SOURCE: Carson, Barbara Harrell. “‘Endlessly Branching and Dividing’: Anne Tyler's Dynamic Causality.” Soundings 85, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 2002): 301-21.

Anne Tyler's fifteen novels distinguish themselves from the usual run of novels of manners and social comedy with which they are sometimes associated, by asking life's really big questions:¹ What is the nature of time? What characterizes a good life? Where do we turn for meaning when our foundations collapse? Is reality external or internal? How do we locate—and live—our authentic identity? Perhaps the biggest question of all in Tyler's novels is the question of whether human behavior is fated or free. Her works dramatize the consequences of living with this mystery, showing how it feels to think you're “something dragged on a string behind a forgetful child” (as Charlotte Emory does in Earthly Possessions [114]) or to believe, as Morgan Gower seems to in Morgan's Passing, that free will is so total that you can even choose who you want to be, whenever you want to. Tyler knows, of course, that merely asking a question—even if it is one as old as human history—doesn't mean that the universe will provide an answer. What her novels seem confident of, though, is that the answers that have been supplied by traditional Western philosophy to questions about the existence of free will just don't work. Tyler's fiction suggests that those answers are untrue not only to human experience, but also to the vision of reality that her works offer as an alternative to conventional atomistic Western ontology.

In Western philosophy, three answers are usually given to the question, “Are humans free?” “Yes,” say the libertarians; “No,” say the hard determinists; and, “Sort of,” chime in the soft determinists or compatibilists. As Mark Thornton has explained in Do We Have Free Will?, philosophers consider a person to be possessed of free will if he or she is

autonomous in that he or she has a “will” of his or her own: she wants certain things and makes her own decisions, without being pushed into them by outside pressures and forces [and if he or she] has genuine alternatives. … If we have free will then we do not have to decide one way rather than another.

(1)

However, given the apparently incontrovertible controls our environment exercises over us—genetic determinism, programming by the past and by our unconscious, the power of compulsion, manipulation, and apparently irresistible desires, not to mention the role of pure chance—given all this, determinists assert, the idea of human freedom becomes tough to defend.² As the most famous proponent of this school, B. F. Skinner, declares through a character in the determinist manifesto Walden Two, “Linguistically or logically there seem to be two possibilities, but I submit that there's only one in fact” (qtd. in Thornton 2).

Soft determinism or compatibilism attempts to navigate between the logical difficulties of libertarianism and the troubling implications of determinism. Here we find Spinoza's and Kant's freedom through understanding what controls us (Thornton 13; Easterbrook xi); Hobbes's, Locke's, and Hume's belief that, in Hobbes's terms, we're “free to do if [we] will,” but not “free to will” (Thornton 15); Nietzsche's version of freedom as “loving fate” (May 270); William James's, in the individual's giving “consents” or “non-consents” to the way things are (May 271-72). In effect, compatibilism is determinism once removed, compulsion softened, typically, by offering the possibility of understanding our absence of choices in the place of genuine alternatives.

All in all, the philosophical alternatives are neatly delineated. However, critics who have struggled to pinpoint Anne Tyler's position on the subject that is so central to her thematic concerns have, almost universally, found that her views just won't fit comfortably into the philosophers' categories. Even Mary J. Elkins, who labels Tyler's world “deterministic,” concedes that none of her characters “passively accepts his or her fate” (124). Most readers avoid definitive labels for Tyler, emphasizing instead, as Gordon O. Taylor does, Tyler's ambiguous “interplay” of “powerful determinations—and liberations—of ‘character’” (66).³

As a consequence of this ambiguity, we are left with an uneasy feeling by virtually all Tyler's works. Readers often close a Tyler novel troubled by the resolution, unsure of how to judge the protagonist's final situation, and, most especially, confused about whether the concluding situation should be viewed as a triumph or a defeat: Does Elizabeth (in The Clock Winder) really act autonomously when she marries Matthew, or is she doomed by family dynamics and her own psyche to join the Emersons? Are the career paths taken by Cody and Jenny and Ezra (in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant) choices or patterns of behavior programmed by the emotional damage wreaked by their parents? When Justine and Duncan (in Searching for Caleb) sell the remnants of Peck family furniture and take to the carnival circuit, are they defying or succumbing to family fate?

Every Tyler novel raises similar puzzles, presenting convincing cases for either side of the argument. For some readers, the ambiguity is troubling enough to warrant the charge that, lacking thematic unity, Tyler's works are gravely flawed. I'd like to suggest instead that our very tendency to assign Tyler to the camp of either the philosophical libertarians or the determinists (and their fellow-travelers, the compatibilists) is the flaw. Considered together, Tyler's novels can be seen as an inter-textual exploration of the age-old metaphysical question. However, the answers dramatized in her fiction suggest that the familiar philosophical alternatives are inadequate to describe how humans come to be what they are and to act as they do.

In Tyler's novels, questions concerning free will usually examine the ability of her characters to change their life paths as a consequence of individual choice, independent of external compulsion. During an interview in 1972, Tyler revealed her awareness of the centrality of this theme in her writing. Some tricky footwork in her comments hints of the complexity that, in works yet to come, would increasingly characterize her fictional responses to the question of human freedom. “I think something that tends to come out in all my books is an utter lack of faith in change,” she declared. “I really don't think most people are capable of it, although they think they are. One reason I like A Slipping-Down Life [1970] is because it's the one book of mine in which the characters do change” (Ridley 27). Tyler's statement is intriguingly contradictory. Initially locating herself, by implication, with the defenders of determinism (in denying faith in change, Tyler denies faith in the efficacy of will), she then declares her special attachment to a novel affirming the possibility of change (that is, the power of human will to effect that change), even as she professes an “utter lack of faith in change.” The paradox here parallels the tension of novel after novel in which Tyler seems both to affirm and deny the power of the individual will in changing a life.

