Not so long ago William Gass could disconcert more than just the John Gardners of the world with his “country-headed” assertion “that literature is language, that stories and the people in them are merely made of words as chairs are made of smooth sticks and sometimes of cloth or metal tubes.” As Gass jokingly went on to note, “that novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It’s as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all those years, the fears . . . from sponge.”1 Despite the efforts of New Historicists and Cultural Critics, the fear of seeming naive2 in matters of literary representation—of mistaking sponge for spouse, word for world—has remained strong in the two decades since the liberation of fiction from what Michael Riffaterre has without a trace of irony called “the shackles of representation.” It would be foolish not to join Riffaterre in hailing “the triumph of semiosis over mimesis” and wrong not to at least entertain the possibility that “the solution to the truth-in-fiction paradox . . . lies in redefining referentiality.”3 But equating truth-in-fiction with verisimilitude does not necessarily mean that “Narrative truth is thus a linguistic phenomenon” and “exterior referentiality . . . an illusion.”4 Rarely in narrative is “the real” only “presupposition,” whose main, even sole purpose is to serve as “the given that tropes need as a foil.” Here we might note the self-inflating trope of the narratologist as prisoner, a Nelson Mandela, say, or Samson, freed from the shackles of referentiality and bringing James’s house of fiction and Gass’s world of words down around readers’ heads.
Wolfgang Iser’s latest foray into “literary anthropology,” The Fictive and the Imaginary, appears to offer a viable alternative to both naive mimesis and narratological hermeticism. Iser sees texts as arising from a “triad” in which the fictive mediates between the concrete actuality of the real and the abstract possibilities of the imaginary. Unfortunately, even as he attempts to steer a course between approaches which poeticize and therefore hypostatize the literary text on the one hand, and those that turn it into a documentary record on the other, Iser proves to be only slightly more interested in “the real” than is Riffaterre, and not interested enough to include this supposedly integral part of his interpretive triad in his dyadic title. The strength of Iser’s position derives, like Riffaterre’s, from defining fiction and interpretation semiotically: “the fictionalizing act converts [reality] into a sign, simultaneously casting the imaginary as a form that allows us to conceive what it is toward which the sign points.”5 Its weakness stems from an unwillingness to consider this semiotic activity in less narrowly aesthetic and/or narratological terms, which is to say in more broadly sociocultural ones, with one important exception: attributing to literary texts a vaguely meliorative function (and to the reader an active and similarly salutary role). Iser optimistically defines the literary text as “a reaction” to a “thought system” “triggered by the system’s limited ability to cope with the multifariousness of reality, thus drawing attention to [the thought system’s] deficiencies.”6 Unlike those generally “trivial” texts that “support prevailing [thought] systems,” literary texts “deform” and therefore alter and improve the real.
For our purposes, the question worth posing is not whether literary texts do indeed occupy a privileged position (a question most readers of this essay have already answered in the affirmative), but how they are privileged: by whom, in what ways, to what degree, and especially to what ends. The answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this essay in all respects but one, the role referentiality plays in determining the literary text’s privileged status. Let us begin by acknowledging that referring in literature is, as Anna Whiteside has noted, “considerably more complex than referring in ordinary discourse”7 and, as Mario J. Valdés has pointed out, that “[t]he subject matter of truth-claims is . . . not the physical data of the world that corresponds to the statement, but rather the reader’s degree of accessibility and relationship to that data within the lived world of language.”8 And let us accept what Linda Hutcheon has said of this relationship in terms of postmodern fiction in general and those texts she calls “historiographic metafictions” in particular, e.g. Coetzee’s Foe, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Coover’s The Public Burning, Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—“texts that make us think not only about their fictionality but also about their historicity.”9 As Hutcheon quite rightly contends, novels such as these are “related to life experience in a very real way for the reader” as “a continuation of that ordering, decoding, naming, fiction-making process that is part of the reader’s normal coming-to-terms with experience in the real world. And it is this fact that theories of novelistic reference ultimately have to take into account, given the self-conscious narrative and linguistic thematization of it in metafiction itself.”10 Hutcheon is right to take Riffaterre and like-minded critics to task and to defend postmodern fiction from those who attack it from the left (as historically irrelevant except as a manifestation of late capitalism) and the right (as historically irresponsible, mere leftist propaganda). However, she is wrong to focus so exclusively on the fiction-making process as these texts’ main claim to referential meaning and not to situate her discussion of them within the larger context of those more numerous contemporary fictions for which the term “historiographic metafiction” seems not to apply.11
