Part One

The difference between the immobilized hero, or protagonist, in myth and legend, when he is compared with the immobilized hero in modern fiction, is one of degree and of kind. There is nothing new, certainly, in the physical immobilization of the fictional hero for long periods of time. But the immobilization of legendary fictional heros--Achilles sulking in his tent and brooding over Briseis, for example-was primarily a plot device. The full stop of the active hero in his tracks was merely another obstacle in his adventurous journey and, as a general rule, the storyteller had plausible or rational reasons for immobilizing his hero. The gods decreed it, or, on a simpler, technical storytelling level, the hero was held fast for the purpose of heightening the suspense of the myth or story. Atlas, forced to hold up the heavens on his broad shoulders, standing alone atop the highest peak in the Atlas Mountains in Northwest Africa, had an immobilization assignment to last him for all eternity. And when Hercules spelled Atlas at his job, the incident was only a temporary obstacle for Hercules. "How," the reader asks himself, "is Hercules going to get out of this nasty situation?" But the reader knows that Hercules must resolve the problem; Hercules was needed later to release another immobilized hero, Prometheus, who was undergoing a harsh punishment by Zeus. Prometheus was chained to a rock, and an eagle ate his liver every day (although it grew back at night, disconcerting the eagle), until he was eventually released by Hercules.

Another prototype of the physically immobilized hero, who was permitted at least a limited movement, was Sinbad the Sailor, who, in a crushingly stupid decision, al- lowed the Old Man of the Sea to get a relentless scissors- hold on his neck. Sinbad's problem, then, was to devise a method to dislodge this littoral legman. And the sailor's solution (making wine from wild grapes in a dry pumpkin, and then intoxicating the Old Man of the Sea) was as difficult as it was ingenious.

The immobilization of the modern fictional character, however, bears little resemblance to these early men-of-action prototypes. From Dostoevsky's Beetleman to Saul Bellow's Herzog, when the modern hero is immobilized, his inactivity is caused by his mental state, his environment, his personality, or the overwhelming crush of modern civilization; he is never Grail-hungry and he rarely, if ever, blames either a personal God or the gods at large for his inactive state. If he is unsound in mind, he is usually sound of wind and limb (Samuel Beckett's mutilated men are exceptions to this general rule), and if his thinking is often distorted when compared with the thinking of the so-called adjusted, or average, man, he himself considers his mental state far superior to the run-of-the- mill average male who lacks his perception and prehension of the real nature of the world and universe.

One of the earliest modern archetypes of the immobilized man as a hero was the wretched, snarling civil servant in Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground (a better translation is Notes From Under the Floorboards). The first half of this short novel was published in the first two numbers of Epoch, which came out together on March 21, 1864; Part II was published in the April Epoch, which was not distributed to the public until June. During the time of writing Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky was ill and feverish, his brother was sick in bed, and his wife was slowly dying. He had been paid for the story in advance- sight unseen, as was his custom- and, as also was his custom, the money had all been spent and the manuscript was overdue. "Writing is not mechanical work," he wrote bitterly to his brother Mikhail, "and yet I write and write in the mornings." Dostoevsky's mental and physical anguish undoubtedly contributed to the disorderly delineation of the Beetleman hero; and surely, the story is one of the most unpleasant tales Dostoevsky ever wrote. The author was plagued by the censors as well, and, anticipating the disgust of his Epoch readers, published a footnoted half-apology to the short novel, which is farseeing in that it points out the inevitability of such a character residing in a modern urban society.

Both the author of the Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictitious. Nevertheless, such persons as the author of such memoirs not only may, but must, exist in our society, if we take into consideration the circumstances which led to the formation of our society. It was my intention to bring before our reading public, more conspicuously than is usually done, one of the characters of our recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation that is still with us. In this extract, entitled Underground, this person introduces himself and his views and, as it were, tries to explain those causes which have not only led, but were also bound to lead, to his appearance in our midst. In the subsequent extract (Apropros of Wet Snow) we shall reproduce this person's Notes proper, dealing with certain events in his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