The Clock Winder (1972), for instance, is another early exploration of the possibility that change can be the consequence of the exercise of will. Elizabeth Abbott's father poses the question when, troubled by his daughter's disengagement from life, he requests that she dress up for a job interview by asking, “[C]ould you change?” Elizabeth's startled response—“Change?”—signals that she hears a much more serious question than her father intended to ask (149).⁴ Twenty-six years later in A Patchwork Planet (1998), it's a question Tyler's characters are still asking. The desire to find out if people can actually change as a consequence of will is what prompted the teenaged Barnaby to steal from his neighbors, not the usual fenceable goods, but personal letters and photo albums. He says that he thought such records might furnish the answer to the question that haunted him: “Did they have to settle for just being who they were forever, from cradle to grave?” (178).

Elizabeth and Barnaby also embody two modern responses to the possibility of free will. In Elizabeth (who has learned, through her involvement in Timothy Emerson's death, what can happen when a person exercises will), we see an anguish like that described by Sartre—the pain of suspecting that we are “condemned to be free” (qtd. in Thornton 20), that we suffer because we are responsible for our decisions. Indeed, Sartre holds that the anguish that accompanies our decisions is what makes us conscious that we are free (Thornton 4). Elizabeth works stolidly for freedom from such freedom. And, paradoxically, her very resistance to exercising will—willing not to will—suggests the possibility of willed choice. Barnaby, on the other hand, reflects the opposite kind of pain, one identified by Rollo May in Love and Will as “the central core of modern man's neurosis”: the fear that “even if he did exert his ‘will’ … his actions wouldn't do any good anyway” (qtd. in Easterbrook 4).

Destined for pain either way, Tyler's characters line up between the poles of these contradictory possibilities, sometimes switching positions in the course of their stories. Such variations cause Tyler's fiction to sound at times like an apologia for philosophical determinism, at other times, like a defense of libertarianism. In Breathing Lessons (1988), for example, Serena Gill speaks from the perspective of determinism, telling Maggie Moran: “You don't have any choice. … That's what it comes down to in the end, willy-nilly …” (83). That old-fashioned expression “Will I, nil I,” meaning “whether I will it or not, [something] will happen anyway,” underscores Serena's position, as does the song she chooses to end her husband's funeral service: “Que Sera, Sera.”

And even Maggie, whose whole adult life seems to reflect an irrepressible Lucy Ricardo-like belief in the efficacy of human will (at least hers),⁵ momentarily entertains a similar idea: “[S]ometimes feeling the glassy sheet of Ira's disapproval, she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what” (48). At this point, Maggie would be perfectly comfortable saying with the soft determinists that we can get what we want; we just can't want what we want. That is, we are free to select among first-order desires, but second-order desires—the desires for those desires—are programmed by forces beyond the reach of will. Then, Maggie ends her musing on the possibility of change sounding like a strict determinist, coming up with her own metaphor from physical science to convey the idea that the human condition is controlled by external forces: “We're all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force” (48).

Like Maggie, Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist (1985) temporarily relapses into determinism, when, flat on his back in Paris near the end of the novel, he reviews his life:

He reflected that he had not taken steps very often in his life, come to think of it. Really never. His marriage, his two jobs, his time with Muriel, his return to Sarah—all seemed to have simply befallen him. He couldn't think of a single major act he had managed of his own accord.

(339)

The usually can-do, take-charge Muriel also speaks at times from the perspective of psychological and social determinism. She declares that “people just get fixed in these certain frames of other people's opinions” (102): Her own life demonstrates that she became the bad daughter in her family in response to her mother's casting her in that role. In Morgan's Passing, Morgan uses a different metaphor to express the idea that, while humans do change, the changes come about because of external forces, not individual will. Speaking to Emily of her husband Leon, Morgan says: “[O]f course he's changed. Everybody does; everyone goes bobbing along, in and out of inlets, snagging on pilings, skating down rapids” (147). Emily and Leon's puppets, always in the background as we read this novel, convey even more chillingly the notion of human passivity in the face of external control.

But if Maggie, Macon, Muriel, and Morgan at times speak as determinists (of one stripe or another), they live as libertarians—Maggie in her constant demonstrations of her belief that merely by the exercise of her will she can improve people's lives; Macon by his conscious choices at the end of The Accidental Tourist to forego the escape from suffering offered by Sarah's pain pill and to leave Sarah for Muriel. Muriel herself proclaims the motto of the libertarian: “I can do anything,” she tells Macon (92), and her life speaks of her ability to triumph over circumstances by the exercise of will. Even more emphatically, Morgan epitomizes radical free will: each morning he chooses the costume appropriate for the character he will not so much play as be that day, constructing his identity now as a cobbler, at another time as a riverboat gambler, yet at another as a doctor (in which role he actually delivers Leon and Emily's baby), until finally he becomes Emily's husband, even assuming the name of “Leon Meredith.”

