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TW3 Contents
Review It!
Daily Curmudgeon
New Voices
Virtual Ink
Reel Politik
Off The Rack
Virtual Light
The Bookstall
S E A R C H
L I T S P A C E
REEL POLITIK
Contrary Commentary
by James Reel
A Community Of Dreamers
THE AMERICAN DREAM CAUSES US much tossing and turning, for we are by nature
a restless people, and our dream suffuses our waking hours even more than
our sleep. For about a century, Americans have conjured a cultural vision
based on conflicting notions of egalitarianism and material prosperity.
Egalitarianism, because democracy implies community rather than hierarchy,
and universal opportunity for personal success. Materialism, because our
economically stable, ostensibly egalitarian society measures success that
way.
Yet there is more to our dream. Within this grand vision of a common life
lurks a peculiarly American preoccupation with the individual mind and heart. It's a question of uniqueness within community -- how can we fit together while setting ourselves apart from one another? Therein lies the dream's
inherent tension.
Two fairly current books, when read in tandem, provide a masterly analysis
of our cultural ideal and its individual realizations. Each pursues one of
the opposing forces in the American Dream to its logical extreme.
The more recent treatment of this subject is the 1996 novel Martin
Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, winner
of this year's Pulitzer Prize. It begins as a Horatio Alger story: boy of
humble means makes a name for himself through wit, strength of character and
some luck. But by the end it seems to have been hijacked by Jorge Luis
Borges; as Martin Dressler's dream expands, it can be conveyed only through
fantasy and symbolism.
The tale begins in the 1880s. Martin is a child working in his father's
modest Manhattan cigar store. As time passes, Martin finds lowly work in a
fine hotel, moves up through the ranks and learns the business, saves his
money and gradually builds a chain of restaurants, and finally is able to
buy a hotel of his own, a microcosm of the world.
But Martin is restive
within the limits of a traditional hotel. He builds bigger and more complex
edifices, culminating in the high, wide and deep Grand Cosmo, which
integrates living quarters with shops, theaters, amusements, freak shows,
wonders and elaborate indoor re-creations of natural settings. It is the
whole world in a single city block. One can't help thinking of the latest
synthetic pleasure palaces erected in Las Vegas, but Millhauser is writing
less about today's America than the genesis of today's America.
The second book under consideration is This Boy's Life, a 1989 memoir
by Tobias Wolff. With the unity, detail and grace of a novel, it recounts
the second decade of Wolff's life, in the late 1950s and early '60s. He
dreams of living in a more stable, affluent household and schemes to create
a bigger, more complex Self, integrating a respectable way of life with a
dynamic personality. But Jack, as this boy insists on being called, fears
that he is unworthy of success, for he is a liar, a vandal and a petty thief
contending with a loving but unconventional mother and a self-absorbed,
intermittently violent step-father.
Both Martin and Jack are first-class American dreamers, but Martin dreams
himself into a world of parable, while Jack dreams himself out of hard
reality. Martin is optimism; Jack is, if not pessimism, at least self-doubt.
Martin devises building projects of such magnitude that they border on tools
of social engineering. Jack's reveries are entirely personal -- being adopted
by strangers he sees on the street, or running into his estranged, distant-
dwelling father. He indulges any fantasy that would offer him better
circumstances in which to be a better person:
I was a liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn't help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade.
While Martin strives to reproduce the world in perfect miniature, Jack
strives to produce a perfect little self, a combination of privileged
lineage and good character traits that would lift him out of his squalid,
mean, lower-middle-class circumstances. But the ideal Jack is a creature
solely of the imagination; Martin feels confident that he can shape at least
a small bit of the world, but Jack finds himself constricted by the world
around him:
Unlike my mother I was fiercely conventional. I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house, and having a big brother and a couple of sisters....And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that...away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be that boy.
Both characters learn that, if the customer is not always right, at least
the customer is easily manipulated. Martin Dressler quickly grasps the value
of advertising and marketing, with help from a marketing genius named
Harwinton. Martin insists that every venture combine convenience, comforting
familiarity and exciting innovation in a balance that will intrigue rather
than overwhelm the customer. (His downfall is forgetting the part about not
overwhelming people.) Jack Wolff learns how to adopt a persona for every
occasion, an approach that will get him through encounters with tough kids,
kind teachers, do-gooders and ill-wishers. In lieu of finding anything
interesting to say about his true self, he learns the value of a well-crafted lie, going so far as to plagiarize his first confession.Martin is diligent; Jack is negligent. But something about both boys -- their
looks? their manner? -- attracts people who can help them. Martin realizes
this vaguely but never analyzes it; Jack fails to recognize this at all,
being certain instead that intelligent or sensitive people will instantly
perceive his fraudulent nature.Still, Jack aspires to be -- or at least to appear to be -- the ultimate
homo sapiens, the thinking man, the man of wisdom, someone respected
for the intangibles of mind and character. Martin, on the other hand, is the
classic homo faber, the man who builds, someone whose sense of worth
lies in his tangible accomplishments. Neither is firmly grounded in reality.
Images of sleep and dreaming permeate both books.In Martin Dressler, New York City is described as "a fever patient
in a hospital, thrashing in its sleep, erupting in modern dreams." Martin's
success hinges on the breadth of his imagination: "It seemed to Martin that
if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater,
something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile." And
toward the end, he begins to wonder if he "dreamed the wrong dream."In This Boy's Life, the dream images are more subtle: "Most
afternoons I wandered around in the trance that habitual solitude induces."
This is when Jack imagines better parents -- strangers -- snatching him away.And yet what ultimately saves both Martin and Jack is an awakening to
reality. Reflecting on the imminent failure of his magnum opus, the Grand
Cosmo, and why he so deeply cares about it, Martin contrasts himself with
the advertising whiz Harwinton:
As an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was God.... But of course God could not believe in the Grand Cosmo, just as He could not believe in the universe, a blankness without meaning, except as it streamed from Him. For only human creatures believed in things: that much was clear.
Then there is Jack, unmoved by a priest's attempt to talk some sense into
him: "He believed in God, and I believed in the world." Accepting the world,
just as it is, turns out to be the most courageous act. For although it
teaches us that the grander notions bound up with the American Dream are
impossible, perhaps undesirable, to realize, it gives us a firm platform on
which we may, ever so tentatively, remake ourselves.Martin's version of the American Dream -- to co-opt, to synthesize the whole
world into a compact, controlled "Grand Cosmo" -- must fail, because however
morbidly fascinating and excessive the dream may be, people will ultimately
sense its synthetic nature and reject it. Even Martin Dressler acquiesces to
its failure, and reconciles himself to the real world.Young Jack Wolff's version of the American Dream will succeed only when he
learns to reconcile individuality with social exigency. After trying to
create himself from scratch to escape an unpleasant situation, he realizes
much later that such situations are only transitory:
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
Such knowledge comes to us slowly, individually, through diverse momentary
setbacks and petty victories. This is the knowledge that enables 260 million
sometime dreamers to coexist as a practical community of Americans.
Titles discussed in Reel Politik
may be purchased at a discount from The Bookstall.
Reel's Archive
Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading
Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book
Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience
Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure
Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers
Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile
Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness
Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!
Reel Politik 9: The Argument
Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community
Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors
James Reel is the arts and entertainment editor of
The Arizona Daily Star, a contributor to Fanfare,
and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.
A Not Entirely Disinterested Service of
Bancroft & Associates: Digital Publishers.