From the opening sentence Dostoevsky's immobilized "man in a cellar" assaults the bewildered reader's sensibilities head-on: "I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all. I believe there is something wrong with my liver. However, I don't know a damned thing about my liver. . ." And, of course, he is right. When the liver is eaten daily, and grows back at night, it transcends the understanding of a mortal. The narrator splutters, exhorts, wheedles, laughs, contradicts himself, lies, changes his mind and the subject, and occasionally inserts a scrap of factual information about himself, for thirty-three dithy-rambling pages. The narrator assumes from the beginning that his reader is hostile, and after reading a few pages, most readers are hostile in fact. But we do not (despite the author's introductory footnote) actually learn how the underground man got this way, we only hear his highly opinionated views. Man is basically evil, science is destroying men's souls, and Utopian ideals (symbolized in the story by the newly erected Ice Palace in England) are fruitless and unrealistic. The narrator lives in a damp basement room; he employs a surly servant who detests him; his co-workers in the Civil Service office, where he is employed as a minor official, dislike and avoid him; he is a chronic borrower; and he constantly courts humiliation. Although he professes resentment of the humiliation he provokes, he also enjoys a perverse pleasure in receiving it because it confirms and solidifies his conviction that people are no good - not one, including himself. He is middle-aged, and beneath the blustering bravado and hyperbolic bitterness of his criticism, one eventually senses his major purpose in writing his notes: the narrator is adding up his life, and it does not add up to anything except more of the same. In the end, all that awaits him is a small, inadequate pension. This is a commonality of experience shared with most of the immobilized heros: the existentialist problem of the suffering man who must come to terms with nothingness.

Part II, entitled "Apropos of Wet Snow," confirms by action the underground man's philosophy expounded at length in Part I -- to the narrator's if not the reader's satisfaction. The hero's "engagement" with life is inauthentic because he makes his experience come out the way it does without honestly disclosing himself to himself - as Heidegger would probably say. He seeks the reluctant camaraderie of his former schoolmates, courts and receives humiliation from them, and then revenges himself on a simple-minded young prostitute. Insincerely, as if to see how much the girl will swallow, he frightens her by telling her what a terrible future she will have if she continues her life of prostitution. Oddly enough, he manages to convert the girl. When she comes to visit him the next day to tell him of her decision, she witnesses a degrading scene between the hero and his servant. Infuriated, the hero humiliates her again; and, when she forgives him, he insults her by offering her money (money he can ill-afford to give). This final act has the desired result; hating him, she goes away. Once again the narrator begins a long, rambling discourse of self-justification, but the novel abruptly terminates with, "But enough; I don't want to write any more from a Dark Cellar . . .'"

As a parenthetical afterthought, Dostoevsky adds, "(This is not, by the way, the end of 'Memoirs' of this paradoxical fellow. He could not resist and went on and on. But it seems to us, too, that we may stop here.)" The closing sentence of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, published almost 100 years later, parallels Dostoevsky's coda,

…you must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

The pattern of the modern immobilized hero was established in Notes From Underground, and it has remained that way, with variations, ever since. For "on and on" the immobilized man writes, writing whether he has anything interesting or valid to say or not, writing because he is compelled to write, to write because he is an artist.

Paradoxes and ambiguities; these are the artifacts with which the immobilized man, worries his pages and befuddles the general reader. The large theme, however, which immobilized heros share in common, is clear enough: the frenetic, endless, and impossible attempt to escape from the restriction of the self, the personality, into a freedom that simply does not exist. As Kafka's ape-man puts it, the immobilized man is looking for "a way out;" and almost anything imaginable is suggested as a reason for the impasse confronting the locked-in, inescapable self, including the Renaissance, which Nathanael West blames, in the last analysis, "for throwing the artist back on his own personality."

In addition to establishing a pied pattern, Notes From Underground also sets the tone for the characterization of the immobilized hero.

There is a resemblance in the immobilized man's narrative to the personal, autobiographical journal, and to the private journal of messages written to the writer himself for future review and reference. But the fictional immobilized hero is always writing consciously for a reader; he is trying to communicate his feelings, his ideas, and his hopelessness to someone, anyone, whereas the journal- keeper or diarist is ostensibly writing for his eyes only. Self-conscious journalists, like Gide and Camus, who realize that their private journals will eventually be published, are exceptions, of course.

Even peas in a pod have their individual differences, but the corollary characteristics of the immobilized hero and his representation can be isolated- as long as these concomitants are arbitrarily and severely delimited- which I propose to do.

The immobilized hero usually has his story (more often plotless than not) told in the first person singular. Franz Kafka's "K," the hero of The Trial and The Castle, is an exception, but "K" could easily represent the personal "I" or the initial of the author's surname. The reader soon realizes, however, that the "I" does not stand for the author, even when the hero is unnamed. But in the plotless, or at best sketchily plotted, novel, a knowledge of the author's life occasionally implies at least an autobiographical thread for a narration that would otherwise appear to be without any point whatsoever. For example, a general knowledge of Homer's Odyssey will provide a reader with a plot-thread for Joyce's Ulysses, although it is not essential to be familiar with the Odyssey before reading Joyce's novel. One can find many things of interest in Ulysses without referring to the Odyssey.

