Paul Auster’s Leviathan begins with the making of history and the unmaking of a body: “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off” (1). In Leviathan history forecloses futurity, which the narrative represents in its ending, extending the past into the future that consists of the reader’s present. Leviathan’s narrator, author Peter Aaron, writes the novel’s opening on July 4, 1990 after reading the news of the roadside explosion, for he immediately thought of his friend and fellow writer, Benjamin Sachs, whom he hadn’t seen since June of 1989 (3). Both men met “as
chance would have it” in or around 1975 (11).6 The novel portrays Benjamin Sachs as
embodying the American century, from the beginning of the nuclear age to the Cold War’s end. Sachs was born on August 6, 1945 and refers to himself as “America’s first Hiroshima baby,” “the original bomb child,” “the first white man to draw breath in the nuclear age,” even going so far as to “claim that the doctor had delivered him at the precise moment Fat Man was released from the bowels of the Enola Gay” (25). Aaron informs the reader: “in fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore” (15). Sachs, as the embodiment of American Cold War history, wanes in the post-Vietnam period, and after the Cold War’s end, unable to imagine a future without the Cold War, destroys himself by accident with a bomb of his own design.
Aaron believes that Sachs’s accidentally blowing himself up is related to his perception of the threat of thermonuclear war: “Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there’s a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond control” (27). The pun, the mixed up word that means by accident, is that Sachs managed to survive the Cold War but died by his own bomb.7 As the embodiment of the American
century, Sachs, without any enemies beyond the state, turns on himself, just as the culture wars presented an insular fragmentation in the years following the end of the Cold War. Sachs interprets reality as if it were authored (49), knowingly reading the world in this way:
Sachs loved these ironies, the vast follies and contradictions of history, the way in which facts were constantly turning themselves on their head. By gorging himself on those facts, he was able to read the world as though it were a work of the imagination, turning
documented events into literary symbols, tropes that pointed to some dark, complex pattern embedded in the real. (27)
For Sachs, a paranoid reading of history provides one with the ability to read his own birth in this very manner. Sachs believes that “once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death” (27). For Sachs the mere existence of the bomb taints the present, turning it and the future into foregone extinction for humankind.
The narrative of Leviathan hinges on the accident that radically alters Ben Sachs, and the accident itself can be understood through reading the political moment in which it occurs. “The era of Ronald Reagan began,” opens the chapter in which Sachs suffers his accidental fall from a fourth floor fire escape. “By pure chance” he falls on “July 4, 1986, the one hundredth
anniversary of the statue of liberty” (120). Aaron notes the effect that Reagan’s presidency had on Sachs: “Almost imperceptibly, Sachs came to be seen as a throwback, as someone out of step with the spirit of the time. The world had changed around him, and in the present climate of selfishness and intolerance, of moronic, chest-pounding Americanism, his opinions sounded curiously harsh and moralistic” (116). Sachs holds fast to the ideals of the 1960s while around him liberalism wanes, appearing to have no future. Aaron continues, “It was bad enough that the Right was everywhere in the ascendant, but even more disturbing to him was the collapse of any effective opposition to it. The Democratic Party had caved in; the Left had all but disappeared; the press was mute” (116-117). The fall of liberalism to Reaganism precedes Sachs’s own fall. A tepid political present forecloses any hopes for liberalism in the future, for progress, and it seems that only radicalism remains. Benjamin Sachs, in one breath, understands his fall from a fire escape as an accident, and in the next demands that he was, at least initially, in control—that he
merely failed in a suicide attempt. For Sachs, the experience of the accident correlates with history having no end, which, however skewed, in his perception means that the future is comprised of a series of accidents.
Of the accident, Aaron says that a woman named Agnes Darwin tripped into Maria Turner, who in turn fell into Sachs who was sitting on the edge of the fire escape’s rail. Agnes Darwin, meaning “holy Darwin,” plays on the idea that this was a mistake, the culmination of a series of random events, rather than the design of a divine hand. Auster here reminds the reader that while in life there is no divine author, the author always serves as God in the novel. Aaron continues: “There is no question that Sachs could have been killed. Given that he was four stories off the ground, it seems almost a miracle that he wasn’t.” (119). Sachs plummets but is saved through narrative machination passing as chance. First he lands on a clothesline, which snaps, but “bathmats, blankets, and towels” cushion Sachs’s landing (119). While pathetic, there is little improbable about a clothesline breaking his fall. And though Sachs’s body recovers from the fall, his psyche does not: “he was never the same after that. In those few seconds before he hit the ground, it was as if Sachs lost everything. His entire life flew apart in midair, and from that moment until his death four years later, he never put it back together again” (120). Here Sachs loses the language to describe the accident, his history, and his future. And with language lost, Sachs retreats into solitude and emerges as a man who makes history, a domestic terrorist. The accident reveals something hidden about Sachs, and discovering what was revealed about Sachs is “the thing” that Aaron, in writing Leviathan, struggles “to come to terms with, the mystery [he’s] still trying to solve” (118-119, 120). While Aaron can trace Sachs’s decline to the decline of liberal politics, his disdain for Reaganism, he cannot understand why Sachs
the Reagan era emerges as the mystery at the heart of Leviathan. The novel, in attempting to imagine the future of the United States after the Cold War and its state as the supreme political and military force in the world, fixates upon a fear of a future of relentless conservatism.
