1
Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When Itâs Not)
OKAY, SO HEREâS THE DEAL: letâs say, purely hypothetically, youâre reading a book about an average sixteen-year-old kid in the summer of 1968. The kidâletâs call him Kipâwho hopes his acne clears up before he gets drafted, is on his way to the A&P. His bike is a one-speed with a coaster brake and therefore deeply humiliating, and riding it to run an errand for his mother makes it even worse. Along the way he has a couple of disturbing experiences, including a minorly unpleasant encounter with a German shepherd, topped off in the supermarket parking lot where he sees the girl of his dreams, Karen, laughing and horsing around in Tony Vauxhallâs brand-new Barracuda. Now Kip hates Tony already because he has a name like Vauxhall and not like Smith, which Kip thinks is pretty lame as a name to follow Kip, and because the âCuda is bright green and goes approximately the speed of light, and also because Tony has never had to work a day in his life. So Karen, who is laughing and having a great time, turns and sees Kip, who has recently asked her out, and she keeps laughing. (She could stop laughing and it wouldnât matter to us, since weâre considering this structurally. In the story weâre inventing here, though, she keeps laughing.) Kip goes on into the store to buy the loaf of Wonder Bread that his mother told him to pick up, and as he reaches for the bread, he decides right then and there to lie about his age to the Marine recruiter even though it means going to Vietnam, because nothing will ever happen for him in this one-horse burg where the only thing that matters is how much money your old man has. Either that or Kip has a vision of St. Abillard (any saint will do, but our imaginary author picked a comparatively obscure one), whose face appears on one of the red, yellow, or blue balloons. For our purposes, the nature of the decision doesnât matter any more than whether Karen keeps laughing or which color balloon manifests the saint.
What just happened here?
If you were an English professor, and not even a particularly weird English professor, youâd know that youâd just watched a knight have a not very suitable encounter with his nemesis.
In other words, a quest just happened.
But it just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread.
True. But consider the quest. Of what does it consist? A knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail (whatever one of those may be), at least one dragon, one evil knight, one princess. Sound about right? Thatâs a list I can live with: a knight (named Kip), a dangerous road (nasty German shepherds), a Holy Grail (one form of which is a loaf of Wonder Bread), at least one dragon (trust me, a â68 âCuda could definitely breathe fire), one evil knight (Tony), one princess (who can either keep laughing or stop).
Seems like a bit of a stretch.
On the surface, sure. But letâs think structurally. The quest consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. Item (a) is easy; a quester is just a person who goes on a quest, whether or not he knows itâs a quest. In fact, usually he doesnât know. Items (b) and (c) should be considered together: someone tells our protagonist, our hero, who need not look very heroic, to go somewhere and do something. Go in search of the Holy Grail. Go to the store for bread. Go to Vegas and whack a guy. Tasks of varying nobility, to be sure, but structurally all the same. Go there, do that. Note that I said the stated reason for the quest. Thatâs because of item (e).
The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They donât know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. Thatâs why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old men either have self-knowledge or theyâre never going to get it, while your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is likely to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department.
Letâs look at a real example. When I teach the late-twentieth-century novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of the last century: Thomas Pynchonâs Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Beginning readers can find the novel mystifying, irritating, and highly peculiar. True enough, there is a good bit of cartoonish strangeness in the novel, which can mask the basic quest structure. On the other hand, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) and Edmund Spenserâs Faerie Queen (1596), two of the great quest narratives from early English literature, also have what modern readers must consider cartoonish elements. Itâs really only a matter of whether weâre talking Classics Illustrated or Zap Comics. So hereâs the setup in The Crying of Lot 49:
- Our quester: a young woman, not very happy in her marriage or her life, not too old to learn, not too assertive where men are concerned.
- A place to go: in order to carry out her duties, she must drive to Southern California from her home near San Francisco. Eventually she will travel back and forth between the two, and between her past (a husband with a disintegrating personality and a fondness for LSD, an insane ex-Nazi psychotherapist) and her future (highly unclear).
- A stated reason to go there: she has been made executor of the will of her former lover, a fabulously wealthy and eccentric businessman and stamp collector.