I want in what follows to make a modest contribution to the ongoing effort to redefine referentiality by examining the relationship between fact and fiction within and between two contemporary texts that at first glance seem to have little if anything in common. One is John Cheever’s highly acclaimed, bestselling novel Falconer (1977) and the other a work that, unlike Falconer, clearly corresponds to Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction, John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990), winner of the PEN/Faulkner prize. For all their obvious differences in terms of race, style, and commercial success, the two novels bear comparison in their deployment of three kinds of factual material. One is autobiographical: lightly disguised and displaced in Falconer, both disguised/displaced and metafictively present in Philadelphia Fire. Another is historical, by which I mean events of public rather than personal significance, especially the September 1971 riot at Attica Prison in upstate New York and the May 1985 police action against the MOVE organization in West Philadelphia. And the third is the intertextuality that is pervasive and dialogized in Wideman’s novel, minimized and personalized, lyricized and monologized in Cheever’s. My concern throughout this essay is with the ways these three kinds (or levels) of factual reference are individually deployed, with the ways they intersect, and ultimately with the ways this deployment “refers” to larger cultural plots.
Biographer Scott Donaldson rightly asserts that Cheever’s stories and novels “tell us more about people in the American middle class during that half-century [1930-1982] than any other writer’s work has done or can do.”13 Strangely enough, Donaldson’s remark seems to apply to all of Cheever’s work but the one Newsweek hailed as “Cheever’s Triumph,” the novel Falconer. Clearly, fratricide, heroin addiction, homosexuality, and incarceration in a state “correctional facility” cannot be said to refer to the American middle class in the same way as the supermarkets, suburban settings, social drinking, backyard pools, advertising jobs, and so forth found in the stories and novels that both precede and follow Falconer. This is not to say that Donaldson’s comment does not apply to Falconer; it does, but in an oddly angled way that tells us something about “Cheever’s Triumph” we may prefer not to know (anymore than “we” wanted to know about Cheever’s homosexuality). Cheever’s fiction often deals with the problem of how to describe and define—how to refer to—the American middle class Cheever spent a lifetime telling us so much about. Bullet Park, for example, begins, “Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark,” before going on to a tour of the town conducted by, and in the language of, a real estate agent named (ominously and comically) Hazzard out to make a sale. The opening of Falconer deals more deliberately and less ironically with, if not the crisis of signification, then the difficulty of representation:
The main entrance to Falconer—the only entrance for convicts, their visitors and the staff—was crowned by an escutcheon representing Liberty, Justice, and, between the two, the sovereign power of government. Liberty wore a mobcap and carried a pike. Government was the federal Eagle holding an olive branch and armed with hunting arrows. Justice was conventional; blinded, vaguely erotic in her clinging robes and armed with a headsman’s sword. The bas-relief was bronze, but black these days—as black as unpolished anthracite or onyx. How many hundreds had passed under this, the last emblem most of them would see of man’s endeavor to interpret the mystery of imprisonment in terms of symbols. Hundreds, one guessed, thousands, millions was close. Above the escutcheon was a declension of the place-names: Falconer Jail 1871, Falconer Reformatory, Falconer Federal Penitentiary, Falconer State Prison, Falconer Correctional Facility, and the last, which had never caught on: Daybreak House. Now cons were inmates, the assholes were officers and the warden was a superintendent. Fame is chancy, God knows, but Falconer—with its limited accommodations for two thousand miscreants—was as famous as Newgate. Gone was the water torture, the striped suits, the lock step, the balls and chains, and there was a softball field where the gallows had stood, but at the time of which I’m writing, leg irons were still used in Auburn. You could tell the men from Auburn by the noise they made.14
The passage is especially striking for the way in which the density of realistic detail and historical reference is quickly subordinated to a larger metaphorical purpose. The chain of metonymic details—1871, Newgate, Auburn, for example—lose their specificity and become part of this paragraph’s and eventually the entire novel’s metaphoric treatment of “the mystery of imprisonment” (according to Cheever, one of three metaphors for confinement in his fiction). Temporal and linguistic differences, between, say, “cons” and “inmates,” are put under erasure, poeticized away in the interest of essential likenesses. For all their physical differences and oddities (the grotesquely fat guard Tiny, the grotesquely tattooed inmate Chicken Number Two, for example) and virtually allegorical names, the characters in this prison version of Pilgrim’s Progress speak as if with one voice. The guards, the inmates on F-block (all of them white), even the television reporters, game show contestants, and characters in commercials and dramatic series speak not only in the same voice but to the same purpose. The Cuckold’s long story of a brief homosexual encounter, the news report of the woman who began assembling an ideal mate from the body parts of the husband and other men she had murdered, and a host of other interpolated narratives have exactly the same subtext.15 At times different characters speak not only similar stories but the very same words. Both Tiny and Chicken Number Two voice the novel’s refrain, asking Farragut why he killed his brother, and both Farragut’s wife Marcia and his brother Eben’s wife Carrie tell their husbands, “I don’t have to listen to your shit anymore” (24, 209). In neither case does the reader feel that either merely echoes the other, that one is prior and the other parasitic. Rather, each speaks as if for the first time out of her despair over finding herself trapped in a “rotten marriage” that is itself only one instance of some timeless, more universal human condition.
