El diálogo socrático: una reinterpretación

From Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction XXIII, no. 2, (Winter 1981-82) © 1981 by Heldref Publications.

John Z. Guzlowski 32

and Todd Andrews in Barth’s The Floating Opera parodies the concept of the sea change.

Allert, the protagonist-narrator of Death, Sleep & the Traveler, dreads both the sea that he sails on and the inner sea of the unconscious. The two are, in his eyes, one. Offering his reaction to the sea at the end of the voyage with which a good part of the novel is occupied, Allert writes, “I plan never again to look at the rough sea though I am filled with it, like a sewn-up skin with salt.”³Peter, Allert’s psychiatrist and friend, further clarifies the analogy by describing a treatment he observed for curing the insane. Under the supervision of the staff of an asylum, a patient was subjected to a series of induced comas, each of which drove him deeper into himself. As Peter states,

The patient was traveling inside himself and in a kind of sexual agony was sinking into the depths of psychic darkness, drowning into the sea of the self, submerging into the long slow chaos of the dreamer on the edge of extinction. The closer such a patient came to death the greater his cure. The whiter and wetter he became in his grave of rubber sheets ... and the deeper his breathing, the slower his pulse, the more he felt himself consumed as in liquid lead, the greater the agony with which he approached oblivion, then the greater and more profound and more joyous his recovery, his rebirth. (143)

Such death, such sleep, and such travel, however, are not for Allert. He reacts to Peter’s description first with silence and then with the statement, “There are certain days when I do not enjoy your company” (144). Allert obviously wants no sea changes.

He responds as he does because he fears both literal drowning and the metaphorical drowning Peter speaks of. Writing of the cruise he took on a pleasure ship, Allert repeatedly reflects on and displays his fear of the sea upon which he once sailed. Identifying himself with the ocean liner, he writes of the terror he experienced as he imagined a “torpedo speeding through the, black night” toward the vulnerable ship (7–8), a torpedo which threatened to force him into the sea. Later, after diving to the bottom of the ship’s pool, he tried to remain there as long as possible to propitiate “the god of all those in fear of drowning at sea.”⁴

What he fears in the actual sea is what he fears within himself: the puzzling, killing creatures of his heart of darkness, and the equally frightening prospect that these creatures do not exist.⁵ While aboard the ship, he felt threatened by “the rising and diving monsters of the deep” (28).

No More Sea Changes: Hawkes, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barth ³³

These find their counterpart in his inner depths. He feels that a “man-sized bat-like shadow” crouches there, ready to attack. Both seas, he believes, also conceal death. Beneath the surface of the sea lie the “bones and shells of the earth’s cemetery” (159); beneath the surface of his external self lie “dark and spongy land mines” (72). His fear of what awaits him beneath both surfaces is compounded by his inability to understand the things that exist beneath these surfaces. As he states, he dreads the “incomprehensible” quality of the deep (7) and the “inexplicable” quality of his inner sea (90). Finally, Allert fears that despite his fears nothing exists beneath either the surface of the sea or the surface of his personality. Once, when the ship stopped moving, the calmness of the sea, with its suggestion that there was “nothing” under its waves, caused in him a fear he “had never known” (7). That fear reappears later in his dream of the tent of “dry and hairless animal skins,” a dream of his inner self. Within the tent of skins, beneath their surface, he finds only

“desolation” and “nothing at all” (74).

Faced with the inexplicable, with death, and with the possibility that what he fears does not exist within him, Allert seeks sanctuary on the surface of his self. He turns away from his inner sea, his inner self, and fabricates a mask, the crafting of which shields him from a confrontation with his

“psychic sores” and transforms the “surface of the bright ocean” within him into an opaque “sea of lead” (164). The mask he crafts is that of an unexceptional, candid man in love with his inner self who is simultaneously exceptional, deceptive, and separated from his inner sea. The tensions inherent in such a paradoxical facade create a “dead surface” (124) that cannot be pierced to discover the reality beneath that surface. Crafting his mask, Allert hopes to prevent himself from drowning in his inner sea.