- Challenges and trials: our heroine meets lots of really strange, scary, and occasionally truly dangerous people. She goes on a nightlong excursion through the world of the outcasts and the dispossessed of San Francisco; enters her therapistâs office to talk him out of his psychotic shooting rampage (the dangerous enclosure known in the study of traditional quest romances as âChapel Perilousâ); involves herself in what may be a centuries-old postal conspiracy.
- The real reason to go: did I mention that her name is Oedipa? Oedipa Maas, actually. Sheâs named for the great tragic character from Sophoclesâ drama Oedipus the King (ca. 425 b.c.), whose real calamity is that he doesnât know who he is. In Pynchonâs novel the heroineâs resources, really her crutchesâand they all happen to be maleâare stripped away one by one, shown to be false or unreliable, until she reaches the point where she either must break down, reduced to a little fetal ball, or stand straight and rely on herself. And to do that, she first must find the self on whom she can rely. Which she does, after considerable struggle. Gives up on men, Tupperware parties, easy answers. Plunges ahead into the great mystery of the ending. Acquires, dare we say, self-knowledge? Of course we dare.
Still . . .
You donât believe me. Then why does the stated goal fade away? We hear less and less about the will and the estate as the story goes on, and even the surrogate goal, the mystery of the postal conspiracy, remains unresolved. At the end of the novel, sheâs about to witness an auction of some rare forged stamps, and the answer to the mystery may or may not appear during the auction. We doubt it, though, given whatâs gone before. Mostly, we donât even care. Now we know, as she does, that she can carry on, that discovering that men canât be counted on doesnât mean the world ends, that sheâs a whole person.
So there, in fifty words or more, is why professors of literature typically think The Crying of Lot 49 is a terrific little book. It does look a bit weird at first glance, experimental and superhip (for 1965), but once you get the hang of it, you see that it follows the conventions of a quest tale. So does Huck Finn. The Lord of the Rings. North by Northwest. Star Wars. And most other stories of someone going somewhere and doing something, especially if the going and the doing wasnât his idea in the first place.
A word of warning: if I sometimes speak here and in the chapters to come as if a certain statement is always true, a certain condition always obtains, I apologize. âAlwaysâ and âneverâ are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that itâs not. If literature seems to be too comfortably patriarchal, a novelist like the late Angela Carter or a poet like the contemporary Eavan Boland will come along and upend things just to remind readers and writers of the falseness of our established assumptions. If readers start to pigeonhole African-American writing, as was beginning to happen in the 1960s and 1970s, a trickster like Ishmael Reed will come along who refuses to fit in any pigeonhole we could create. Letâs consider journeys. Sometimes the quest fails or is not taken up by the protagonist. Moreover, is every trip really a quest? It depends. Some days I just drive to workâno adventures, no growth. Iâm sure that the same is true in writing. Sometimes plot requires that a writer get a character from home to work and back again. That said, when a character hits the road, we should start to pay attention, just to see if, you know, somethingâs going on there.
Once you figure out quests, the rest is easy.
2
Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
PERHAPS YOUâVE HEARD THE ANECDOTE about Sigmund Freud. One day one of his students, or assistants, or some such hanger-on, was teasing him about his fondness for cigars, referring to their obvious phallic nature. The great man responded simply that âsometimes a cigar is just a cigar.â I donât really care if the story is true or not. Actually, I think I prefer that it be apocryphal, since made-up anecdotes have their own kind of truth. Still, it is equally true that just as cigars may be just cigars, so sometimes they are not.
Same with meals in life and, of course, in literature. Sometimes a meal is just a meal, and eating with others is simply eating with others. More often than not, though, itâs not. Once or twice a semester at least, I will stop discussion of the story or play under consideration to intone (and I invariably intone in bold): whenever people eat or drink together, itâs communion. For some reasons, this is often met with a slightly scandalized look, communion having for many readers one and only one meaning. While that meaning is very important, it is not the only one. Nor, for that matter, does Christianity have a lock on the practice. Nearly every religion has some liturgical or social ritual involving the coming together of the faithful to share sustenance. So I have to explain that just as intercourse has meanings other than sexual, or at least did at one time, so not all communions are holy. In fact, literary versions of communion can interpret the word in quite a variety of ways.