This attempt to create a paradoxically unique “Cheeveresque” voice which effectively erases all differences between characters in order to highlight the common wellsprings of their despair and their desire for a spiritual, or quasispiritual, freedom is noteworthy, especially when read in relation to the novel’s intertextual and autobiographical dimensions. The range and density of Falconer’s intertextuality is slight, its allusiveness arguably as tenuous as the ghosts of Defoe and Dickens evoked by the mention of Newgate prison in the novel’s opening paragraph quoted above. Indeed, the only literary reference to receive any attention at all is Cheever’s modelling Farragut’s escape from Falconer (and from Falconer) on Edmond Dantes’ from the Chateau d’If in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Farragut’s letter to his girlfriend recalls Hemingway in substance and setting, though not, as some of Cheever’s earliest stories did, in style. Freud is mentioned several times as a temporal and cultural marker, and Cheever’s favorite Shakespearean play, The Tempest, is very briefly quoted. Television news offers up an octogenarian bicyclist jokingly but also appropriately named Ralph Waldo, and the woman mentioned above is made in the blackly humorous image of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Calling Farragut an “opium eater” does not so much recall De Quincey as contribute to the heightened operatic, almost other-worldly quality of the language of a novel in which criminals appear as “miscreants” and “malefactors.” There is as well a “declaration of addiction” and a sprinkling of Biblical allusions. Yet Falconer is densely intertextual in one important respect: drawing on and alluding to so many earlier Cheever works. Indeed, Falconer is in many respects a recycling and reaccenting of Cheever’s most characteristic situations and most obsessive themes, albeit in a new setting and in a largely different key: rivalry between brothers, brittle marriages, a sense of otherness, the unloved child grown into the insecure and self-centered but spiritually striving adult.
Just as important, this appropriately constrained, arguably claustrophobic, even narcissistic intertextuality is related to Falconer’s deeply and invitingly autobiographical nature. Read in terms of the author’s actual life, Ezekiel Farragut “is” Cheever, Farragut’s brother Eben “is” the brother Fred with whom Cheever had his own love-hate relationship and who died just as Cheever completed Falconer, Farragut’s wife Marcia “is” Mary Cheever (the former’s painting a displacement of the latter’s poetry writing), and Falconer Prison “is” Sing Sing where Cheever taught for two years in the early 1970s as well as the prison-like Smithers Rehabilitation Center where he voluntarily committed himself in 1975 in a successful effort to overcome his addiction to alcohol. Of course, these equations are valid only in a special, which is to say refracted, sense but one that cannot be explained, or explained away, by claiming that the one “is modelled on” the other. (This is the loophole that allowed reviewers and others to assume that Farragut and Cheever were alike in certain, mainly metaphorical ways, but not in others: most notably the homosexuality that looms large in Falconer and is clearly present in so many of his other fictions, the novels in particular, but that still had to wait until Susan Cheever dared speak its name in her 1984 memoir, Home before Dark.) The problem with the “modelled on” explanation is that Cheever is not just Farragut; he is, for example, Eben too. In one of the novel’s funniest and most affecting passages, Farragut recalls a conversation in which Eben tells him of his wife Carrie’s growing indifference to his very existence. In an effort to find some way into her life he manages to get himself on a game show he knows she likes to watch, Trial and Error, a lightly fictionalized version of Truth or Consequences. Willing to undergo public humiliation in order to reach his wife, Eben arrives home only to find her crying, “because,” he thinks, “I looked like such a fool, falling into the tank. She went on crying and sobbing and I said, ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ and she said, ‘They shot the mother polar bear, they shot the mother polar bear!’ Wrong show. I got the wrong show, but you can’t say I didn’t try” (211). Much the same story, minus the game show but with the rebuffs, the shooting of the polar bear and the wife’s, now Mary’s, “crying” and “sobbing” appears in one of Cheever’s journal entries from 1971.16 On its own this particular use of autobiographical material in the novel proves nothing more than the obvious: Cheever’s fiction is often autobiographical in some sense and to some degree (though not necessarily in the sense and rarely to the degree that Susan Cheever has claimed).17 However, it is also true that in writing of “man’s endeavor to interpret the mystery of imprisonment” and his protagonist’s as well as his own efforts “to leach self-pity out of his emotional spectrum,” Cheever conceived a novel that is not so much about himself as it is about a certain kind of self, or way of defining the self, a decidedly and perniciously American way in which the triumph of spiritual redemption in its typically Protestant form of personal salvation becomes the alibi for a form of narcissism from which neither Farragut nor the novel ever really escapes and about which there may be very little reason to “rejoice.”