A small but significant detail in Allert’s narrative serves as a clue to his method of self-masking. His initial description, occurring on the first page of his wife’s appearance as she leaves him does not coincide with his second description, occurring at the end, of her appearance in the same scene. While in the first he says she is wearing a “gray suit,” a “silk dress,” and a “black blouse” and is carrying a “straw suitcase in either hand” (1), in the second he notes that she is wearing “white slacks” and a “red knitted top” and is carrying a small suitcase of lambskin and a handbag.⁶ These conflicting descriptions of surfaces, like the contradictory aspects of Allert’s mask, create a third surface, an impregnable surface which foils any attempt to discover the truth beneath it.

Displaying this method of self-masking, of surfacing, Allert boasts of his unexceptionalness: “During all this time” (the eight or nine years covered in his narrative) “I have thought of myself as moderate, slow-paced, sensible,

John Z. Guzlowski 34

overly large, aging. But ordinary, always ordinary” (135). Against this aspect of his mask, he juxtaposes, with apparent eagerness, repeated references to his extraordinary sexual proclivities. He tells the reader and reveals to other characters that he collects pornographic pictures, practices voyeurism, participates in a menage a trois with his wife and his friend Peter, and has a kinky shipboard romance with a young girl, whom he may or may not have killed at the end of his voyage. The other aspects of his mask—his candor and his deceptiveness, his love of psychic slime and his fear of it—are developed in the same way and serve the same purpose. The tensions between these contradictory elements of his mask are ultimately irreconcilable. Existing side by side, they create a “dead surface” for Allert’s others, his reader, and himself, a surface which Allert hopes can never be pierced. Crafting a mask and concerning himself with its surface, Allert hopes to escape a confrontation with the inner depths, the inner sea he dreads.

The sea as an emblem of the unconscious is also central to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. As its narrator suggests, the novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, like Allert, senses that the ocean possesses “something tidal” and

“primal” that corresponds to something deep within man.⁷The ocean sends

“feelers past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding” (37). Again like Allert, Oedipa fears the sea without and the sea within. She continually, to use the narrator’s phrase, stops short of the physical sea, the Pacific, and the psychic sea, the deep “sink” of primal, “redemptive” emotions within man (122, 37). She cuts herself off from her inner sea of emotions and from those persons who could cause her to respond emotionally.

Oedipa’s estrangement from her inner sea and from others and her desire to further the estrangement are forcefully rendered in a key scene in which she meets the pathetic sailor. Searching for clues in San Francisco to the Trystero conspiracy, she comes upon an old, broken and forlorn salt, “huddled, shaking with grief” (92) and delirium tremens in a doorway. Gripped by the poignancy of his condition, she responds initially with her emotional inner sea:

“Overcome all at once by a need to touch him” (93), she comforts him in her arms and feels his tears against her breast as he begins to cry. After she takes his hand in hers and helps him to his room, however, she becomes so “lost in the fantasy” of helping him—of buying him a new suit, of complaining to the landlord about the condition of the room the sailor lives in (94)—that she neither feels his hand withdrawing from hers nor hears his cries turn to sighs.

Shortly, deciding that “nothing she knew of would preserve ... him” (96), she leaves the sailor—and the inner emotional seas he might have guided her to—

and continues on her quest for the meaning of the Trystero.

No More Sea Changes: Hawkes, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barth ³⁵

Oedipa’s failure to respond to the cries of the sailor and others in the novel arises from her alienation from and fear of her inner life, the depths of the primal sea within her. Such cries demand that she go into herself, the narrator states, “further down perhaps than she could reach” (3). Faced with such demands, she reacts with “near panic,” with the feeling that she is

“about to lose control” (4). Oedipa avoids such panic and retains control by creating a seawall between her self and her private experience and a corresponding “buffer” (6) between herself and others. Her tendency is suggested in the scene in which she plays Strip Botticelli with Metzger the lawyer. While they watch a confusing movie which—significantly—describes the drowning of the crew of a submerged submarine, Oedipa agrees to remove a piece of clothing for each wrong guess she makes about the film.