Of course, such shifts between belief in free will and belief in determinism could merely reflect the characters' different attitudes at different periods in their lives. I'd like to suggest, however, that something else is also going on here. Even though the position is untenable in conventional philosophy, in repeating these alternatives without resolving the tension between them, Tyler is hinting at the simultaneous truth of both fatedness and freedom. This paradoxical stand is underscored in her repeated use of fortune-tellers, who, because of Tyler's idiosyncratic emphasis, embody the apparently contradictory message of the co-existence of free will and determinism. Thus, in Searching for Caleb, Justine's ability to foretell the future reminds us throughout the novel of fate's role in human life, a suggestion that what will be, will be. (If fate is not already established, how could you predict what will happen?) Yet Madame Olita, who teaches Justine to read the cards, declares: “You can change your future a great deal.” Then she adds, even more radically, “Also your past” (135). Later in the same novel, Alonzo, the carnival owner who visits Justine periodically to have his fortune told, demonstrates the coexistence of determinism and free will in his response to the messages from Justine's cards. He almost never follows Justine's advice and, consequently, never claims the future—usually happiness, not money—she predicts if he follows her counsel. However, by choosing the opposite path, Alonzo both eludes his fate and affirms it. Since Justine predicts that not following her advice will deny him potential joy, when Alonzo chooses a different path, and misses out on the pleasure Justine foresees, he demonstrates the accuracy of her prediction—and the efficacy of his will: He has the ability to choose between alternatives.

From a philosophical perspective, Tyler seems to have broken all the rules of Aristotelian non-contradiction by declaring the truth of both X and non-X, of free-will and determinism. Problematic as that is from the perspective of classical logic, it's a contradiction that most of us live with quite comfortably. We readily concede the apparently incontrovertible reality of the control that our environment and our genes exercise over our lives. But, hard as it is to refute the power of these forces, most of us simply refuse to surrender the notion of free will: Determinism strikes us as foreign to the way we actually experience life, untrue to our sense that we do have real options, that we can make decisions, that we are morally responsible for our actions (a position defensible only in the presence of free will). Like us, Tyler's characters manage to hobble along with one foot in the camp of the determinists, and one gingerly placed with the libertarians.

That her works reflect a popular, cavalier disregard for stringent logic is, however, not the only defense of Tyler's evasion of the philosophers' either-or approach to the question of whether our lives move to the rhythm of free will or of fate. Her unwillingness to come down on one side or the other of the question is also, and more importantly, linked to her perception of the essential flaw in that very question. The question itself is illogical, her works imply, because life is not a matter of clearly divided Self and Other, but a system in which these parts unite (our dualistic language forces us to approach the idea only glancingly). How can we ask if A (self) causes A′ (a change in self) or if B (an external force) causes A′, when there is no A or B in isolation? Indeed, Tyler's world posits not just AB, but ABCD … ZA′B′C′D′ … Z′ ad infinitum.

While virtually every Tyler novel dramatizes this complicated world, Searching for Caleb captures this dynamic, non-dualistic relatedness with particular clarity at two telling moments: after Justine's mother's death and, later, just before her daughter's birth. Wandering through the family home after her mother dies, Justine is struck by the absolute falsity of A and B as separate, distinct realities:

Now as she cruised through the darkening house she was aware of how everything here was attached to everything else. There was no such thing as a simple, meaningless teacup, even. It was always given by someone dear, commemorating some happy occasion, chipped during some moment of shock, the roses worn transparent by Sulie's scrubbing, a blond stain inside from tea that Sam Mayhew had once drunk, a crack where Caroline, trembling with a headache, had set it down too hard upon the saucer.

(125)

Later, trying to prepare for all eventualities before Meg is born, Justine returns to the vision of life as a messy, non-linear system, sensing that “merely the fact of having a new person in the world implied a stream of unforeseen events endlessly branching and dividing” (181). The imagery of endless branches implies the complicated, multiple causal links uniting the individual with life. Indeed, Tyler's words evoke the infinite branching of fractiles in chaos theory, itself a reminder of the mysterious dynamic connecting each to all, most famously linking that butterfly in Madagascar to the hurricane in the Atlantic. Justine's meditations on both death and birth present human life as a similarly dynamic system, a system in which no part exists in isolation and no event moves in only one direction.⁶

Toward the end of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), Ezra Tull finds comfort in the thought of such systemic connectedness. He is described in a passage which also complicates our normal view of causation. Helping his nearly blind mother from her chair, Ezra realizes that

they were traversing the curve of the earth, small and steadfast, surrounded by companions: Jenny flying past with her children, the drunks at the stadium sobering the instant their help was needed [when his mother fainted], the baseball players obediently springing upward in the sunlight, and Josiah connected to his unknown gift giver as deeply, and as mysteriously, as Ezra himself was connected to this woman beside him.

(284)

The “obedience” of the baseball players has particular resonance here: In a linear, cause-and-effect system, their leap for the ball would seem anything but externally caused. Yet viewed as part of a system, the flying ball causes the players' action as surely as the force of the bat causes the ball to come hurtling toward them. In this image, life is like an intricate dance or like the flight of birds in a flock or the connection of butterfly and hurricane in chaos theory. In all these, the movement of one part affects the whole, and the consequent movement of all affects the one, and so on, until cause and effect become inextricable.

