method of killing to all the boas. Eventually the Great Python dies and Hermit announces that “his body would be eternally on display beside his hunting trophies, since the sculptor was going to make him a mummy” (169). Enshrining the Great Python’s corpse in the museum parody the Soviets’ use of Lenin’s body as a source of posthumous propaganda, and it suggests that Hermit will continue the Great Python’s policies of distorting history in the service of power.

Page 92 →The very transfer of power from the Great Python to Hermit is a constant reminder of the way power tends to perpetuate itself. Hermit succeeds largely by promising a different order but quickly falls into his predecessor’s ruling habits. He announces that his ascension to the leadership is “in accordance with the Great Python’s wish [that] a boa shall rule over the boas.” He also makes the purely cosmetic linguistic gesture of announcing that “from now on, there will be no more palaces. . . . The Great Python’s palace will now be known as the Hermit’s Cell” (169). Like his predecessor he acquires the honorific sobriquet “Great” before his name when a toadying boa asks him, “Is it possible to address you as the Great Hermit, in honor of all your deeds?” He “modestly and accurately” answers that it is not necessary but also not unwelcome. The Great Hermit begins acting even more like Stalin than either the Great Python or the king of the rabbits, even giving a speech, “Smothering Is Not an End in Itself,” whose content is, as Ryan-Hayes points out, deliberately reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930 address, “Dizzy with Success” (Ryan-Hayes 31). Iskander again associates the Great Hermit with Stalin when the narrator describes the way in which the trophies in the museum have been recontextualized to fit Hermit’s wishes: “Instead of the former pieces, the collection had been enlarged, starting with the display of a stuffed rabbit who was the first to be dealt with in the new way. And a number of old trophies had been restored according to the Great Hermit’s recollections. The Great Hermit’s personal trophies concluded with the mummy of the Great Python with his eyes open, which created an awesome ambiguity and hinted rather frighteningly that the Python had been the Great Hermit’s most brilliant kill. And what’s more, there had been dark rumors among the boas that not long before the Great Python’s death, he had either been deprived of the right to have a say, or deprived of the gift of speech” (Rabbits 170).³⁹ Those “dark rumors” correspond with ones regarding Stalin’s conduct while Lenin was on his deathbed in 1923 and early 1924. Likewise the Great Hermit’s alteration of the trophies to fit his “recollections” fits with Stalinism’s succession of Leninism as the guiding principle of the Soviet Union (not to mention Stalin’s practice of having purged party members airbrushed out of historical photographs). Ultimately the Great Hermit’s main distinction from the Great Python is his substantially heightened affinity for and efficiency at killing, as symbolized by his ostentatious and sinister display of the Great Python’s mummy.

Having endowed three ostensibly distinct regimes with unambiguously Stalinist characteristics, Iskander makes the satirical point that any society that voluntarily acquiesces to despotic rule in the ways that the boas and the rabbits do, whether or not they acknowledge their acquiescence, is bound to descend into absurdity and be subject to abuse by its own leaders. Iskander’s satirical technique of laying bare the methods various leaders used to create and maintain the social fictions that help them extend their rule is familiar. Page 93 →His metafictional technique of frustrating (or even penalizing) his readers’ attempts at easy interpretation of the narrative is more innovative, though, and drives home the point that the target of the satire is not the Soviet people but any logically unsophisticated recipients of information, especially ones like the Soviet intelligentsia, who (in Iskander’s view) should have known better than to be conned by the social fictions of the Soviets. The ominous fate of both the boas and the rabbits in light of Hermit’s new method of killing and his assumption of power bolsters Iskander’s contention that any action that does not genuinely resist despotic power ultimately serves, perpetuates, and even exacerbates it. As he has no specific historical target in mind for his satire, he also does not advocate a prescriptive solution to his readers beyond thinking more analytically than the menagerie of animals that populates his mock fable.

While many influential satires from the cold war subvert simplistic logic without substituting a specific moral philosophy of their own, there are also instances in both U.S. and Russian literature of more didactic satire that can still be classed as subversive. Yuz Aleshkovsky’s novel Ruka: Povestvovanie palacha (1980; The Hand, or, The Confession of an Executioner), for example, uses satire to comprehensively reject the fictionalizing impulse behind Soviet language; it also offers a specific moral vision for the future to replace the system it casts off. Like so many of his peers, Aleshkovsky’s anger at the Soviet system comes in large part from having been personally abused by it. He spent the years from 1950 to 1953 in prison for violating military discipline and suffered professional reprisals for most of his career as a writer for refusing to conform to official demands. Outside of a few collections of children’s stories, Aleshkovsky’s publication history in the Soviet Union was confined to samizdat. After contributing three songs about life in the Siberian camps to the illegally produced literary almanac Metropol’ (1979), Aleshkovsky emigrated from the Soviet Union, first to Vienna and then to Connecticut. Within three years of arriving in the West, he published five fictional works, including The Hand.