Although she repeatedly guesses incorrectly, “the progressive removal of her clothing” brings her “no nearer nudity” (26). Her body remains unrevealed and unrevealable because, in preparation for the game, she dressed in multiple layers of panties, nylons, slacks, blouses, and other garments.

This tactic, like Allert’s self-masking, is symptomatic of Oedipa’s response to situations that might require her to reveal herself to others or reveal her inner sea to herself. Her reaction to the pathetic sailor, cloaking him in a fantasy and thus separating herself from him and from any further emotional response to him, is only one instance of this tendency. A more pervasive example is Oedipa’s obsessive commitment to the quest for the Trystero: a mysterious, underground organization, which may or may not exist, dedicated to “serving as a channel of communication” (80) for the disinherited and the isolated. First coming upon hints of its existence in her role as the executor of Pierce Inverarity’s will, she uses the conspiracy as a buffer between herself and others, and between herself and the depths of her private experience. When she stops in her quest for Trystero to reflect on the men who have had the most intimate contact with her and who now are separated from her, she does not view their loss from the perspective of her emotional inner sea but rather from the perspective of her obsession with the Trystero. She feels that the conspiracy is somehow responsible for her husband’s addiction to LSD, her psychiatrist’s madness, and Metzger’s relationship with a depraved young girl. Likewise, the suicide of Dribblet, her “best guide to the Trystero” (114), briefly penetrates “to the sanctuary of her heart” but then becomes lost in the quagmire of her speculations concerning the conspiracy. She prays to his corpse to release its memories so that she will know if his suicide “had anything to do with Tristero” (121).

At the end of the novel, standing between two steel rails on a track bed miles from the sea, Oedipa has a vision of the meaning of the Trystero, a

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vision of communication, of people responding to people. The tracks she stands on, she imagines, lead to other tracks, whole webs of tracks, which lead to “squatters” who are “in touch with others, through the Tristero.”

Along these same rails are linemen’s tents in which “nameless” people, using the linemen’s equipment, live in “the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication” (135). The vision, although attractive to her, is ironic.

Oedipa has used the Trystero not as a means of achieving communication with others and with herself, but rather as a way of forestalling communication. She has allowed herself to “plunge” through the complexities of a conspiracy layered as dense as her “own streetclothes in that game with Metzger” (36) in order to avoid a similar plunge through the layers of seawalls and buffers which shield her from her inner sea and from others. The cry she hears at the end of the novel, therefore, is not “the cry that might abolish the night” (87); it is neither her own inner cry nor that of someone like the sailor, a cry that might open a bridge to her inner sea.

Instead, the cry she hears at the end is merely an auctioneer’s announcement that Lot 49, one of Inverarity’s stamp collections and a further clue to the Trystero, is to be auctioned. At the end, Oedipa is sill landlocked, still deaf to those other cries, still constructing layers between herself and others, still constructing seawalls between herself and her inner sea.

While Allert and Oedipa fear the sea and what the sea emblematizes, Wyatt Gwyon in Gaddis’ The Recognitions seeks the inner sea but cannot discover it. Speaking of the sea upon which Wyatt once sails, the narrator suggests its meaning for Wyatt: “Boundlessly neither yes or no, good nor evil, hope nor fear, pretending to all these things in the eyes that first beheld it, but unchanged since then, still its own color, heaving with the indifferent hunger of all actuality.”⁸“Whole,” undifferentiated, and flowing, the sea in Gaddis’ novel is an emblem for unconscious reality, the reality that exists beneath all surfaces, the surfaces of the actual world and the surfaces of the individual. Gaddis argues in his novel that man is isolated from unconscious reality. For man, unconsciousness and consciousness are discrete realms.