Another, more familiar passage in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant combines just as nimbly Tyler's sense of the indivisibility of parts in the human system and the idea of the multiple causal layers behind human action. The scene in which Cody wounds his mother while fooling around with the archery set his father bought plays throughout that novel. The more we learn about the various characters' perceptions of the event, the more we are struck by the blurred boundaries between cause and effect. Since few things move more straightforwardly from A to B than the path of an arrow, it might initially seem that here at least the distinction between cause and consequence will be clear. Yet Tyler undercuts this familiar linearity when she explores the actual, experienced path of the arrow shot by fourteen-year-old Cody into his mother's shoulder (or heart, as we're originally told). Pearl first complicates our understanding of causality when she gives her view of the incident: “It was Cody who drew the bowstring, but that was incidental; Cody was not the one she had blamed. … She blamed Beck [her husband] …” (27).

In the system Pearl is talking about, causality is clearly something very un-Newtonian. Science might explain the physical cause and effect here, but causality in the psyche and in the interpersonal world (the world, it might be argued, that we really inhabit) is a different matter altogether. In that system, even though it was clearly Cody who plucked the strings, it makes sense not only for Pearl to identify Beck as the cause, but also for Cody to exclaim to his brother Ezra, “See what you've gone and done?” and for Ezra to reply, “Did I do that?” (38). In spite of physical evidence to the contrary, Ezra has no doubt that it was “entirely [his] fault” and goes through life feeling “unforgiven” (122). Just as Cody, Beck, and Ezra all become causes of the released arrow, so too the object of its flight shifts away from the wounded Pearl when Cody declares to Ezra: “Gone and done it to me again” (38; emphasis added). As readers, we know that just as reasonably, Pearl—so indisputably the victim of the archery accident when it is viewed from the usual vantage point—could also be seen as pulling the string, with Cody, or Ezra or Beck, as targets created by the good child/bad child competition she fostered or by her emotional distance from her husband. The cause of the wounding could also be traced to a society that championed marriage as the only path for women or to her Uncle Seward's inability to suggest how she could be like other girls, or to her social isolation in Baltimore and on and on.

Causes regress infinitely into the past, and consequences proliferate endlessly into present and future (the latter point underscored by Tyler's looping return throughout the novel to the arrow incident). In peeling back the layers behind the apparently simple question of who shot the arrow, in suggesting that cause and effect may, indeed, be interchangeable (Pearl, Beck, Cody, Ezra—all, both victims and perpetrators), Tyler dramatizes a vision of complex, dynamic causation that defies easy discursive expression and simple philosophical categories.⁷

Tyler also plays with the inseparability of free will and determinism in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant when she describes Ezra's attempt to explain to Mrs. Scarletti the sleepwalking that earned him a discharge from the army:

“Remember when I left the army? Discharged for sleepwalking? Sent home? Mrs. Scarlatti, I wasn't really all the way asleep. I mean, I knew what I was doing. I didn't plan to sleepwalk, but part of me was conscious, and observed what was going on, and could have wakened the rest of me if I'd tried. I had this feeling like watching a dream, where you know you can break it off at any moment. But I didn't; I wanted to go home. I just wanted to leave that army, Mrs. Scarlatti. So I didn't stop myself.”

(123)

Trying to unravel free will from determinism is hopeless before such a tangle. The self here is the residence of both compulsion and will—and the compulsion to sleepwalk could just as easily be an expression of the will to go home, while the will that could stop the “self” from sleepwalking, but elects not to, could, with as much reason, be seen as compelled by the unconscious. Given passages like these throughout Tyler's works, it makes little sense to try to isolate the locus of causality in her system. To ask if it is internal, thus free, or external and thus determined is inevitably to be reminded that “internal” and “external” themselves are convenient labels. These terms are useful in a world of colliding atoms, but inadequate as descriptors of the much more complex reality that is Tyler's subject.

But if these categories are illusions created by the human need for clarity in the face of complexity, they are illusions capable of causing great pain. Tyler's characters again and again feel they have to be in charge and reject or ignore life's causal interplay. Even as she is dying, the almost blind Pearl in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant dreams of willed control and, then, only half awake, declares: “Dance! Oh, I don't think so, … I'm in charge of this whole affair, you see, and all I'd have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fall into little pieces” (16). On one hand, this is true: Pearl's determined efforts keep her family together after her husband deserts them. However, we also recognize that her choices during those times are contingent on realities outside her control, forces impervious to her intention. Her death itself causes scarcely a ripple even in her family, further belying her notion that she's “in charge of this whole affair.” Easily overlooked in Pearl's dream, however, is a symbolic alternative to seeing life as either the arena of free will or of determinism. Her refusal to dance implies an unwillingness to see life itself as dance, as a shared activity combining predetermined pattern and individual choice, as well as the influence of one's partner on one's choices, to create a new pattern of life. Other non-dancers populate Tyler's Baltimore, all sharing at some point in their lives the notion of the absolute power of their own will in effecting life changes: Cody Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Morgan Gower in Morgan's Passing, Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist.