The immobilized hero lives alone. Instead of an apartment, he usually lives in a single room in a private home, like Henry Haller in Hesse's Steppenwolf- or in a depersonalized hotel room. The immobilized man is either a bachelor or a man who has been unable to adjust with any degree of success to a conjugal arrangement; and so he lives alone by choice. (The American immobilized hero, because of our greater affluence, usually has better living quarters than his European counterpart, although he shares the same desire for austerity.) The immobilized man cannot, for any one of a dozen reasons, abide living with his immediate family or distant relatives. Walker Percy's moviegoer, Binx Bolling, lives in a peaceful basement apartment rented from the widow of a fireman. When he tried to live "in a gracious house in the Garden District [of New Orleans]," with his aunt and uncle, he found himself "first in a rage during which I develop strong opinions on a variety of subjects and write letters to the editors, then in a depression during which I lie rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster medallion in the ceiling of my bedroom."

The immobilized hero professes self-satisfaction, bordering on smugness, concerning his isolation from relatives and friends. Although he is in a static condition, he is "free" to the extent that he is the only person who knows the true nature of reality. Whether he is a successful artist or a failure as an artist (when this is his vocation, avocation or desired role), the fact that he fancies himself as an artist of some kind sets him above and apart from his fellowmen. In this latter respect he resembles Poe's William Wilson, a supersensitive Wilson who has a premonition of, but is not certain that he is, a man who is "also dead--dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope!"

Although he professes to be engaged in a search for his true identity, the immobilized man slyly evades any direct path that leads, or promises to lead, in that direction (which would bring him face to face with his own image, like William Wilson), veering off into irrelevant, fanciful rhetorical paragraphs which allow him to remain complacent or smugly self-satisfied. His ideas, which often have a lurking aura of profundity, are disguised in "fine writing," which beg the questions he asks himself. The reader, in such cases, must fill in the missing spaces as best he can. The reader's cooperation is important, and must be kept in mind when reading the sclerotic types of immobilized hero novels. The reader is the willing partner or conspirator of the narrator, and brings as much, if not more, to the narrative as he takes away. This aspect is particularly true of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novels, which will be discussed in Chapter III. The immobilized hero's narrative, as it details his ostensible superiority, also expresses perturbation concerning the failure of other people to recognize his superiority and well-hidden talents.

The occupations by which they earn their living vary widely in immobilized heroes. The ideal state is to have private means and no occupation other than the chronicling of what he feels, thinks, and experiences in an isolated environment. Beckett's hero in The Unnamable has reached the penultimate goal: seated in a dark void unable to smell, half-deaf, voiceless, paralyzed, and unable to move his eyes or head, he stares straight ahead into faintly luminous darkness and the tears flow over his face. "Over," because he does not know whether he is sitting or reclining. In fact, he is not certain that his tears are tears. "Perhaps it is liquefied brain," he states, rather than asks, the question. The ultimate stage, which has not as yet been reached by the immobilized man, is the "termite-man." The termite, according to Joseph Wood Krutch, is the most triumphantly successful of all living creatures:

Though their way of life is the most elaborate known to any creature except man himself, they know neither joy nor sorrow. In all probability they are not conscious at all. They weigh no questions, they make no choices. They live but they are not aware of living. The adventure of life has reached a dead end. They have come almost the full circle from the inanimate mechanism back again to something hardly distinguishable from the mechanical.

Beckett's Unnamable, however, is still sentient; he can still peer weakly into a darkness that is not total and, even without a coherent memory, can still record his impressions and random thoughts. The style of the immobilized hero novel is carefully designed to fit its subject; the reader cannot put down Krapp's Last Tape and say, "it's just about an old man talking to himself." To do so is to miss both the type and the tape.

The immobilized hero, when he knows where he is, is a city man, residing in a complicated, many-peopled environment where survival depends upon some kind of symbiosis. Dreading contact with other people, the immobilized man tries to exist with minimum contact with others in the city. Residing, as he usually does, in a narrow city bedroom, he is a million miles away from Walden's Pond and a diet of nuts, berries, and a rare day's work in the open air for a day's pay. He has difficulty in surviving- his minimum contact with other people almost always leads to trouble- and some immobilized heroes either commit suicide or kill another person instead, thereby inviting the state to kill them, in turn, by official execution. And when they do kill another person, it is an involuntary expression of an inarticulated death wish, as in Chester Himes's novel, The Primitive.