Hereâs the thing to remember about communions of all kinds: in the real world, breaking bread together is an act of sharing and peace, since if youâre breaking bread youâre not breaking heads. One generally invites oneâs friends to dinner, unless one is trying to get on the good side of enemies or employers. Weâre quite particular about those with whom we break bread. We may not, for instance, accept a dinner invitation from someone we donât care for. The act of taking food into our bodies is so personal that we really only want to do it with people weâre very comfortable with. As with any convention, this one can be violated. A tribal leader or Mafia don, say, may invite his enemies to lunch and then have them killed. In most areas, however, such behavior is considered very bad form. Generally, eating with another is a way of saying, âIâm with you, I like you, we form a community together.â And that is a form of communion.
So too in literature. And in literature, there is another reason: writing a meal scene is so difficult, and so inherently uninteresting, that there really needs to be some compelling reason to include one in the story. And that reason has to do with how characters are getting along. Or not getting along. Come on, food is food. What can you say about fried chicken that you havenât already heard, said, seen, thought? And eating is eating, with some slight variations of table manners. To put characters, then, in this mundane, overused, fairly boring situation, something more has to be happening than simply beef, forks, and goblets.
So what kind of communion? And what kind of result can it achieve? Any kind you can think of.
Letâs consider an example that will never be confused with religious communion, the eating scene in Henry Fieldingâs Tom Jones (1749), which, as one of my students once remarked, âsure doesnât look like church.â Specifically, Tom and his lady friend, Mrs. Waters, dine at an inn, chomping, gnawing, sucking on bones, licking fingers; a more leering, slurping, groaning, and, in short, sexual meal has never been consumed. While it doesnât feel particularly important thematically and, moreover, itâs as far from traditional notions of communion as we can get, it nevertheless constitutes a shared experience. What else is the eating about in that scene except devouring the otherâs body? Think of it as a consuming desire. Or two of them. And in the case of the movie version of Tom Jones starring Albert Finney (1963), thereâs another reason. Tony Richardson, the director, couldnât openly show sex as, well, sex. There were still taboos in film in the early sixties. So what he does is show something else as sex. And itâs probably dirtier than all but two or three sex scenes ever filmed. When those two finish swilling ale and slurping on drumsticks and sucking fingers and generally wallowing and moaning, the audience wants to lie back and smoke. But what is this expression of desire except a kind of communion, very private, admittedly, and decidedly not holy? I want to be with you, you want to be with me, let us share the experience. And thatâs the point: communion doesnât need to be holy. Or even decent.
How about a slightly more sedate example? The late Raymond Carver wrote a story, âCathedralâ (1981), about a guy with real hang-ups: included among the many things the narrator is bigoted against are people with disabilities, minorities, those different from himself, and all parts of his wifeâs past in which he does not share. Now the only reason to give a character a serious hang-up is to give him the chance to get over it. He may fail, but he gets the chance. Itâs the Code of the West. When our unnamed narrator reveals to us from the first moment that a blind man, a friend of his wifeâs, is coming to visit, weâre not surprised that he doesnât like the prospect at all. We know immediately that our man has to overcome disliking everyone who is different. And by the end he does, when he and the blind man sit together to draw a cathedral so the blind man can get a sense of what one looks like. To do that, they have to touch, hold hands even, and thereâs no way the narrator would have been able to do that at the start of the story. Carverâs problem, then, is how to get from the nasty, prejudiced, narrow-minded person of the opening page to the point where he can actually have a blind manâs hand on his own at the ending. The answer is food.
Every coach I ever had would say, when we faced a superior opposing team, that they put on their pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else. What those coaches could have said, in all accuracy, is that those supermen shovel in the pasta just like the rest of us. Or in Carverâs story, cube steak. When the narrator watches the blind man eatingâcompetent, busy, hungry, and, well, normalâhe begins to gain a new respect for him. The three of them, husband, wife, and visitor, ravenously consume the cube steak, potatoes, and vegetables, and in the course of that experience our narrator finds his antipathy toward the blind man beginning to break down. He discovers he has something in common with this strangerâeating as a fundamental element of lifeâthat there is a bond between them.
What about the dope they smoke afterward?
Passing a joint doesnât quite resemble the wafer and the chalice, does it? But thinking symbolically, whereâs the difference, really? Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barrie...