What Farragut, as well as Falconer, does escape is dependency: literally in Farragut’s case his heroin/methadone addiction and his confinement in Falconer and metaphorically other forms of self-abuse, including and especially self-pity. En route to becoming free, “clean,” Farragut must be weaned as it were all unknowingly by the State for his own good so that he can, albeit passively, substitute the daily bread of the eucharist for the daily dose of methadone substituted for the daily fix of heroin in another of the novel’s several daisy chains of metaphoric substitutions. So far so good, but this escape merely prepares the way for another, Farragut’s freeing himself from his less visibly incapacitating dependency on others. “They”—the other inmates—may be fallen, but he who once was lost will now be saved after freeing himself from one last illusion about his place in the sociopolitical, as opposed to the spiritual, scheme of things. Significantly, Farragut frees himself from this illusion, disguised as a delusion of grandeur, in the novel’s penultimate section which plays itself out against the backdrop of a thinly, almost absurdly disguised version of the September 1971 riot at Attica Correctional Facility in western New York.
Farragut ties his fate to that of the rioting “brothers” with whom he tries to maintain a kind of contact, first accidentally by overhearing radio and television news reports and then more deliberately by building a contraband radio. In need of a crystal, he approaches another inmate, the owner of a large diamond (perhaps real, perhaps not). “I want your diamond,” Farragut explains, “to save the world.” Not surprisingly, Bumpo says no. What is so striking about the exchange is not Bumpo’s predictable, even understandable selfishness; it is the absurdity of Farragut’s messianic aspirations. Farragut’s efforts to build the radio and thus by some megalomaniacal twist of logic “save the world” fail as badly, albeit less spectacularly, as the efforts of the Attica inmates to have their grievances redressed. At Falconer the effectiveness of the Amana riot is measured in a change of prison dress that is at once trivial and symbolic. “[I]t was for this light greenness [’a shade up from the gray of the living dead’] that the men of Amana had died or had lain, vomiting and naked, for hours in the mud. That was a fact” (192). But this “fact” clearly does double duty, referring to the fictional Amana and the equally factual Attica in a way that ends up subordinating both.
Attica is a sign—alternately signifier and signified—that functions within the novel in a curious and ultimately disturbing way. That Amana is and is not Attica (to speak synechdochically) is self-evident. What is less obvious is that the “Amana is Attica” equation does not function in the same way as “Falconer is Sing Sing.” The latter connection may be interesting, especially biographically, but it is neither specific nor crucial, nor does it function the same way “Auburn is Auburn” does, at least for anyone who knows of the actual maximum security prison in upstate New York. Amana occupies a strange middle ground between the more than less fictionalized Falconer and the entirely real Auburn which Cheever makes no effort to disguise but which also, unlike Falconer, plays a decidedly small role, a piece of realistic furniture in a work that seems more romance or fantasy than novel. Amana, on the other hand, evokes Attica while at the same time keeping it at a safe distance, subordinating it to the kind of minor role that, as Chinua Achebe has pointed out, Africa is made to play in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In much the same way that the Congo exists so that Marlow can attain self-knowledge, Attica, as Amana, exists so that Farragut can achieve personal salvation. As the novel’s closing paragraph puts it, “Farragut walked to the front of the bus and got off at the next stop. Stepping from the bus onto the street, he saw that he had lost his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature. He held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought, rejoice.”
