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Whatsa martyr with
you?
By Spengler
"What's a motto?" asked the future Lion
King Simba, to which Timon replied, "Nothing."
"Whatsa motto with you?" Charlotte Simmons, the
ingenue of Tom Wolfe's new novel, by rights should
have been a martyr to debauched university life.
By sparing his protagonist from martyrdom, Wolfe
in effect tells the reader,  "Whatsa martyr with
you?" We have "hakuna mattata" in place of the
indicated conclusion. Rather than holding up the
mirror of tragedy to his public, Wolfe ultimately
gives us a smiley-face.
Wolfe's collective
biography of America's astronauts (The Right
Stuff, 1983) was the ultimate
feel-good-about-America book. It made him a
cultural icon among the sort of boosters who also
think that Mel Gibson's Braveheart is a
grand paean to freedom. He did not mention that
German scientists once in Adolf Hitler's service
devised and built the rockets on which Wolfe's
tobacco-chewing pilots flew to glory. Wolfe
believes that guts, goodwill, and a smattering of
knowledge will always win the day. That is the red
thread connecting The Right Stuff and
Charlotte Simmons, namely the author's
assurance that within US culture as it is are to
be found the solutions to the all problems that
the United States confronts. Twenty years ago his
account of the US space program was merely
incomplete; today his portrait of American youth
is incongruous.
As a journalist, Tom Wolfe
knew better. The youth culture he describes
mass-produces martyrs faster than the Emperor
Nero. One out of six university students suffers
from depression; two out of five college women
suffer from anorexia or bulimia at some point,
reported Psychology Today in December. This should
be no surprise, given what Wolfe himself has
reported.
"Only yesterday," Wolfe wrote
five years ago in Hooking Up, "boys and
girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as
getting to first base. Second base was deep
kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that.
Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all
the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000
we can forget about necking. Today's girls and
boys have never heard of anything that dainty.
Today's first base is deep kissing, now known as
tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and
that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going
all the way. Home plate is learning each other's
names." Apart from some binge drinking, these
lines summarize two-thirds of the content of
Charlotte Simmons.
Charlotte
Simmons, a poor girl from the rural US South, wins
a scholarship to a great university, and there
loses her religion, her sobriety, and her
virginity. Better writers than Wolfe have been
killing off the likes of Charlotte for centuries.
Innocent country folk lured into the fleshpots of
Babylon usually do not survive their debauches in
the genre of which Wolfe's book is an evident
knock-off. Some reviewers have compared Charlotte
to Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre, who takes poison
at the conclusion A Harlot High And Low.
Wolfe's actual model, I suspect, was Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, in which The
Savage, a remnant of 20th-century culture,
stumbles into a hedonistic dystopia of the future
and eventually hangs himself.
Given the
precedents, one would expect to see Charlotte on a
slab at the book's conclusion. New York Times
columnist David Brooks titled his November 24
review "Moral suicide a la Wolfe" - but the
trouble is that there is no suicide. Here is a
brief plot summary, intended to spare the public
the bother of reading it. Young Charlotte arrives
at fictional DuPont University (apparently modeled
after Duke). She encounters a young Jewish
intellectual, Adam Gellin, who has plagiarized an
essay for Jojo Johanssen, a basketball star. She
also is pursued by a handsome poseur named Hoyt
Thorpe, to whom she loses her virginity. Thorpe
has witnessed a sexual act between the governor of
California and a female student, and accepted a
bribe in the form of employment at a Wall Street
firm to keep silent.
Charlotte inspires
Jojo to use his mind, and the athlete registers
for a course in Socrates in which he is proud to
obtain a C+. (That, for Wolfe, represents
redemption by the intellect.) Jojo nearly loses
his position on the basketball team for the sin of
engaging in actual academic work, but regains his
position. Adam publishes an expose of the
aforementioned sexual incident and becomes a hero
to the left-wing professors at the university, who
choose not to pursue the plagiarism charge. Hoyt
Thorpe is exposed as a cheat and fraud, but not
before deflowering Charlotte. Charlotte rejects
Adam, who loves her, and chooses Jojo instead. Her
intellect fails her, but she becomes a celebrity
as a sports hero's squeeze. "So the little country
girl from the Lost Province had become quite a
campus presence, of sorts, in a remarkably short
time, a mere six months."