The novel consists almost entirely of a monologue delivered by a KGB colonel known as “the Hand.” He gains this nickname by virtue of his oversized hand, which he uses to punish those he interrogates (and once used to kill a mad dog attacking Stalin, thereby gaining his seemingly undying favor). His name is given within the novel as Vasily Vasilievich Bashov, but in telling his tale he relates that both his name and his biography were altered during his youth in order to make him more appealing to Stalin as a potential member of the Cheka (114). His father’s name is Ivan Abramych—which would make his patronymic Ivanovich, not Vasilievich—and his “real” first name is Page 94 →never revealed.⁴⁰ His adopted name is made even more important by the fact that Gurov, the prisoner he is interrogating throughout the novel (by telling him, rather than asking for, the details of his crimes), is also named Vasily Vasilievich. Like Bashov, Gurov’s name is subject to frequent change in the novel, making this correlation both coincidental and artificial. Gurov was born as Conceptiev⁴¹ and takes the surname Brutnikov only after denouncing his father and being adopted by a Communist Party loyalist tellingly named Collectiva L’vovna Brutnikova. He changes this to Gurov after murdering Brutnikova⁴² and marrying her daughter, Electra (whose last name is presumably Gurova).⁴³ Thus neither man’s name is a stable signifier of his identity, making the resemblance between their names and patronymics semantically meaningful—inasmuch as it hints at their mutual participation in the Soviet system—only in a fictional context. Finally the mutable naming of Bashov and Gurov recalls the new names that Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Lenin (Ulianov), and Trotsky (Bronshtein) took for themselves after beginning their involvement with Communism. The indeterminacy and artificiality of names in the novel is just part of Aleshkovsky’s critique of Communism’s adverse effects on language.

Bashov explicitly points out early in his monologue that he fervently opposes Communism despite his rank in the KGB. Only four pages into his astonishingly profane harangue, Bashov explains his striking choice of language to Gurov: “I gather you’re wondering why I use thieves’ jargon and obscenities so often. At one time I did have an assignment working with criminals. As for the obscenities, I use them because dirty words, Russian mother-oaths, are my personal salvation in the fetid prison cell that is now the home of our mighty, free, great, etcetera, etcetera language. Poor sucker, it gets chased under the bunks by every thug in the cell: propagandists from the Central Committee, stinking newsmen, scabby literati, pulp writers, censors, even our proud technocrats. They chase it into editorials, resolutions, interrogation reports, the lifeless speeches at meetings, congresses, rallies, and conferences, where it has gradually lost its dignity and health—it’s a goner! They’re beating it to death!” (7). As M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga note in Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction (1995), Bashov’s “speaking style results precisely from an attempt to inject new life into a language that Stalinism has left deadened and impoverished.” Furthermore they argue that Aleshkovsky is using Bashov’s extreme departure from officially sanctioned Russian to satirize the inherently mendacious character of Soviet language: “It has been used to tell so many lies that it no longer has any real meaning. Far from containing the mystical force of meaning described by Gogol [in Dead Souls] in relation to the Russian language, the ‘dead word’ of Stalinism has no connection to reality at all: it represents nothing but the fictional constructions of official power” (109). Like Aleshkovsky himself, Bashov chooses to set himself apart from the Soviet system by the words he uses, Page 95 →claiming that all the various manifestations of Soviet language are corrupt and meaningless.

Bashov demonstrates that this corruption is the result of the Soviets’ attempts to hide their colossal failures. He reconciles the potential paradox of serving the regime he loathes by pointing out that he reviles its deceitfulness (that is, its unacknowledged fictionality) and associates its propaganda with all manner of infernal refuse:

We pups, we punks, before all the other kids our age and before a lot of the old farts, had guessed right: underneath the sheep’s clothing, underneath the flittering of philanthropic Party slogans, underneath the sweet promises, underneath the invitation to the housewarming at the World Commune was the wolf-toothed grin of diabolical forces.

With our puppy-dog eyes, not yet clogged by the rainbow puke of Soviet illusions, we saw how our well-to-do country had become hungry and ill clad. Under the banner of building a new life, chaos had penetrated trade, daily living, the economy, justice, culture, and art. . . .

Despite the demonic orgy of agitation and propaganda that enmeshed soul and reason, we punks sensed what was hidden behind the slogans and fine words: a deathly abyss or a latrine barrel full of shit. The words hid us from a monstrous tyranny, bloody carnage, the collapse of the five-year plans, the bankruptcy of the routine propaganda campaigns, the abuse of power, all-out thievery, moral degeneracy, the mockery of faith.

The Forces, in their high-handed attack on what was human, used the Word, they used Language, and at the same time tried to destroy its essence. (100–101)

This recognition allows Bashov to formulate his revenge against the group of Communists who murdered his father and destroyed his village during the collectivization of 1929. He tells Gurov that he decided to emulate the Count of Monte Cristo, whose story he had read while at an orphanage, and subvert the power structure from within:

I came to hate utopians, Marxes, Engelses, Lenins, revolutionaries, socialists, Dantons, Robespierres, Chernyshevskys, and other demons. I came to hate the promises of alleged friends of the people, who assured the nervous and skeptical that it was possible to create a new order on earth. I wasn’t thinking philosophically, of course, or even politically. This was all stewing and baking in my heart. But even then, my feeble little mind could not help correlating the glaring reality of the Soviet hell, or the hell of the French Revolution, with its ideological and moral sources. . . .