Very few immobilized heroes have executive positions or highly paid jobs: the upper level of professional work is represented, however, by Dick Diver, F. Scott Fitzgerald's psychiatrist-protagonist with only one patient (his wife), in Tender is the Night; Walker Percy's hero, when he isn't sitting in a dark movie theater, sells stocks and bonds; and the anonymous husband-hero in Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy is a banana planter. But for the most part, immobilized heroes have menial jobs as government clerks, salesmen, clerk-typists, dishwashers, or other mean, part-time jobs. The writers, painters, and poets, ironically enough, occasionally subsist on foundation grants or fellowships; or, like Jesse Robinson, in The Primitive, on publisher's advances for work that will never be completed. They also get by with small loans from casual acquaintances, or by taking odd jobs, getting money from home, and by petty thievery, as in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Newton Arkin, the hero of John Anthony West's story, "Your Education is Fine But Where's Your Experience," and John Barth's hero, in The End of the Road, are graduate students majoring in English. But whatever it is that they do to earn a living, the immobilized heroes, to a man, do not want to do it.

An important concomitant of the immobilized hero is list-making. At times these lists are so long an impatient reader suspects that the author is merely padding his narrative. J. D. Salinger's listing of the crowded contents of the bathroom medicine cabinet in his long story, "Zooey," seemed pointless to many bored readers. List-making, however, is a traditional device in literature. The listing of the heroes and their armor and trappings was a formal, mandatory part of the epic, and list-making has been practiced, in one way or another, in all types of literature. But the lists of the immobilized hero are made for different purposes than, for example, those long lists recorded by Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe's heroes listed the things they had done and the things that they had not done yet and wanted to do. His lists were invariably on the positive side: if he listed the books he had read, he also listed the books he had not read but intended to read. Although Wolfe's heroes despaired over their long lists, they were written in a spirit of optimism. Thoreau, on the other hand, who had many of the characteristics of the modern immobilized hero, made his lists to indicate what he could do without and still live happily. The modern immobilized hero's list, then, is a negative grouping of his small stock of possessions: he lists his small inventory, and finds that it does not add up to much. And the smaller his inventory the better he likes it. His attitude toward his list is antiscientific and antimaterialistic. Percy's moviegoer reduces his possessions to the minimum for the purpose of simplifying his life.

I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pocket: wallet, notebook (for writing down occasional thoughts), pencil, keys, handkerchief, pocket slide rule (for calculating percentage returns on principal) ... I stood in the center of the room and gazed at the little pile, sighting through a hole made by thumb and forefinger.

By looking through this "aperture," Percy's hero reduces his small pile even further by narrowing his visual range as well as his possessions. Chester Himes's hero makes exhaustive lists in The Primitive; Jesse Robinson's lists are, in fact, an integral part of his characterization. Robinson no longer writes, but he counts his manuscripts every time he enters his room, drunk or sober, because they remind him that no matter what he has to do from time to time to earn a living, he is a writer. Malone, in Beckett's Malone Dies, has a small stock of personal possessions. Confined to his bed, he lists and records his few items again and again, keeping close track of them. His pencil and notebook are his most valuable possessions, as writing materials are to most of the immobilized heroes. As an artist, the immobilized hero's major defense against the encroachment of science and materialism on his life is pencil and paper. He cannot envision a cyclotron, nor can he understand the Atom- or H-bomb; his weapons against such things are his writing materials. As skimpy as these materials are, they represent his only defense; so long as he has them he is able to produce art, e.g., write and amplify his thoughts. But, in another sense, when he marshals and then totals his limited possessions, the immobilized hero says, in effect, that his own life does not add up to much and art is a poor defense against scientific progress. Unlike the non-intellectual hero of the epic, the immobilized hero would rather make lists than enter them.