Walter Clemons’ phrase “Cheever’s Triumph” refers to more than just the book’s superb artistry, more than reviewers’ acknowledgement of Cheever the short-story writer’s having finally mastered the “more demanding” form of the novel after two “episodic” Wapshot books and one “broken-backed” Bullet Park. It refers as well to the autobiographical context that enables and even leads us to read Falconer as the record in fictional form of the author’s triumph over adversity: an Alcoholics Anonymous testimonial, an act of religious witnessing. But “Cheever’s Triumph” also refers to its author’s and audience’s ringing endorsement of individual success over collective concerns, of one man’s escape at the staggering cost of the ten hostages and twenty-nine inmates killed by state police and corrections officers in just eight minutes during the 13 September 1971 retaking of Attica and the sixty-one inmates indicted on a total of 1406 counts by grand juries that did not find a single officer or government official culpable. “Cheever’s Triumph” refers, then, not just to what Falconer affirms but to what it allows us to forget as it leaches considerably more than self-pity from Farragut’s and its readers’ emotional spectrum.
Philadelphia Fire tells a very different story. Where Falconer is narratively progressive, joyously escapist, and seemingly, soothingly apolitical, Philadelphia Fire is narratively disjunctive, deeply intersubjective, densely intertextual, and politically resistant. Falconer looks determinedly and joyfully ahead while in fact looking away. Philadelphia Fire looks back, inviting us to reread and reassess, prizing recovery of over Cheever’s recovery from, aware that what is progress for some is “SOS” (“same ole shit”) for others. Falconer offers up a lyrically enchanting world of mirror reflections, a mise en abime of narcissistic self-absorption masquerading as universal longing. Philadelphia Fire offers up the Foucauldian counter-image of “a node within a network,” of intricately rather than innately connected lives. Adopting a more or less postmodern posture, Wideman’s novel constitutes a relentless but nonetheless designedly incomplete postmortem investigation of its titular subject, a study of a very different kind of fratricide than the one we find in the more insistently and religiously symbolic Falconer. It is a labyrinthine novel about trying to write a book “[a]bout the fire. What caused it. Who was responsible. What it means,”19 in which it is impossible to speak with the kind of monological self-assurance that characterizes both the prayer of thanksgiving with which Falconer concludes and the words with which Police Chief Sambor commenced the 13 May 1985 siege of and subsequent attack on MOVE headquarters on which Philadelphia Fire is closely but also problematically based: “Attention, MOVE! This is America!”
If, as Donaldson claims, Cheever’s fiction does tell us more about the way Americans have lived in the Twentieth Century than any other writer has done or can do, then Wideman’s novel warns us of the danger in this kind of representativeness, of “look[ing] on reality as being like myself” (109). Cheever uses the imagination to transcend actuality and thus create, in Richard Poirier’s phrase, a typically American “world elsewhere,” a utopia that can exist in words only. Wideman uses it to supplement rather than transcend, aware of how much of the multifarious and multivoiced, largely communal experience of African-Americans has been either passively lost or actively silenced in the rush to social progress and personal salvation. Although his protagonist laments that his name fails to connect him to anyone or anything, he is intertextually linked to another Cudjoe, Kwansa Parker’s four-year-old son in Wideman’s 1987 novel, Reuben, and biographically linked to the author (basketball, educational abilities and advantages, writing, mentor, assimilation, white wife, two sons, escape from and subsequent belated return to his “roots”).