And after my horrors, which occurred almost nightly, I would imagine that my nook in the hole was the count’s island cave. I was the Page 96 →count, trying on the coat of my Chekist uniform before setting off with a rapid-firing cannon and a detachment of trusty friends on a vengeful crusade against Stalin, Fourier, Kamenev, Saint-Simon, Trotsky, Voroshilov, Zinoviev, Karl Marx, Pyotr Verkhovensky, Yagoda, Campanella, Bukharin and the rest of the gang. . . . I daydreamed; in my dreams I wrought retribution; and I did so, purely for reasons of camouflage, in the Chekist uniform that I hated. (103–4)

Bashov learns the linguistic tricks of the trade so well as a Chekist that he gradually avenges his father’s death by employing the very fictionalizing that he deplores. He ensnares Gurov’s father, for example, a close confidant of Stalin and thus a difficult target to bring down,⁴⁴ by composing and then filming two elaborate scenarios in which Conceptiev and several of his colleagues act out a pair of wholly fictionalized plots to kill first Lenin and later Stalin.⁴⁵ Bashov ironically presents these fabrications to Conceptiev as a possible means of refuting charges that his son has made against him in a denunciation. Every step of Bashov’s elaborate plan to hoist Conceptiev upon his own petard involves intentional confusion of the fictive and nonfictive.

To spring his trap on Conceptiev and his cohort, Bashov sets loose the Cheka’s vast disinformation network. Earlier in the novel he ironically refers to these individuals as the “‘poets’ of their profession” at work in various “Palaces of Literature” (that is, prisons) with the “same goal: to create, with the aid of one or more unhappy prisoners, a literary work of a piofuckineering new genre: the Case” (28–29). They first begin turning out falsified newspapers that Bashov shows the detainees in order to convince them that their reputations are being sullied: “Our printing house immediately began turning out Moscow newspapers with personal data on the arrestees and all sorts of fantastic blooey about their double-dealing: their links with foreign intelligence, the Trotskyite opposition, and domestic reactionaries. We had a couple of novelists and a certain now-deceased mammoth of journalism, the vile David Zaslavsky, who all did a glorious job on it. They found a gruesome satisfaction in the work, and I also convinced them that their discovery of new literary and journalistic genres would certainly be followed by medals, honor, and national fame” (165). Once Bashov has convinced Conceptiev and the others that their situation is grim, he steps in to offer them an apparent escape that in fact irrevocably seals their doom: “There is, however, a remedy. . . . The charges brought against you are provocative and ridiculous. The more ridiculous the charges, the more absurd they are, the more improbable your confession will necessarily seem to Stalin. He will have to doubt the reality of the case, the circumstances of it, and the moral probity of the informers and false witnesses. The remedy is dialectics. Your salvation is to confess to something that could not, objectively, have happened. Think about it. We’ll continue our conversation tomorrow. We must demolish the Page 97 →two main charges dialectically. The rest will wither away of themselves” (167). Invoking the supposedly inviolable logic of Soviet dialectics even as he presents a wholly fictionalized and admittedly absurd scenario involving Lenin’s death, Bashov persuades Conceptiev to cooperate in the filming of the ridiculously “fabricated phantasmagorias” (168).

Simply “shooting the episodes of the ‘investigation’” (170) does not suffice for Bashov, though, since he wants to make sure his fictions have the desired effect. Ironically invoking Lenin’s politico-aesthetic pronouncement about the importance of film as a tool for Soviet propaganda—“I was the director, and at that moment, for me, the cinema was truly ‘the most important of the arts’”—Bashov brings in a variety of film professionals to polish the product: “In the end, the materials were edited by a leading documentary filmmaker. We dubbed the testimony, which I personally had written on a sleepless night. Dunaevsky composed a marvellously expressive score, which the sound technicians synchronized with Lenin’s hoarse breathing, the groans of his flesh being tortured by Communist labor” (171). In sum Bashov employs nearly every means at his disposal of fictionalizing the “case” against Conceptiev, eventually creating a document so compellingly perfidious (albeit utterly nonsensical) that Stalin, of course, orders Bashov to execute the whole supposedly treacherous lot immediately.

The irony of this judgment is compounded by yet another fraudulent document that Gurov mentions in denouncing his father. Gurov repudiates Conceptiev—in the process unwittingly initiating Bashov’s revenge on both of them—in part because Conceptiev fabricated a note purportedly from Stalin as part of his strategy to coerce Bashov’s father’s village into collectivizing. Gurov informs on Conceptiev not out of loyalty to Stalin or to the principles of the revolution but to further his own literal and figurative fortunes within the party. On the other hand, Conceptiev’s “crime” of impersonating Stalin was actually part of an attempt to ruthlessly enact Stalin’s will, and this act is exposed not by those who were victimized by it but by one who originally abetted it and gained from it. The supposed exoneration for that crime, cunningly set up by Bashov through his elaborately staged fictions, ultimately becomes a “real” crime that gets Conceptiev executed. The entire fabric of the intertwined stories of Bashov and Gurov’s lives is woven from a long string of forgeries and dirty tricks.