The rest of the
697 pages are occupied with sex, drinking, and
jejeune undergraduate discourse.
Another
C+ student with an interest in philosophy is the
president of the United States. The former flyer
George W Bush has a good deal of what Wolfe called
"the right stuff", a blend of goodwill,
sportsmanship, optimism and horse sense. Like test
pilot Chuck Yaeger, the man who broke the sound
barrier, he represents the best type the United
States produces. But Yaeger had the benefit of
Werner von Braun and his team; Bush has Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.
Apart from David Brooks, the
neo-conservative monthly Commentary printed the
most sympathetic notice of Charlotte
Simmons I have seen. Reviewer Sam Schulman
notes that the action of the novel centers on
Charlotte's search for a boyfriend, but
nonetheless "it is a novel of ideas, a
philosophical novel". This is an astonishing
statement, considering that ideas of any sort are
mentioned only in passing amid the rivers of
cervisial vomit and the quivering mounds of
undergraduate flesh. The statement says a great
deal about the neo-conservatives, however.
In the realm of culture, the
neo-conservatives are passionately "middlebrow", a
term that has re-entered the cultural vocabulary
thanks to David Brooks' advocacy. That is, they
look for "healthy" elements of popular culture,
from a time before American culture began to
disintegrate. They like Jackson Pollack rather
than Damien Hirst, Stravinsky rather than
Stockhausen, Frank Sinatra rather than Ice Cube,
and so forth. That is, they praise the older
modernists who overthrew traditional culture, and
eschew the post-modernists who want to eradicate
whatever is left.
Wolfe comes close to
their literary ideal. As a chronicler of popular
culture, Tom Wolfe has been the bane of radical
popular culture, and the bard of traditional
popular culture. During the 1960 he ridiculed the
counterculture (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test). Bonfire of the Vanities became
the 1980s fable of Wall Street excess, and in 2000
Hooking Up reported on promiscuity among
teenagers, as noted.
Charlotte's triumph
as an athlete's love interest encapsulates what
Wolfe wants to convey: that there exist strengths
in US culture that will triumph over whatever
adversity might present itself. In the American
provinces, reverence for high-school sports takes
second place only to religion, and first place
during an important match. Athletes at US
universities are not expected to do much academic
work. Games are the principal drawing card for
wealthy alumni, and universities compete for the
best athletes the better to solicit contributions
from them. In other words, Americans are overgrown
children for whom the fantasy-world of basketball
provides their strongest emotional tie to higher
education. George W Bush, it will be remembered,
made his modest fortune buying the Texas Rangers
baseball team. No worse mental preparation for the
real world can be devised than team sports, which
proceed from fixed rules.
It is a bit
unfair to single out Tom Wolfe for the literary
crime of wandering into a tragic genre and turning
it into a sports story. American tragedy, I
observed in the past, is an oxymoron, because
America is the land of perpetual new beginnings
(George W Bush, tragic
character, November 25, 2003).
Americans simply do not brook tragic endings. They
ignore the menacing omens of the first act, and
pull up stakes during the second act, so that the
third act never arrives. Trivial crimes masquerade
as tragedy in US literature, for example the
ambitious young man's murder of his pregnant
mistress in pursuit of a wealthy bride, or Jay
Gatsby's confusion of love with social status.
Eugene O'Neill's attempt to transplant the
Oresteia into America's tragedy of real life, the
Civil War of 1861-65, became merely grotesque; his
essay into domestic tragedy, "Long Day's Journey
into Night", actually has the structure of a
situation comedy.
A people with no tragedy
of its own never will understand the tragic
destiny of other peoples. That is what makes
America both so powerful and so prone to failure.
I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom
Wolfe. Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York,
2004. ISBN 0374281580, 676 pages, US$28.95.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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