However, where Cheever either downplays or elides entirely differences between himself and his protagonist by a process of metaphoric substitution, Wideman problematizes his relationship with his protagonist by means of a series of metonymic displacements. “Why this Cudjoe, then? This airy other floating into the shape of my story. Why am I him when I tell certain parts? Why am I hiding from myself? Is he mirror or black hole?” (127). It is tempting to read Cudjoe as the person Wideman might have been had he not become who he is: his books not published, not even completed, his marriage in ruins, his children living in another country, etc. The problem with the there-but-for-fortune reading of Philadelphia Fire is Wideman’s making literally (structurally) central to his novel of Cudjoe’s personal and aesthetic dilemma his own double failure: to get on with the telling of Cudjoe’s story and to tell the story of his son Jacob who in 1986 at the age of sixteen killed the companion with whom he had just been camping and who two years later pleaded guilty to murder. In the novel Jacob Wideman is “seen” during the period in-between arrest and adjudication, a limbo during which the authorities keep him isolated while pondering whether to try him as an adult or a juvenile. In one important respect, Wideman’s son is a version of Simba Muntu, the object of Cudjoe’s search, “the boy who is the only survivor of the holocaust on Osage Avenue, the child who is brother, son, a lost limb haunting him since he read about the fire in a magazine. He must find the child to be whole again. Cudjoe can’t account for the force drawing him to the story nor why he indulges a fantasy of identity with the boy who escaped the massacre” (18). But if Jacob Wideman is in one sense Simba Muntu (the novel’s version of the actual Birdie Africa/Michael Ward), then in another sense he is not, for he is not merely or even mainly a victim. He exists, as most of the novel’s “characters” do, at the point at which various referential systems and meanings intersect. Where Falconer collapses or erases all differences into the seamless whole of the autonomous self triumphantly separate from all others yet paradoxically one with them, Philadelphia Fire moves in the opposite direction. As Wideman explains in the novel in a letter to his son, “[w]e’re different. But not separate.” Having nothing to “rejoice” about, the only advice he can give is to “hold on.”
Within the field of Foucauldian relations, Jacob Wideman intersects with Simba Muntu, alternately a lost child (like Reuben’s Cudjoe) and a symbol of kid power. In the latter role, he represents both resilience and resentment, the promise of childhood innocence and the threat of “the fire next time.” Similarly Jacob Wideman also intersects with Wideman’s brother Robby, the subject of Wideman’s nonfiction book, Brothers and Keepers. In trying to account for his and his brother’s very “different but not separate” lives—the one a Rhodes scholar and acclaimed author, the other serving a life sentence with no chance of parole—Wideman asks a question that reverberates throughout Philadelphia Fire. “Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life? If I can’t be trusted with the story of my own life, how could I ask my brother to trust me with his?”22 The fact that he did write his brother’s story and in doing so came to write his own, provisionally completing a return to the past that he had begun in his Homewood Trilogy, constitutes an integral part of Philadelphia Fire’s frame of reference. Having done this much for his brother (in an effort to understand his brother and himself, and to publicize his brother’s plight and perhaps win for him a pardon), can Wideman afford to do anything less for his son? “Will I ever write my son’s story? Not dealing with it may be causing the forgetfulness I’m experiencing. . . . A continuous underlying distraction so that if I look away from what I’m doing I lose my place” (115).
Farragut finds his place, “his rightful place in things as he saw them” (217). Wideman, along with his son and brother, his protagonist and reader, loses his place because he chooses not to forget. “In America, especially if you’re black,” Wideman has noted, “there is a temptation to buy a kind of upward mobility. One of the requirements is to forget. Eventually, I felt impoverished by that fact.”24 This unwillingness to forget, which necessitates Wideman’s returning to the “demons” he thought he had left behind when he moved first to the University of Pennsylvania and then, as a Rhodes scholar, to Oxford and finally to Wyoming, is what makes Philadelphia Fire so difficult a text, and so troubling: difficult because of the sheer density, heterogeneity and complexity of reference and troubling because the novel requires the reader, especially the American reader, to move in an unaccustomed direction. The unambiguous oneness celebrated in Falconer is akin to that of Emerson’s grand and grotesque image of the transparent eyeball, a merging with the universe which paradoxically leaves the individual self intact, exalted rather than diminished. The oneness of Philadelphia Fire is altogether different: a virtual denial or rejection of transcendental oneness in favor of encyclopedic wholeness (I am thinking here of the distinction Umberto Eco makes between “dictionary” and “encyclopedia”). As Ashraf Rushdy points out in his excellent discussion of Wideman’s Homewood trilogy, “the relinquishing of one’s ego—the decentering of one’s self—is not necessarily a prerequisite to achieving a stronger individual self, but may lead to a stronger sense of a collective self.”25 Neither utopian nor euphoric, Wideman’s sense of a collective self emphasizes interconnectedness at the expense of the linear development of the bourgeois ego moving inexorably through time and space towards a highly personalized triumph (or disaster). “You never know when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the more it becomes clear that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of interdependence and chance that after all could only have produced one result: what is.”26