Bashov exposes the entire system of justice as nothing more than the “most elaborate works of Socialist Realism” and completely fictionalized, like a stage play: “The trials, whether open or closed, were perceived by our leaders, and by spectators temporarily remaining at large, as mighty pageants where any deficiency in Shakespearean passion or depth of artistic thought was compensated for by the real-world setting of the opener, the real denials of guilt, the real pressure from the prosecutor, the forced confessions, and the details of the epic crime as reconstructed in the soul-freezing dialogues Page 98 →between the judges and defendants. Then the culmination and finale” (29). Aleshkovsky’s satire repeatedly demonstrates that the moral corruption he sees as an inescapable aspect of the Soviet Union results from fictions having been misrepresented as reality. This process is so advanced that “our leaders” up to and including Stalin himself can no longer discriminate between reality and a patently absurd imitation, despite having presided over the creation of a state dependent on unacknowledged fabrication.

Even though much of the recollected action of the novel takes place in the 1920s and 1930s, the narrative present in the days leading up to the sixtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution,⁴⁶ placing it in autumn of 1977, squarely in the middle of the zastoi and thus the cold war. Aleshkovsky uses Bashov’s recollections, not just from the Stalinist era but throughout Soviet history, to uncover the roots of the wholly empty promise that Communism has become by the time of Brezhnev. Bashov recalls a lengthy anecdote, for example, about Khrushchev nearly allowing a single deputy of the Supreme Soviet to vote in opposition to an issue⁴⁷ rather than having a unanimous vote on the question. Bashov claims that this gesture was intended to demonstrate to Western Communist parties specifically how Stalinism had been replaced by enlightened government. All of the party cadres begin suffering horrible health problems as a result of the stress that this “historic step” causes them. As Bashov tells it, Khrushchev reneges on the deal after the delegate, a certain Fyodor Boronkov, declares his actual ideological opposition to every facet of Soviet policy in a private conversation with Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s angry abandonment of the plan, complete with thoroughly formulaic condemnatory sobriquets, shows the shallowness of the Thaw’s much-lauded open-mindedness: “No, Fyodor . . . Kulak, White Guard modernist kike-face, you will not go vote. You will abstain. We will simply inform the comrades privately, ‘He abstained.’ One can’t be opposed right off. Liberalization is an endlessly lengthy process, like the path to absolute truth. There’s no hurry. Stay put. Here’s the key to the bar. Drink anything you want, listen to some music. . . . Then you’ll go home. We’ll defend our fundamentals. For the life of me, I just can’t understand it: how did you agree, organically, to be opposed? Shut up, son of a bitch, and say thank you that we aren’t liquidating you like we did Beria!” (93–94). Instead of making even a token gesture toward openness, Khrushchev offers Boronkov stupefaction (liquor), empty propagandistic clichés (“Liberalization is an endlessly lengthy process”), and threats of reprisal, which is essentially the bargain that Bashov, and by extension Aleshkovsky, claim that the Communists concluded with the Soviet Union’s populace.

In addition to repeatedly identifying Communism as a Satanic invention, Bashov explicitly links nuclear war (and Soviet rhetoric of ideological conflict) with the fact that “Soviet Fascism is metastasizing successfully” under the devil’s guiding hand: “Civilization, which Satan has been nurturing for Page 99 →several dozen centuries now . . . has at last begun to bear fruit for him. Darkened skies. Rivers puking shit and Moloch’s undigested grub into the seas and oceans. An all-out undeclared war being waged on man by things, which occupy the Time and Space of his existence. Hundreds of millions of souls already taken captive. . . . And Satan keeps perfecting weapons of mass destruction to use on souls. ‘Just wait, you fuckheads,’ he must be thinking, this Supreme Con of all times and peoples, ‘I’ll exterminate your souls, every last one of them. And I’ll be goddamned if I expect any trouble with your bodies. I’ve got everything ready for the “last decisive battle”—the annihilation of life on earth’” (52–53).⁴⁸ Subverting Soviet ideology thus means subverting the devil’s work, an especially virtuous task in light of Aleshkovsky’s own Orthodox Christian values, embodied in the character of Frol Vlasych Gusev, “the protector of people and animals” (150).