The nature of such discreteness and the attempt to overcome it are fleshed out in those sections of the novel dealing with Wyatt. As a boy, he suffered an intense fever in which he glimpsed the fundamental nature of this fragmentation. Everything, he sensed, is divided into two distinct realms: a surface called consciousness, and a subsurface, sea-like one called unconsciousness. As the narrator states, consciousness is “a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life.” Normally, man lives in consciousness, lives on the surface. He sees everything, including his own being, as being composed of

No More Sea Changes: Hawkes, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barth ³⁷

discrete particles, and he is completely unaware of the single sea-like “deeper flow” that undulates beneath the surface reality of the universe, nature, society, and the self. During his fever, however, Wyatt’s repeated faintings plunged him into this flow where nothing is separate. He experienced it both within his being and within reality. Inside of him, “Deliria embraced in his memory, and refused to discriminate from one another, from what had happened and what might have happened” (58). Outside of him, he saw “the throbbing flow of night,” a landscape of “intimacy” in which “particles” were not “separated into tangible identities” (60–61). Although his fever abated, Wyatt’s memory of the undifferentiated states of unconscious existence never faded. His life becomes a search for such moments of ontological and epistemological recognition. He seeks to re-experience the flowing inner sea that lies both beneath his surface and the surfaces in the world outside him.

Wyatt turns to art as a means of recapturing this recognition. He feels that painting provides him with the means of approaching the state of recognition he seeks. After viewing a work of art (significantly Picasso’s Night Fishing in Antibes), he tells his wife, Esther, that a great painting allows one to achieve moments of “near-recognition of reality” in which “all of a sudden everything is freed into one recognition,” freed into a bunion of all things that, living in consciousness, normally “we never see” (102). Such moments in which the unconscious is revealed are, however, brief and infrequent. If one looks at a painting for too long, Wyatt adds, it becomes “familiar,” and then, instead of experiencing a recognition, the viewer sees merely the painting. Furthermore, these recognitions are rare; Wyatt believes they occur “Maybe seven times in a life” (102). Finally, such recognitions are somehow incomplete. They are, as Wyatt says, near-recognitions, and, although he does not explain to Esther what he means, the implication is clear. Art allows one, to use a word Wyatt uses throughout the discussion, to

“see” everything as non-discrete, to “see” the unconscious sea beneath surfaces, but art does not allow the viewer to plunge into non-discreteness, to plunge into the unconscious flow. In his best moments, man can approach a state of recognition, but he cannot fully enter it. To some degree, he is always cut off from the sea within himself and the flowing reality beneath the surfaces of the external world.

In part, the novel chronicles Wyatt’s efforts to achieve recognition, to see not only the unconscious flow in the art of another but to plunge into this flow. As a painter himself, he tries a number of strategies for uncovering and entering unconsciousness. While still a child, he starts several original drawings but never completes them.⁹Unfinished, they are vague: forms are only half-seen, unfixed: “The original works left off at the moment where the

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pattern is conceived but not executed, the forms known to the author but their place daunted; still unfound in the dignity, of the design” (60). The narrator also stresses the flowing quality of Wyatt’s unfinished portrait of his mother: it leaves “its lines of completion to the eye of the beholder” (64).

Describing the reaction of Wyatt’s father to this work, the narrator states,

“Once he’d seen it he was constantly curious, and would stand looking away from it, and back completing it in his mind and then looking again as though, in the momentary absence of his stare and the force of his own plastic imagination, it might have completed itself. Still each time he returned to it, it was slightly different than he remembered intractably thwarting the

“Once he’d seen it he was constantly curious, and would stand looking away from it, and back completing it in his mind and then looking again as though, in the momentary absence of his stare and the force of his own plastic imagination, it might have completed itself. Still each time he returned to it, it was slightly different than he remembered intractably thwarting the