* * *
It is to the consequences of this forgetfulness that I want to turn in concluding this essay. Attica is so familiar a story that not even Cheever’s renaming it Amana can disguise it or its essential irrelevance to Farragut’s situation. It represents that sense of sociopolitical connectedness and responsibility which he must reject in order to follow more closely the straight and narrow path to personal salvation, itself disguised (or alibi’d) as something transcendental and universal. MOVE, on the other hand, has “always already” been a doubly unfamiliar story: at first only marginally understood and inconsistently reported/represented46 and at last repressed and replaced altogether, no longer even a tale of sound and fury signifyin(g) nothing. Whereas Attica’s subversive force could be controlled both by the State Police and corrections officers whom Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered to retake the prison and by Cheever whose renaming it after a well-known brand of kitchen appliances evokes images of consumerism and domesticity, MOVE’s resistance to representation suggests its resistance to mainstream American values and practices and the society’s, especially the media’s, inability to comprehend and thereby control its subversive power even semantically. But what exactly is the familiar story that Attica has come to represent? Soon after the fire, Mayor Goode defended his actions by claiming that “People want a strong leader.” It was an explanation that led one observer to contrast “Rockefeller’s choice of response at Attica in 1971” with “the fruitful resolution Mario Cuomo salvaged at Ossining in 1983” and to ask, “Need the distance between Ossining and Osage Avenue have been so great?”47 By 1985 Attica had become a lesson learned, and has remained a lesson worth remembering, as recently as the April 1993 prison uprising at Lucasville, Ohio: “experts say the lesson of past bloodbaths like Attica . . . is that negotiation must be given a chance to work.”48
The failure to apply the lesson of Attica to the situation in Philadelphia just two years after the uprising at Sing Sing implies not so much an inability to translate prison narrative to urban context as an unwillingness to conceive of MOVE as a link in the causal chain of the larger melioristic plot, the master narrative, connecting Attica to Lucasville via Ossining. This unwillingness helps explain why whatever lessons might have been drawn from the events of May 1985 in West Philadelphia were not applied to the dismayingly similar situation eight years later in Waco, Texas. An article in the New York Times did point out (though not always accurately) the “many parallels” between MOVE and the Branch Davidians,49 but in general the media filled the dead time in this curiously actionless thriller with two conflicting explanations. One was to situate the Branch Davidians in the context of the religious and/or political far right and of Jonestown. “Since the Jim Jones episode, nobody wants to fail to take these groups seriously” (quoted in Steinfels). Taking the Branch Davidians seriously proved a rather formidable task, however, given the media’s fascination with David Koresh’s abortive career as a rock musician and his (perhaps not unrelated, certainly intertextually significant) pathological sexual interest in young girls. Indeed, despite the drama’s bloody opening and fiery conclusion, there was in Waco, as there had rarely been in West Philadelphia, an element of opera bouffe, of history forgotten and therefore condemned to repeating itself just as Marx had predicted, as farce, a pastiche of Dallas, Elmer Gantry, Waiting for Godot, Marjoe, and National Enquirer. The media’s other method for explaining “Waco” was to permit Attorney General Janet Reno to explain it and thereby the largely ineffective, often bizarre, and ultimately destructive tactics used to force David Koresh and his followers to accede to government demands by emphasizing the situation’s uniqueness. Her failure to see Waco, like Mayor Goode’s to see MOVE, as a node in a network, as part of a web of relations, rather than as an unprecedented event that has no “rightful place” in the master narrative, suggests both a resistance to representation on the one hand and a determined indifference on the other. It is precisely this indifference, this willed forgetfulness, that Philadelphia Fire resists in all its polyphonic density and that Falconer celebrates in its will to monologic power. As Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai explains as he sits in a “pool of Anglepoised light,” “trapped in the web of . . . interweaving genealogies”: “how convenient this amnesia is, how much it excuses!”