Gusev, alternately portrayed as a saintly fool and a dissident savant, represents Russian values wholly outside (and thus antagonistic to) the Soviet notions of social history, and his influence over Bashov eventually leads to the latter’s radical abandonment of the system (via a staged suicide) in favor of a morality rooted in a religious worldview. Bashov uses religious terminology in connecting power over language and power over people when he asserts, “The soul of a word, like that of a man, is easy to kill” (102). This principle permeates the novel, with all forms of corruption resulting from attempts to construct an artificial philosophy of “reason” to supercede or even to destroy the innate “soul” of Russian language and society. Gusev represents Aleshkovsky’s suggestion of how this damage might be undone. Even Gusev’s rather archaic-sounding name hearkens back to a distant Russian past the Soviets intentionally effaced. The first name Frol is not only uncommon for the time but also suggests a connection with the seventeenth-century stories about the Russian picaro Frol Skobeev. These tales were among the first secular literary writings produced in Russia and as such occupy a prominent place in the nation’s cultural history. The patronymic Vlasych is derived from the name Vlas, which is itself taken from an archaic Russian word meaning “slow” (in modern Russian, the most common word for “slow” is medlennyi). Finally the surname Gusev, derived from the noun gus (goose),⁴⁹ is appropriate to his self-designation as “protector of . . . animals,” but it also serves metaphorically as an animate and pastoral counterpoint to the inanimate and industrial name Stalin (derived from stal’, or “steel”).

Gusev and Bashov originally come into contact partly because of Gusev’s name. His wife denounces him for his anti-Soviet attitude, citing as evidence the fact that he “refused to exchange his religious name and patronymic for the progressive Vladlenst Marxenglich” (149). Bashov is assigned to investigate the case and naturally rejects this denunciation as mindless ideology, allowing Gusev to write his self-exonerating testimony while “ensconced . . . comfortably at [Bashov’s] desk, smoking occasionally and sipping strong tea” Page 100 →(150). In his rambling statement, Gusev unambiguously rejects the Soviet doctrine of social and historical progress, a fact most clearly demonstrated by his supposed conversations with “Outraged Reason” (199), the Soviet Zeitgeist personified. Reason alternately abhors, abuses, pines for, and weeps over his mate, Soul, who has abandoned him because of his preference for Communist ideology.

As Gusev recalls his alleged actions of February 28, 1935,⁵⁰ he literalizes a common metaphorical association taken from early Soviet propaganda. Gusev claims that he commandeered the locomotive of Soviet historical progress and turned it around so that it actually ran backward. His immediate reaction to this is a parody of the language of prorevolutionary writers like Mayakovsky or Valentin Kataev:⁵¹ “I was having a modest snack, as it were, with my first gulp of space: quivering at the delicious, unearthly sensation of history moving backward, I stuck my head out the window so that the wind would spark tears in my eyes and not let them fall from my cheeks, so that it would carry away from my lips, to the rumbling accompaniment of the wheels, the words of an absurd little ditty: Backwards fly, my locomotive! Make stops! Halt at each for hours please. I’ll cherries buy in paper sacks, made from Pravda and Izvestia. And at the kiosk I shall drink a soda pop, a soda pop . . . I love, I so-o-o-o love any stop. Except the commune. Heigh-ho, fireman, come poke up the coal in the furnace” (199). The “fireman” who turns up in response to this call is none other than Outraged Reason himself, and the remainder of this testimony consists of a conversation between Gusev and Outraged Reason in which they weigh the benefits and costs of Communism.

Using the rhetoric of Soviet propaganda, Outraged Reason initially claims that the Faustian bargain (in his case, the literal loss of his “Soul-mate”) has been worth it because of current progress and future achievements: “Look at the view from our locomotive! You won’t deny our achievements will you? Look! The foundation for new social relations has essentially been laid. Our own world we have built, a new world, and planes on duty in the sky continuously renew the motto that stretches from horizon to horizon but whose author has not yet had the honor to be born: ‘Communism is history that has gone into eternal retirement.’ Tremendous!” (200).⁵² Gusev counters that Reason’s willful abandonment of Soul was a foolish gamble based on false premises, and his reply sarcastically invokes an oft-repeated catch phrase of Soviet propaganda: “I refer to your participating in the game ‘Communism is the radiant future of all mankind.’ That is the extreme case when you consider it permissible to choose the tactic of limitless sacrifice, throwing colossal resources and millions of human pawns into the battle. The incorrectness of your gambit is excused (this you impress on both yourself and the pawns, to the applause of foreign fans who crave exciting spectacles), by the same old goal—a showy ending to the big game, the world-history experiment, the building of Communism” (212). Gusev’s rejoinder essentially restates both Page 101 →Maltby’s and Hirshberg’s points about the ways in which justifying the “old goal” overrides the fundamental “incorrectness” of a situation that consumes enormous quantities of resources, both human and financial. Even though Gusev’s discussion ostensibly dates to the 1930s, its later influence on Bashov, after forty more years of the locomotive’s progress, extends its applicability to the novel’s (and novelist’s) cold war present.

Gusev’s philosophy influences Bashov so greatly that his lecture to Gurov cites Gusev as an authority. Gusev’s legal deposition transforms into a religious testimony that finally causes Bashov to seek repentance for his lifelong pursuit of bloody vengeance. Gusev becomes for Bashov what the simple soldier Platon Karataev was for Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a kind of informal spiritual mentor whose direct connection with an earthy and honest (if also romanticized) sense of Russianness helps his misguided pupil see the error of his prior ways.