Because Tyler recognizes the fallacy of this concept of human efficacy, she emphasizes again and again in her novels that personal change occurs not as a result of isolated introspection but in the arena of relationships. While many of her socially enmeshed characters fail to change, her isolated sorts never do. Even Barnaby Gaitlin of A Patchwork Planet (1998), arguably the Tyler character who works most consciously to take control of his life and to will its change of direction, manages this only in concert with another. The Gaitlin Twinform, the invention with which Barnaby's grandfather had made the family fortune, becomes the symbol of this need for the Other in the exercise of individual will. Shaped something like a two-dimensional dressmaker's manikin, the Twinform was intended to allow women to put together an outfit before actually wearing it. According to family legend, the Twinform was inspired by an angel who told Grandfather Gaitlin: “How often have I put on a frock for some special occasion … only to find that it doesn't suit and must be exchanged for another at the very last moment …” (34). Barnaby's business partner Martine's response to this explanation locates the Twinform in the debate about human agency: “Those old inventions slay me. … People used to try so hard, seems like” (29).

Shortly after this exchange, Barnaby begins the construction of his own metaphorical Twinform by lying and claiming Sophia Maynard's experience on the train as his own: He's the one, he asserts, who delivered the stranger's passport without even being tempted to look inside, although these acts are so admirable and so different, Barnaby feels sure, from what he actually would have done. He sees himself just as his family does: the black sheep, a thief as a teenager and a failure at everything as an adult. His appropriation of Sophia's encounter with the stranger on the train is Barnaby's first use of Sophia as his Twinform, his first attempt to see if such a moral life “suits” him. Later, Barnaby's romance with Sophia provides further opportunities to try on what he sees as Sophia's virtues, characteristics he judges lacking in his own life. In Barnaby's case, trying on the Other allows him to identify the virtues he would like to live by and leads him to choose which of Sophia's qualities he will claim as his own. As it turns out, Barnaby finds that Sophia “doesn't suit”; he recognizes that the honesty he identified with her is really only superficial and that he has actually become the one who can be trusted. He has incorporated these values into his life, even though the person originally associated with the virtues is judged wanting. Nevertheless, Sophia's role in this change is as real as the role of Barnaby's will.

The complicated causality at work here is made even more tangled by the fact that the catalyst for Barnaby's changed life turns out, in the end, to be in large part the externalization of his own values projected onto Sophia. The agent of the change emerging here is a third party, Barnaby-cum-Sophia. Of course, even that is too simple to explain human causality, ignoring as it does the multiple versions of himself (other Twinforms) reflected in his parents, his ex-wife, his daughter, his co-workers, and on and on. And added to all these crisscrossing ties are all the others that would appear if we shifted our examination to Barnaby's reciprocal effect on Sophia who, he realizes, was “as proud of my sins as I was of her virtues” (181). In A Patchwork Planet, as clearly as anywhere in her fiction, we see Tyler's relational self: We do not exist in isolation, but are created by, and create our identity out of, our tangled interconnectedness with others.

In earlier novels, Tyler expressed the Twinform idea and explored the nature of causality in human relations in her frequent treatment of the attraction of opposites, an attraction especially evident when individuals choose a romantic partner. However, instead of stopping at the cliché-level of the truism, Tyler pushes on to explore the consequences of such choices, uncovering a tangle of causes and effects that defy linear description. For example, in A Slipping-Down Life, Tyler's third novel (the one Tyler claimed to be particularly fond of because its characters actually changed), Evie Decker—silent, dull, fat, heavy-footed, unmusical—falls in love with rock musician Drumstick Casey, who creates the mysterious lyrics Evie finds so compelling, by “just hauling in words by their tails” (9). Almost without identity, Evie first expresses a self when she carves Drum's name on her forehead. Tellingly, her first self-defining “word” is the name of another person. In their developing relationship and, finally, marriage, Evie begins to change, taking on her partner's characteristics and claiming a voice as puzzling in its own way as Drum's. She becomes a rebel, too: She speaks back to the revivalist who uses her experiences as a parable of modern evil; she refuses the conventionally solicitous comfort of neighbors when her father dies, phoning instead for Clotelia, the family's unsentimental, no-nonsense housekeeper. Finally, having to take care not only of herself but of her coming child, she uses the voice discovered in her relationship with Drum to change the nature of that relationship, issuing her ultimatum: “[W]e are going to have to make some arrangements. … Start a new life. Give some shape to things” (217).

When Drum refuses to move with her into her late father's house, she even redefines her initial act of assertion, exercising the option of changing her past, the possibility Madame Olita speaks of in Searching for Caleb. Evie slips away from Drum's control by telling him first that the “Casey” written on her forehead is her name, not his, and then asserting that it wasn't she who carved the name, but “someone else” (220). Ironically, through this declaration, presenting herself as the object of another's will, she asserts her will and claims her freedom, taking from Drum his ability to see her as victim of her love for him. Yet, of course, it is a complicated freedom, since the truth, or at least one truth, is that Evie's new assertion of control does lie on the foundation of Drum's influence on her life. The complications in exploring the pattern of causality in this novel multiply when we consider that Drum is not only an agent of change, but is himself changed by the relationship. He, too, begins to assert himself, refusing with increasing vigor to go along with the publicity stunts dreamed up by Evie and his manager. He confronts his own lack of musical talent; he begins to prefer blues to rock, and he refuses, finally, to move with Evie out of their tarpaper shack.