The humor expressed by the immobilized hero is mordant, biting, ironic, and often in the nature of a private or family joke -a joke that the hero does not let the reader in on. In Evelyn Waugh's novel, A Handful of Dust, to give an example of the "private" joke, the theme is adultery. John Beaver has an adulterous affair with Brenda Last. After Brenda's son is killed in a riding accident she asks her husband Tony for a divorce. Tony refuses to give her a divorce and embarks on an exploring trip to the South American jungle, believing that his absence from the London social scene and the passage of time will bring his wife to her senses. His porters desert him in the jungle, his canoe overturns, and he is held captive by a half-mad jungle trader who forces him to read Dickens aloud every day. A searching party investigating Tony's disappearance is shown, by the trader, a grave purporting to be Tony's. Satisfied, the searchers return to England and Tony is left alone with the trader, presumably to spend the rest of his life reading Dickens aloud to the trader's exacting standards. This improbable fate seems pointless to the reader. Brenda’s lover abandons her, and she marries, later on, a friend of Tony's, believing her husband to be dead. Here the novel terminates, leaving the reader with an uneasy feeling that something important has been omitted from the story. Certainly there is nothing funny about the ending, although the urbane writing style gives the reader the impression that it is supposed to be a humorous novel. The title is taken from Mr. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the superficial reader assumes that the novel is merely a study in the futility of life and dismisses it. However, here is where biographical knowledge of the novelist provides the clue to a more purposeful conclusion. Evelyn Waugh is a Roman Catholic writer; and he is punishing Brenda for her adultery with John Beaver by having her compound her adultery by living in sin a second time (even though she believes her husband is dead). The death of her son was a punishment for her first adulterous affair (whether she knew it or not, and apparently she did not), and the second affair, despite its legality in the eyes of man, will keep her out of heaven forever. Instead of being pointless, the novel is a didactic, if ironic, lesson in morality. Tony is being punished, of course, for leaving his wife and allowing the affair with Beaver to continue, instead of accepting his husband’s role and ordering his wife to obey him. The author has no sympathy for any of his characters and he has moved and manipulated them like bead-headed pins on a Roman Catholic map of morality; and yet, the uninitiated reader, who is unaware of the author's religious purpose, will leave the morality briefing with a feeling of frustration, having missed the point of the colorful pinheads and the unexplained theological geography. To laugh, then, at the hopeless plight of the immobilized Tony reading Dickens aloud in the jungle, one needs to be a member of the family to appreciate the joke. Non-Catholic readers, misled into believing that they are reading a comic novel in the Wodehouse tradition, are appalled by the cruelty of the author's resolution.

The mordant humor of the immobilized man is often limned by fear and horror, as in the example of the tennis ball that bounces mysteriously down the stairs from the paralyzed man's room in Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. A paralyzed old man in bed with dozens of tennis balls has the bizarre humor of the unexpected, but once the reader understands that the painful pushing of one of the tennis balls to the floor is the only way this immobilized man can communicate his needs, the situation is basically unfunny.

The totally immobilized "soldier who isn't there" in the hospital ward, encapsulated completely in a plaster cast, in Joseph Heller's Catch 22, is not funny in itself; it is the attitude of the other characters toward this unknown soldier that is humorous. This is exaggerated black humor; and the other hospital inmates are masking their own fear of death in Catch 22 when they make jokes about the cast- like man: his fate may be theirs within a few hours after they have been discharged from the hospital and fly another bombing mission over enemy territory. Here again, like Evelyn Waugh, the author's style (swiftly paced, disjointed, untidy and hyperbolic) successfully prevents the reader from dwelling upon the tragic aspects of the soldier who may or may not be within the immaculate white cast- or the casket of the undiscovered self. Distortion, bordering on nineteenth century Baroque, but up-dated by the use of contemporary images, is another shared characteristic of the immobilized hero's humor.

The immobilized hero is filled to overflowing with self- love; his love of self gives him a reason for living. On the other hand, when he is rejected by or loses his beloved or love-object (man, woman, child, thing, which he has incorporated into his self), his self-love often turns to self-hate. If his self-hate is nourished and becomes strong enough, he may destroy himself. Self-love without transference is the preferable state for the immobilized hero; as soon as he reaches out to another person, attempting timidly to share himself, the beginning of his end is at hand.

After Miss Amelia, in Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, is rejected by her beloved, Cousin Lymon, she becomes immobilized for the remainder of her life. Her house, half-painted, half-exposed pine slabs, is boarded except for one second-story window. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, in the hottest part of the day, a hand will open the window and a face will look down on the town: "It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams -sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief."

The immobilized hero, then, who is city-pent and agoraphobic, shares these characteristics: he "writes" in the first person; he is antiscientific and antimaterialistic; he searches his own mind instead of going to the outside world for answers to his questions; he lives alone, counting and listing a small stock of possessions; he is a single man; he is likely to be an artist of sorts; his sense of humor is mordant, ironic, and often private; and he either loves or hates himself to the point of mental and physical pain.

These are shared concomitants of the immobilized man, but he exists in varied guises: some of the more important guises and disguises will be examined in the chapters to follow.