Bashov decides to forego his planned retribution against Gurov; he reverses himself entirely, in fact, asking Gurov to kill him instead. Aleshkovsky presents this conversion as a religious redemption akin to Raskolnikov’s in Crime and Punishment. Bashov states that the chief motivation for his contrition is the desire to see his father again in the afterlife. In his final moments Bashov even identifies himself both with Christ and with Gusev’s rejection of the soul-versus-reason model of Soviet-style Manichaeanism. As Gurov readies himself to shoot Bashov, the latter exclaims, “Receive me, Father. . . . Understand the darkness of the wanderings of my reason, and the fury of my ruinous passion. . . . Understand, Father, and receive my poor sinless soul. . . . It bears no blame for my deeds, for my falsehood, dissembling and executions. None!” (260). This speech evokes Christ’s dying words from Luke 23:46 (“Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit!”) while it also reinforces Aleshkovsky’s belief that resistance to the Soviet system—and the redemption that ultimately results from such resistance—is not properly achieved by adopting its methods but by returning to a life in which soul and reason are not sundered.

When considered in the broad context of Russian social history from 988 onward, Aleshkovsky’s satire is normative, since it espouses a return to values similar to those that were predominant in Russia centuries before (and on numerous different occasions). However, within the context of Soviet society, his satire is clearly subversive. It thoroughly overthrows the value system on which that society is based, exposing its unacknowledged fictionality at every turn. As such it participates in the process of cultural homeostasis that Lotman and Uspensky identified as characteristic of pre-nineteenth-century Russia (and that others like Sinyavsky have carried forward into recent times) by attempting to make a contemporary version of traditional values into a “new” prescription for the ills of “old” Soviet society.

Not all American subversive satires eschew prescriptive moralism either. Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Page 102 →Near the End of the World (1971), resembles several of the aforementioned Soviet satires in blending anti-utopian characteristics, scathing criticism of technocratic thought/language, and antibinary satire. Like Aleshkovsky, Percy produces a satire that explores the potential for religion to come to the aid of a perishing cold war society. The dire situation of the “old violent beloved U.S.A. and the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world” (3) is clear from the book’s outset (set on the afternoon of July 4, 1983), at which Percy’s protagonist, a psychiatrist and inventor named Dr. Thomas More, states, “I have reason to believe that within the next two hours an unprecedented fallout of noxious particles will settle hereabouts and perhaps in other places as well. It is a catastrophe whose cause and effects—and prevention—are known only to me. The effects of the evil particles are psychic rather than physical. They do not burn the skin and rot the marrow; rather do they inflame and worsen the secret ills of the spirit and rive the very self from itself” (5).

More uses the now-familiar language of nuclear warfare in forecasting a “fallout,” yet the novel’s central metaphor of a spiritual disease is established when the symptoms of this fallout are described in terms that make radiation poisoning seems benign by comparison. As is the case in San Narciso and New Tammany, More’s ironically named community of Paradise Estates is noteworthy for being a house divided against itself: “The scientists, who are mostly liberals and unbelievers, and the businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side in Paradise Estates. Though the two make much of their differences—one speaking of ‘outworn dogmas and creeds,’ the other of ‘atheism and immorality,’ etcetera etcetera—to tell the truth, I do not notice a great deal of difference between the two. . . . There are minor differences. When conservative Christian housewives drive to town to pick up their maids in the Hollow, the latter ride on the back seat in the old style. Liberal housewives make their maids ride on the front seat” (15). Although More’s comments suggest the differences between the conservatives and liberals are more rhetorical than ontological, his example of the “minor differences” also points out that he is missing or perhaps discounting more genuine social divisions of race and class, both of which contribute heavily to the upheaval that looms as the novel opens.

Outside this mirage of an “oasis of concord in a troubled land” exists a thoroughly divided society, strongly reminiscent of the schism between San Narciso’s well-heeled insiders (such as Inverarity) and the motley outsiders of the Tristero:

Yonder in the fastness of the swamp dwell the dropouts from and castoffs of and rebels against our society . . . Bantu guerillas, dropouts from Tulane and Vanderbilt, M.I.T. and Loyola; draft dodgers, deserters from the Swedish army, psychopaths and pederasts from Memphis and Page 103 →New Orleans, whose practices were not even to be tolerated in New Orleans; antipapal Catholics, malcontented Methodists, ESPers, UFOers, Aquarians, ex–Ayn Randers, Choctaw Zionists, who have returned from their ancestral hunting grounds, and even a few old graybeard Kerouac beats. . . .