One of Tyler's earliest hints of why linear causation doesn't apply in human lives appears in Drum's declaration after first meeting Evie in the hospital: “Feels like meeting up with your own face somewhere,” he says (55). Where Emily Dickinson described the inner recesses of the mind as the spot where the self can meet the self, unarmed,⁸ Anne Tyler locates that spooky place in the Twinform other. When people are connected in this way, like identical twins, simultaneously independent and united, it becomes impossible to label a change in that unified system as the result of either internal or external forces. Evie is right to say both that she carved Drum's name on her forehead—an act that she claims was “the best thing I've ever done. … Something out of character. Definite. … Taking something into my own hands for once” [43]—and that it was done to her by someone else. Given Tyler's ontological frame, free will and determinism become meaningless distinctions in understanding Evie's actions.

Morgan's Passing offers a vivid description of such personality exchanges and of the permeable membranes which both separate and unite people. Thinking of her marriage to Leon, Emily Meredith muses:

She seemed to have caught some of Leon's qualities. He seemed to have caught some of hers. … [S]he was reminded of those parking-lot accidents where one car's fender grazes another's. It had always puzzled her that on each fender, some of the other car's paint appeared. You'd think the paint would only be on one car, not both. It was as if they had traded colors.

(98)

Marriage here is not so much union of X and Y, but a transformation of X into Xy and Y into Yx.

Underscoring the idea that questions of cause and effect are better viewed in terms of mutual, reciprocal relatedness, Tyler also creates characters who try to step outside the tangle of causality. Of course, no one can actually make that escape, but Tyler knows the human fantasy about such freedom. Its pursuit is, in many ways, her Ur-motif. Her vision of the disastrous consequences such freedom would bring if it were achieved is dramatized in the lives of Caleb Peck in Searching for Caleb, in Morgan Gower in Morgan's Passing, and in the foreign graduate students living next to the Bedloes in Saint Maybe (1991).⁹ The foreigners in Saint Maybe provide a comic view of this radical freedom. Cut off from their familiar contexts, their homeland, their language, and their families, the foreigners seem to live happily. However, it is an eerie, immature, inhuman happiness. Their transience and separation from real life are indicated by the “two webbed aluminum beach lounges” furnishing their living room. On vacation from consequential relationships, they seem to be traveling through “a flat green countryside like the landscape in a child's primer” (186); for them, America “was a story they were reading, or a movie they were watching. It was happening to someone else; it wasn't theirs. … Here they spoke lines” and “wore blue denim costumes,” on “a brief holiday from their real lives” (201). It doesn't really matter if they break a window to install a radio aerial or crush the roof of their car with the garage door. Disconnected from their authentic identities, the foreigners become the quintessential, though comic, aliens. They give up their difficult names, coming in “batch[es]” and “rotation[s]” into the Bedloes' neighborhood, infinitely replaceable and interchangeable “Jims” and “Freds” and “Franks” (179). Only when they return home and “fall in love and marry and have children, and … agonize over their children's problems, and struggle to get ahead, and practice their professions soberly and efficiently” (201), will they begin their “real lives.” But for now, they are impervious to the influence of others and unable to influence others' themselves. And because they are free (or as close to it as imaginable for comically realistic characters), they, in effect, cease to exist.

In Morgan's Passing, Morgan Gower provides another caveat for those idealizing absolute free will. He achieves within his own family an isolation from efficacy similar in effect to that of Saint Maybe's foreign grad students. Working from the assumption that “events don't necessarily have a reason behind them” (232), Morgan sets out to create a life embodying this randomness. He comes as close as any of Tyler's main characters to a life free of shaping forces—even the forces of internal predisposition. Every day he faces infinite choices, beginning with “deciding who to be today” (29). If Morgan cannot become in reality a man constructed solely by his own will, he becomes such a person in his elaborate role-playing, assuming and discarding personae at will. He is Tyler's symbol of the radically free individual. His is an improvised life, unimpeded by the constraints limiting the lives of others. Such freedom may be momentarily appealing, but in the long run, as Tyler makes clear in Morgan's repudiation of this improvisation, it ends in nihilism.

Morgan is, Tyler tells us, a man “in pieces,” “unassembled,” “fragmented”: “Parts of his life … lay separate from other parts. His wife knew almost none of his friends. His children had never seen where he worked” (29). He regards clothes as costumes (29), underscoring the inauthenticity of the radically free self. Because he is making up his self as he goes along, he cannot depend, as the rest of us do, on being guided by instinct or habit or character or conscience. He is unable to relax in a consistent selfhood. Thus, he avoids alcohol; because he has to build his identity moment by moment, he always has to be in control (29).

A definite, predictable self is valuable, even if it means a predisposition that shapes our behavior and thus limits our freedom to be anything at any moment. This is reflected in Breathing Lessons in Maggie Moran's response to Ira's description of her tearful nostalgia. “It's just like you,” he tells her. Hearing this, rather than feeling insulted, Maggie feels “strong and free and definite” (123). Having an identity means that one will respond reliably in certain ways to certain stimuli; it means being predictable (to those who know you best), at least some of the time. Turning our usual definitions on their heads, Maggie associates such predictability with freedom. Living without that predictable identity, Morgan discovers, is exhausting. Beyond that, like the foreigners in Saint Maybe, Morgan the individual seems scarcely to exist. It's no surprise that by the end of the novel he easily passes for Leon Meredith. Another kind of “passing” is comically adumbrated in the spiteful fake obituary his wife places in the Baltimore Sun. But the announcement of his death as Morgan Gower, son of Louisa, brother of Brindle, husband of Bonny, father of seven daughters, seems to affect no one.