While Sachs may rage against the machine, his lifestyle has become that of the yuppie. Aaron, and the rest of the characters in Leviathan, whether they like it or not, have benefited from Reagan’s presidency, which is why Sachs cannot understand his fall as an accident. Sachs confesses to Aaron that he was on the fire escape because he wanted Maria Turner to touch him. However, Sachs had sworn to himself and his wife that he would no longer commit infidelities. Since he couldn’t bring himself to touch Maria’s leg, he decided that he would let her pursue him. Sachs interprets his accident as deliberate self-punishment for not taking matters into his own hands and actively pursuing Maria. Upon hearing this, Aaron asks, “Are you telling me you jumped?” Ben responds: “No, nothing as simple as that. I ran a stupid risk, that’s all. I did something unforgivable because I was too ashamed to admit to myself that I wanted to touch Maria Turner’s leg” (128-129). Aaron does not understand why Sachs fixates upon his
interaction with Maria, but understands that “In Sachs’s mind [. . .] there was a direct connection. The one thing had caused the other, which meant that he didn’t see the fall as an accident or a piece of bad luck so much as some grotesque form of punishment” (131).
Yet, this grotesque form of punishment quickly shifts in Sachs’s perception to a
deliberate attempt at suicide: “I had put myself in a position to fall, I realized, and I had done it on purpose. That was my discovery, the unassaiblable conclusion that rose up out of my silence. I learned that I didn’t want to live. For reasons that are still impenetrable to me, I climbed onto the railing that night in order to kill myself” (135). Sachs rewrites the accident so as to assert control over his life, over history. Catching the change in Sachs’s account of his fall, Aaron
points out that “You told me you fell because you were too afraid to touch Maria’s leg. Now you change your story and tell me that you fell on purpose. You can’t have it both ways. It’s got to be one or the other” (135-136). First Sachs falls by accident, and then falls because he
unconsciously punishes himself for desiring Maria Turner, and finally he falls because he chooses to kill himself. Sachs’s narrative reconstruction of the event changes each time so as to provide him with more control, moving from a totally passive to totally active state over the course of his story. He thus erases the accident and replaces it with intention.8
Sachs refuses to accept that he could not simultaneously have fallen accidentally, unconsciously, and consciously. He tells Aaron, “It’s both. The one thing led to the other, and they can’t be separated. I’m not saying I understand it, I’m just telling you how it was, what I know to be true. I was ready to do away with myself that night. I can still feel it in my gut, and it scares the hell out of me to walk around with that feeling” (136). This logic of having it both ways permeated American culture during Reagan’s Presidency, most famously in Reagan’s deployment of language in response to the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan first claimed on November 13, 1986: “Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands. [. . .] we did not, repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we” (Reagan). On March 4, 1987 Reagan said, “a few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it’s not” (Reagan). Clearly, Reagan, like Sachs, wants it both ways. His heart and “best intentions,” like Sachs’s “gut [. . .] feeling,” somehow balance against evidence, the truth. Sachs has become a man of his time, his reasoning the same as the neoconservative politics he so reviles.
Unable to continue living the bourgeois yuppie life, Sachs retreats from his marriage, his friends, New York City, like his hero Thoreau, into the woods, and there tries to live the politics that he promotes. However, this retreat is not enough. That Sachs finds some kind of peace in moving from a literary-political project to acts of political terrorism in the final years of the Cold War and beyond reveals the kind of future that Leviathan imagines for the United States.
Without a foreign threat Sachs falls apart, becomes a domestic terrorist. Likewise, the
international problems of the United States wane, and what follows is a turn inward, an uneasy sense of peace that stirs unrest within the nation.9 The inability to imagine the future—any future—culminates in the novel’s final paragraph when Harris, an FBI agent arrives and asks about Sachs. At this final moment the narrative breaks from its chronotope, which throughout the novel has been one of Aaron’s first person present account of his friendship with Ben Sachs: “Then I pointed to the studio, and without saying another word I led Harris across the yard in the hot afternoon sun. We walked up the stairs together, and once we were inside, I handed him the pages of this book” (275). Obviously, it is impossible for Aaron to have handed Harris the literal pages of Leviathan; he could not have written its final sentences had he done so. But, unlike Sachs, we can interpret this event both ways. Leviathan’s narrative resists staying true to its word, insisting to the reader that the book just finished is the book that Harris was handed. The future is paradoxically left both open and foreclosed. The words of Leviathan are always the same, yet insist that they can be changed, that accident can alter teleology, open the future, even if only to deny the transmission of its own historical narrative. While the formal features of
Leviathan insist that the text is at once both opened and closed, The Virgin Suicides, through its