By contrast with the swamp, the town has become a refuge for all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex–Washington, D.C., policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists. (15–16)

The situation beyond More’s locality is no better, with the country cloven into polarized “Leftist” and “Knothead” (formerly Democratic and Republican) political factions. Religion is likewise divided, Catholicism having undergone another schism, this time into conservative and radical factions with only superficial links to the old church hierarchy. Only a small and wholly inconsequential—until the novel’s conclusion—group remains loyal to the pope, who has relocated from Rome to Cicero, Illinois. A race war is clearly impending between black (called “Bantu” in the novel) and white groups. Finally the relationship between More and Art Immelman, a sinister figure who identifies himself as a liaison between governmental and private interests, takes on parodic overtones of an apocalyptic struggle between Christ and Antichrist in regard to More’s invention (see below). As Gary M. Ciuba writes in Walker Percy: Books of Revelations (1991), in the United States of the novel “all institutions and individuals lack that selfsame integrity whereby opposites complement and correct reach other, the whole cohering as a harmony of mutually sustaining contradictions. Rather, each has become divided into pairs of absolute and incompatible extremes” (133). Within this diametrically divided environment, Percy unleashes a social and, in part, religious satire that strikes at the very root of postwar America’s self-definition. With the American landscape reduced to a three-part microcosm of either extreme dichotomization or willful ignorance, hope for avoiding More’s prediction of a psychic catastrophe seems scant.

The broader geopolitical situation further exacerbates the country’s divisions, with “the war in Ecuador [that] has been going on for fifteen years” clearly functioning as an analogue to Vietnam.⁵³ More comments that this conflict was “not exactly our best war” and proceeds to describe a situation wholly contingent on a good-versus-evil mentality, even as its underlying reality (like that in Vietnam) belies the futility of such a simple binary conception: “The U.S.A. sided with South Ecuador, which is largely Christian, believing in God and the sacredness of the individual, etcetera, etcetera. The only trouble is that South Ecuador is owned by ninety-eight Catholic families with Swiss bank accounts, is governed by a general, and so is not what Page 104 →you would call an ideal democracy. North Ecuador, on the other hand, which many U.S. liberals support, is Maoist-Communist, and has so far murdered two hundred thousand civilians, including liberals, who did not welcome Communism with open arms” (19–20).

American governmental support for South Ecuador is thus based on criteria (“sacredness of the individual”) in line with Hirshberg’s American patriotic schema. Similarly the support More mentions among “U.S. liberals” for North Ecuador, despite also being presented as an unsavory nation, mirrors the purely oppositional support that North Vietnam received from some on the American Left in the late 1960s. The reality of the South Ecuadoran government exposes these criteria as fallacious, just as the corruption of the South Vietnamese government, whether under Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen Van Thieu, fomented doubts about the American moral imperative in that conflict.⁵⁴

Nevertheless, despite the general concurrence among Pynchon, Barth, and Percy in their diagnoses of America’s social malaise in the post–World War II era, a significant difference arises in that Percy is willing to propose a potential (if admittedly idealistic) means for transcending the self-destructive binary system. More’s dismissive (and habitual) repetition of “etcetera, etcetera” in the quotes above suggest a healthy skepticism toward binary thinking such as that separating liberals from conservatives or South Ecuadorians from North Ecuadorians, but throughout most of the book, he nevertheless insists that his invention, the “Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer” (30), is “the very means for inoculating persons against” the worsening spiritual sickness. More retains his bipolar diagnosis of this epidemic largely because he himself has developed psychological and physiological ailments that, according to his clinical observations, should not coexist because of their innate political tendencies:

Conservatives have begun to fall victim to unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large-bowel complaints.

Liberals are more apt to contract sexual impotence, morning terror, and a feeling of abstraction of the self from itself. . . .

It is my misfortune—and blessing—that I suffer from both liberal and conservative complaints, e.g., both morning terror and large-bowel disorders, excessive abstraction and unseasonable rages, alternating impotence and satyriasis.

More suggests that his invention “can diagnose and treat with equal success the morning terror or liberals and the apoplexy of conservatives” and thereby “save the U.S.A.” (20), but Percy gives his readers plentiful opportunities to doubt More’s reasoning.

For starters the lapsometer is based partly on observations that More made while observing an accident that occurs during an experiment involving significant satirical allusions to Enrico Fermi’s groundbreaking experiments Page 105 →with atomic energy beneath the football stadium at the University of Chicago: “Do you recall the Heavy Sodium experiments that were conducted years ago in New Orleans under the stands of the Sugar Bowl stadium? . . . The physicists were tinkering with a Heavy Sodium pile by means of which they hoped to hit on a better source of anticancer radiation than the old cobalt treatment. . . . The long and short of it is that the reactor got loose, killed a brace of physicists, sent up an odd yellow cloud” (25). In the wake of this cloud, More begins to notice that “something peculiar happened in the Tulane Psychiatric Hospital, where I was based. . . . Some of the patients got better and some of the psychiatrists got worse” (26). He discovers that all the affected individuals have “significant levels” of the chemicals involved in the experiment in their blood and publishes an article in JAMA on “More’s Paradoxical Sodium Radiation Syndrome” (26). He also notes that it took him “twenty years to figure out why some got better and some got worse” and, in turn, to develop the lapsometer to deal with the condition whose name reveals its rigidly binary perspective: “Heavy Sodium radiation stimulates Brodmann Area 32, the center of abstractive activity or tendencies toward angelism, while Heavy Chloride stimulates the thalamus, which promotes adjustment to the environment, or, as I call it without prejudice, bestialism. The two conditions are not mutually exclusive. It is not uncommon nowadays to see patients suffering from angelism-beastialism” (27).