For all the popular American lip-service given to free will, life, freed from any causation except one's own choices, would be empty of meaning. Tyler conveys this when she describes Morgan's running from his mother's dog, an intriguing image of the desire to escape “family as fate,” to use Mary Ellis Gibson's terminology. In his flight, Morgan sinks “into the lives of the scattered people sitting on their stoops. … A soothing kind of emptiness began to spread through him. He felt stripped and free, like the vacant windows, frameless, glassless …” (41). The negatives attached to this state—“stripped,” “vacant,” “frameless,” “glassless”—suggest what this kind of freedom would be like. To the extent that he is disconnected from background and context, Morgan's life is empty. He sinks into the lives he witnesses, but there's no reciprocity, no Twinform perspective: he sees only otherness, not self-in-other.¹⁰ Blind to the reflective surface of others, he loses the ability to see himself. Because he is able to be anything, Morgan risks becoming nothing. If this is what comes of freedom, Tyler seems to be asking, “who wants it?”¹¹

In Searching for Caleb, Caleb Peck's attempt to escape the influences of his family turns out to be as problematic as Morgan's flight from his. Although in making music after he flees Baltimore, Caleb has the solace of doing what he most wants, his life seems otherwise as vacant as Morgan's threatens to be. Caleb runs from his coercive father, who insists on Caleb's resigning his own will, including his love of music, in favor of his father's agenda. Ironically, in exercising his will by leaving his family, Caleb comes close to destroying his selfhood. Because he sees relationships as limitation and control by others, Caleb allows himself only the most tenuous of human connections, symbolized in the string that for twenty years hitches him to the blind guitar player White-Eye in New Orleans. The two seldom speak; they know nothing of each other's lives. After White-Eye dies, Caleb, without making a real choice (280), drifts into a family that eventually turns him out because he's not “any real relation or anything” (286). In the old folks' home where they leave him, he lives in dreams of music and the New Orleans of his youth. Like Morgan Gower, because he has escaped the tangle of relationships and the systemic dynamics of cause and effect, Caleb scarcely seems alive.

Caleb's rejection of the control of others also reveals the futility of attempting such an escape in any absolute sense. Not only does he move into other constraining relationships after losing his companion in music, he also demonstrates that he can never really free himself of the shaping power of his original family. True to his upbringing, he treats others with studied politeness, bowing formally to the duster-clad women in the old folks home (274). He is “startled to find his father's face gazing at him from mirrors” (281), and even on the run, he writes a formal, Peckish bread-and-butter note thanking his niece Justine for the hot dog dinner she served during his brief return home. He ends that stay by climbing out of the window, once again escaping—and not escaping—the constraints of relationships.

What Caleb makes clear, of course, is that the system operates whether we consent or not. Self and other, will and compulsion together create what Tyler calls in Breathing Lesson “a real life”—“the whole messy kit and caboodle” (288). Nowhere is that idea more vividly conveyed than in the statue created by Jeremy Pauling in Celestial Navigation: “A man pushing a wheelbarrow, webbed around with strings and pulleys and chains and weights. He was mostly plaster, but you could find nearly every material in the world if you looked long enough …” (209). Both pushing and pulled, at once individual and composite—here, for Tyler, is human reality. Just try to separate the self from all the rest of the universe, she says with Jeremy's statue, just try to locate causality here. It can't be done, of course. What Tyler offers instead in her works is an exploration of the impulse to untangle that mystery and a celebration of the impossibility of simplifying life's “endlessly branching and dividing” reality.

Notes

1. Charlotte Templin discusses Tyler's association with the comedy of manners in the British tradition and with “amiable social comedy,” a comparison usually made by reviewers who dismiss her works as lacking in “attention to the dark side of reality” (179-90). Templin identifies “something that can be called philosophical verity or ‘wisdom’ as one of the three criteria used by reviewers to judge a novel” (180). She notes Mary Ellen Gibson's declaration that Tyler's “almost metaphysical intelligence” has often been overlooked and Margaret Morganroth Gullette's comments on “Tyler's ability to answer ‘philosophical questions’ in ‘plain concrete language’” (195).

2. Thornton details the arguments against free will in the fifth chapter of his useful study.

3. In her perceptive and seminal analysis of human fatedness in Tyler, Mary Ellis Gibson chooses another tactic, discussing Tyler, not in terms of conventional philosophy, but instead locating her in relation to concepts of fate found in Greek tragedy and in early Christianity. In these systems too, Gibson decides, Tyler's determinism is complicated: “somewhere between the classical Greek fates, or moira, who work out destinies in accordance with some cosmic order—those fates who preside over Sophoclean irony—and the more oppressive fate or heimarmene of the gnostic dualists …” (165-66). See also Joseph C. Voelker (89 et passim); Linda Wagner-Martin (170-71); and Alice Hall Petry (149-51, 154-81, 186-206). For Petry, Tyler suggests that fatedness may be attenuated by “shifting one's point of view” and choosing “positive elements” in one's fated condition, deciding to “accept and nurture” those aspects “in the hope of eventually attaining a kind of psychological compromise or spiritual balance” (174).

4. In Morgan's Passing, Leon asks the same question (“Change?”) when Morgan says, “I'd better go home and change.” Morgan means only that he needs another hat, but Leon's question draws the reader's attention to the deeper implication that Leon had responded to (127). Tyler uses the same pun when the train conductor in If Morning ever Comes twice informs Ben Joe (close to the beginning of the novel and then again at the end), “Won't have to change” (27, 266)—reassuring words to a person fighting life's changes, first in a precipitous trip home to Sandhill, North Carolina, and then in a return to New York, old girlfriend by his side and plans to transplant Sandhill to the North underway.

5. When Maggie compares herself to Lucy, she focuses on Lucy as the epitome of the “madcap, fun-loving” type, “full of irrepressible high spirits,” as well as a “dizzy woman” whose “failures [were] just built-in, just guaranteed” (47). However, another side of Lucy also applies to Maggie: She is the undefeated libertarian, always confident that she can take control of a situation; she can get into the show, meet the famous actor, make the extra money she needs selling mega-vitamins.

6. Among Tyler's favorite metaphors to convey this idea of life's complex relatedness are images associated with weaving or sewing, or other textile metaphors suggesting enmeshment. For a fuller discussion of the metaphor, see my essay, “Complicate, Complicate: Anne Tyler's Moral Imperative” (24-34). In Morgan's Passing, Tyler turns to another symbol to present this idea of life's causal interconnectedness in Morgan's story to Emily about his having been married—and never divorced—before his marriage to Bonny. When Emily objects that this makes him a bigamist, Morgan responds: “But it's really very natural. … It's quite fitting, when you stop to consider. Aren't we all sitting on stacks of past events? And not every level is neatly finished off, right? Sometimes a lower level bleeds into an upper level. Isn't that so?” (147) It's an idea that Tyler introduced in her first novel, If Morning ever Comes, when Ben Joe tries to figure out why he has asked Shelley to marry him: “Who knew how many other people, myriads of people that he had met and loved before, might lie beneath the surface of the single smooth-faced person he loved now?” (265-66).

7. In an intriguing shift from the conventional conceit of humanity as arrows shot from God—a shift which itself implies Tyler's sense of the multiple directions of causality—the narrator of Saint Maybe says of Ian Bedloe, “He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow—not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end” (247-48).

8. In poem 670 (“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—”), Dickinson writes:

   Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
   The Stones a'chase—
   Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter—
   In lonesome Place—

9. Indeed, all Tyler's agorophobic or sociophobic characters reflect such consequences, from Ansel in The Tin Can Tree (1965) to Delia in Ladder of Years (1996).

10. In Celestial Navigation, Jeremy Pauling also demonstrates the self-destruction attending the totally autonomous, non-reciprocal self. When one of his lodgers declares that Jeremy is “not himself at all today,” his sister Amanda thinks scornfully, “He is always himself. That's what's wrong with him” (10). She means merely to judge her brother's abnormal personality, but in the context of Tyler's works, we can see the larger implications. Existing in psychological isolation from others, impervious to exchanges of affect and effect, Jeremy is always and only himself, and that is the source of his psychic pain.

11. This is a theme still playing in Tyler's latest works. In Ladder of Years (1995), Delia arrives at a similar conclusion after she walks away from her conventional life. When Rebecca Davitch fears that she has been living someone else's life in Back When We Were Grownups (2001), part of the cause is her inability to see the systemic causality of her life.

Works Cited

Carson, Barbara Harrell. “Complicate, Complicate: Anne Tyler's Moral Imperative.” Southern Quarterly 31 (Fall 1992): 24-34.

Easterbrook, James A. The Determinants of Free Will: A Psychological Analysis of Responsible, Adjustive Behavior. New York: Academic, 1978.

Elkins, Mary J. “Anne Tyler and the Faulkner Connection.” The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Ed. C. Ralph Stephens. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 119-35.

Gibson, Mary Ellis. “Family as Fate: The Novels of Anne Tyler.” Southern Literary Journal 16 (Fall 1983): 47-58.

May, Rollo. Love and Will. London: Souvenir, 1969.

Petry, Alice Hall. Understanding Anne Tyler. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1990.

Ridley, Clifford A. “Anne Tyler: A Sense of Reticence Balanced by ‘Oh, Well, Why Not?’” Critical Essays on Anne Tyler. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. New York: G. K. Hall/Macmillan, 1992. 24-27.

Taylor, Gordon O. “Morgan's Passing.” The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Ed. C. Ralph Stephens. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 64-72.

Templin, Charlotte. “Tyler's Literary Reputation.” Anne Tyler as Novelist. Ed. Dale Salwak. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 175-96.

Thornton, Mark. Do We Have Free Will? Bristol, England: Bristol Classical, 1989.

Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York: Berkley, 1986.

———. Back When We Were Grownups. New York: Knopf, 2001.

———. Breathing Lessons. New York: Berkley, 1989.

———. The Clock Winder. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

———. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Berkley, 1983.

———. Earthly Possessions. New York: Berkley, 1985.

———. If Morning ever Comes. New York: Berkley, 1983.

———. Ladder of Years. New York: Ballantine, 1997.

———. Morgan's Passing. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

———. A Patchwork Planet. New York: Ballantine, 2001.

———. Saint Maybe. New York; Ballantine, 1992.

———. Searching for Caleb. New York: Berkley, 1986.

———. A Slipping-Down Life. New York: Berkley, 1983.

———. The Tin Can Tree. New York: Berkley, 1983.

Voelker, Joseph C. Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Breathing Lessons: A Domestic Success Story.” Anne Tyler as Novelist. Ed. Dale Salwak. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 162-74.