More’s device thus proposes to cure the “manifold woes of the Western world, with its terrors, and rages and murderous impulses” (28), and he so steadfastly believes in his vocation as a healer that he appears to invalidate the very binarism that his invention purports to resolve: “Don’t tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it apart was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman” (62–63). More’s belief that he can heal the angelism-beastialism binary because he has now ostensibly risen above it parallels the oversimplified and hence flawed solution that Paradise Estates represents in respect to the divided society in which it is embedded.

The unwillingness to abandon this model leads to his inability to “get it right,” even in the more hopeful epilogue that takes place five years after the abortive apocalypse of the Bantu uprising. More begins the epilogue by reflecting on the ways in which his life has stabilized in the intervening period: “Despite the setbacks of the past, particularly the fiasco five years ago, I still believe my lapsometer can save the world—if I can get it right. For the world is sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half man, half beast, but no man. Even now I can diagnose and shall one day cure: cure the new plague, the modern Black Death, the current hermaphroditism of the spirit, . . . chronic angelism-bestialism that rives the soul from body” (382–83).

Page 106 →Ultimately More’s solution to angelism-bestialism (and by extension that of the entire society) is a withdrawal from it, withdrawal back into a heavily revised version of loyal Catholicism. More attends a Christmas mass and goes to confession, at which he penitently renounces his adulterous and alcoholic past, behavior closely tied to his philosophical perspective throughout the novel. Ironically his renunciation triggers what seems to be yet another binary reaction in his new wife as well as a recurrence of his “etcetera” tic: “Ellen’s cheek radiates complex rays of approval-disapproval. Approval that I will now ‘do right,’ be a better husband, cultivate respectable patients, remain abstemtious, etcetera. . . . What bothers her is an ancient Presbyterian mistrust of things, things getting mixed up in religion. . . . For she mistrusts the Old Church’s traffic in things, sacraments, articles, bread, wine, salt, oil, water ashes” (400).

This time, however, the binary is not (to use Ciuba’s language) a pair of “absolute and incompatible extremes” but a “harmony of mutually sustaining contradictions” since More’s new ecumenical faith incorporates Catholic virtues but without relying too heavily on “things,” a comment that both indicts More’s earlier faith in the lapsometer and alludes to Protestant critiques of Catholic ritual. More imagines Ellen telling him to “Watch out!” against falling back into the kinds of practices she distrusts, to which he responds (albeit inwardly), “I will. We will” (400). The love they have found is, as the title implies, a love “in the ruins” of American society, but Percy seems to suggest this love contains some measure of real promise—and not just cold comfort—after having been refined through a trial by fire. In this regard Percy’s ending bears some similarity to the (oft-derided) tempered optimism of Pat Frank’s postapocalyptic Alas, Babylon, in which the survivors in Fort Repose, Florida, have created new and deeper bonds of kinship and community as a result of their survival process.

Critics have not necessarily agreed as to how and why Percy’s conclusion relates to his overall satirical intentions in Love in the Ruins. Ciuba asserts that More’s partaking of the Eucharist represents the moment at which he has definitively “forsaken the self-divisive angelism-bestialism, . . . once again feed[ing] on God rather than ‘feasting on death’” (169). On the other hand, in her American Dream, American Nightmare (2000), Kathryn Hume insists that Percy’s ending is not meant as an absolute prognosis. Her reading thus departs (correctly, in my view) from the widespread interpretation of the book as a normative satire intended to preach resumed religious (specifically Catholic) devotion in the manner of Flannery O’Connor’s comic-satirical works. Hume maintains that More’s persistent belief in the efficacy of the lapsometer demonstrates his continuing lack of true enlightenment: “Right up to the end, however, More still thinks that this machine could somehow save humanity, and readers are given no clue that he understands the error of this attitude, though we are clearly meant to see the futility of such scientific Page 107 →materialism” (97). Hume’s negative interpretation is somewhat problematic, though. More’s confession takes place during a time in which Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic services are overlapping, thus making the scene not simply one of normative retrogression into traditional religious values but rather what she herself calls a “‘new [paradigm] of man’s authentic existence in community’ . . . [and] one of the best hopes for America” (168). Hume is correct in stating that Percy’s solution is not didactically definitive, but it does also involve a complete subversion of the discordant binaries that afflict his fictionalized version of cold war America. As such, it is an improvement that suggests (if perhaps gingerly) that the next lapsometer may offer real healing, just as More’s new hybrid religious belief is an improvement on the fragmented, isolating forms that preceded it.

In a larger historical sense, Percy’s satire in Love in the Ruins works much like Aleshkovsky’s satire in The Hand in seeking to renew connections with a spiritual realm that has largely been forgotten. Unlike Aleshkovsky, though, the spiritual solution that Percy puts forth is not hearkening back to a particular past (that is, Gusev’s old-style Orthodoxy and traditionalist sense of Russianness) but moving toward a more inclusive version of an older system of belief in order to transcend the multitudinous traps of binarism. Although both visions are normative in a broader historical sense, both also clearly run contrary to the dominant cultures of their time, making them at least locally—in time and place—subversive.