Bharati Mukherjee, born in Calcutta in 1940, went to the USA in 1961, to Canada in 1968, became a Canadian citizen in 1972, returned to the USA in 1980 and became a permanent citizen of the United States the same year. Her writing career began in 1971 with Tiger's Daughter. However, she got recognition as a writer with The Middleman and Other Stories, which bagged the 1988 National Book Critics Award in America. This collection seeks to dramatize the “immigrant experience” in America. The immigrants chosen as protagonists in the stories are from India, Italy, Hungary, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. Talking about the immigrant experience, Bharati Mukherjee claimed, “it was not right to describe the American experience as one of a melting pot but a more appropriate word would be ‘fusion’ because immigrants in America did not melt into or were forged into something like their white counterparts but immigration was a two-way process and both the whites and immigrants were growing into a third thing by this interchange and experience.”¹

The contention of this paper is that a study of The Middleman does not bear out Bharati Mukherjee's claim about the immigrant experience being a process of interaction resulting (through transformation of both the whites and the immigrants) into a “third thing.” Instead, what actually emerges, to a large extent, is the complete change in the majority of immigrant protagonists, both in style and psyche, as they have fully adapted themselves to the American culture and ethos. Consequently, the stories portray the American reality: the souring of American Dream, fears and anxieties that the Americans are vulnerable to, and the typically American response to the emptiness and loneliness that haunts the inhabitants of this modern wasteland. They pursue sex more vigorously in a bid to establish relationships which, however, remain tenuous and are forever falling apart.

Delineating the American cultural landscape in the 1960s (as also later), Lewis Perry observes: “In the wake of the 1960s, some analysts viewed society at large as catering to immaturity and anti-rationality. Explanations varied: the lack of intrinsically rewarding work; the coddling of children in their most self-absorbed stages; the snares of advertising obsolescent goods; the sexual revolution and the decline of genuine intimacy, the collapse of faith in common purposes of higher laws. Taken together, such analyses suggested that the counterculture of the 1960s had succeeded in portraying American society as self-centred, alienating, and unfulfilling even though it failed to establish any conviction that alternatives were available.”² In a vigorous work of cultural criticism, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch opines: “the typical ‘repressed’ patient of the past was giving way to a new type of shallow, impulse-ridden character.”³ David McReynolds sketches the contemporary cultural scene in these words:

How is man to know who he is today? By what does he identify? Not by a relationship to the soil on which he was born—for we have left the land for the city, where we flit like harried vagrants from one apartment to another. Nor can a person find his identity in the family—for that institution is breaking down. By winning the right to enter the labour market women have found a degree of economic freedom that makes a marriage less necessary—our divorce rate is one price we pay for technological progress. The sudden equality of sexes creates tension in both men and women as they realize that their old roles are destroyed but are uncertain what their new ones should be.

This is the society of the mass. We know everyone by his first name—trying to imply a relationship which does not exist. Families living in an apartment house are more isolated from the neighbours a few feet away than were families on the American frontier who lived twenty miles apart. The individual is never able to feel that he is an important part of some meaningful whole. Our hearts ache with loneliness but we do not know how to talk to one another. “Society” is a word from which all content has been drained. Society does not mean community, only what David Riesman calls “the lonely crowd.”⁴

What connects most of the characters in the stories is merely sex, which proves to be an ephemeral bond. So, there is constant movement away from each other and breaking down of relationships. Of course, fresh contacts are made, but the pattern remains the same, and so does the outcome. Alfie Judah, the narrator of the story, “The Middleman,” confesses that his weakness is women. As a young boy back in old Baghdad, he used to “stroll up to the diplomatic enclaves just to look at women,”⁵ (4) and visited whores. He goes to bed with Maria, wife of Clovis T. Ransome, for whom Judah works. Maria has violent sex with Andreas, the guerrilla leader. When she sees Andreas, she “throws herself on him and he holds her face in his hands, and in no time they're swaying and moaning like connubial visitors at a prison farm.” (13) Andreas, along with his men and Maria, visits Ransome, robs him and Maria kills him with Andreas's gun. Alfie's life is saved for the sole reason that he has had sex with Maria “three times tonight.” Panna (“A Wife's Story”), a traditional Gujarati wife, has been in the States for a couple of years only, but she has begun to flirt with Imre, another immigrant. As an Indian, she gets irritated at the parody and satire—the two protections Americans use against vulnerability—heaped at the Indians (Gujaratis in particular), but she has become American enough to throw herself at Imre in full view of everyone on the road. It is Imre who is taken by surprise by this action of an Indian married woman: “He wants me to let go, but he doesn't really expect me to let go. He staggers, though I weigh no more than 104 pounds, and with him, I pitch forward slightly. Then he catches me, and we walk arm in arm to the bus stop. My husband would never dance or hug a woman on Broadway. Nor would my brothers.” (28) Her roommate, Charity Chin, a model, “had her eyes fixed eight or nine months ago and out of gratitude sleeps with her plastic surgeon every third Wednesday.” (29) It does not matter that Chin is an Oriental. She is fully Americanized. She suffers from American problems: “When I first moved in, she was seeing an analyst. Now she sees a nutritionist.” (29) She is estranged from her husband, but her affair with a flutist, a man with “thin hair,” is in full blossom, even though she suspects that he is a creep too, like the others she has slept with. She has bought a blue Datsun so she “could spend weekends with him. She returns every Sunday night, exhausted and exasperated.” (30) The narrator refers to her own complete transformation: “That part of my life is over, the way trucks have replaced lorries in my vocabulary, the way Charity Chin and her lurid love life have replaced inherited notions of marital duty.” (32) Panna's husband, however, remains ignorant of the change in her and he remarks: “You're too innocent.” The irony is incisive. Renata, the Italian protagonist in the story, “Orbiting,” has had a lover, Vic, before she was picked up by her “current” lover, Ro (from Afghanistan) in an uptown singles bar. “He bought me a Cinzano and touched my breast in the dark. He was direct, and at the same time weirdly courtly. I took him home though usually I don't, at first. I learned in bed that night that the tall brown drink with the lemon twist he'd been drinking was Tab.” (62, italics added) This story makes two very important statements about the American cultural reality: first, it underscores the ease, rather the abruptness with which a love (?) affair is ruptured and secondly, it highlights the assiduous efforts of the girls, as it were, to get married, which somehow seems to elude them. The way Vic, Renata's first lover, broke with her is illustrative of the first point. One day, he just announced:

I'm leaving, babe. New Jersey doesn't do it for me anymore. I said, “Okay, so where're we going?” … Vic said, “I didn't say we, babe.” So I asked, “You mean it's over? Just like that?” And he said, “Isn't that the best way? No fuss, no hang ups.” Then I got a little whiny. “But why?” (62)

But there is no answer from Vic. Instead, he peremptorily demands the keys to the van which belonged to Rindi (Renata). When she gives him the keys, he just coolly walks out on her. This is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night in which “separation and loss are the basic truths: betrayal the norm.”⁶ Rindi's reflection, “All over the country … women are towing new lovers' home to meet their families,” (63) brings to focus the second point, mentioned above. Yet another instance of the total change in the sensibility is provided by Maya Sanyal from Calcutta, in the story “The Tenant.” Having come to the States, “she's taken some big risks, made a break with her parents' ways. She's done things a woman from Ballygunje Park Road doesn't do, even in fantasies. She's not yet shared stories with Fran [her friend who has got her the room] apart from the divorce. She's told her nothing of men she picks up, the reputation she'd gained, before Cedar Falls, for ‘indiscretions.’ … She is an American citizen.” (100) Yes, she is an American through and through, because there is no difference between her and her friend, Fran, who comments on her relationship with her erstwhile lover: “Anyway, it was a sex thing totally. We were good together. It'd be different if I'd loved him.” (100) As for Maya, she has “slept with married men, with nameless men, with men little more than boys.” (103) She now prepares to make love to a man without arms. When she meets Ashoke Mehta, who has given an advertisement for a bride, in the very first meeting, she begins to fondle him around the neck. “The immigrant courtship proceeds,” (110) but it is thoroughly American in character. From every indication, it is going to develop into torrid sex.

In spite of so much love (which is, in fact, nothing more than sex), the protagonists feel a certain emptiness within them; they feel alienated. There is no real communication between them. Jeb and Jonda (“Loose Ends”) have been living together, but both are on either side of the emptiness that separates them (or connects them). Jonda says as much: “Nine years, for God's sake! Nine years, and what do we have?” (44) Progressive deterioration in their relationship has brought them to such a pass when “There's no point in us talking. We don't communicate anymore.” (44) Griff and Blanquita, an Asian, (“Fighting for the Rebound”), too, are in the process of breaking up. Griff is keen to save the relationship and proposes to Blanquita: “Let's start this conversation over. … I'm tentative at the start of relationships, but this time I'm not throwing it away.” (80) But Blanquita's complaint rings strident: “You don't love me, Griff.” (82) Griff is reminded of his previous relationship-breaking with Wendi: “We talked, we did things together,” (83) but it all ended. And now the story is getting repeated with Blanquita. It seems there is some kind of inevitability about people falling apart. Griff sums it up: “Love flees, but we're stuck with love's debris.” (82) Blanquita yells at Griff scolding in her well-bred, Asian convent-schooled voice: “You're all emotional cripples. All you Americans,” (85) but then the immigrants seem to behave no differently. Blanquita herself leaves Griff and is later reduced to a nervous wreck. In this fictional world of the story, it is not the emotions but the holding of the tea cup that warms the hands. Brief breathlessness of sex passes for love. No wonder, they are all so lonely and so alienated. Loneliness, in fact, becomes a source of exploitation. Sharp shooters like Danny (Dinesh), a dogra boy from Simla, rope in lonely persons to fob off the girls he brings from India, making a tidy packet in the process. Some of them take their alienation and disintegrating relationships in their stride, the American pragmatism coming to their rescue. Jason knows his marriage is crumbling, but he seems reconciled to the fact. His remark on his house is applicable to his marital state as well: “I've put twenty years into this house. The steps, the path, the house all have a right to fall apart.” (122) But his wife, Sharon feels low and depressed and has to be put on sedatives.

The majority of the stories portray the ruthlessness of the struggle for survival which is a distinguishing characteristic of the American society right from its inception, what with Americans having to face the New England wilderness and the hostile Red Indians. The competition is cut-throat, and the milieu is surcharged with violence. The Middleman, Alfie Judah, operates in the underworld and makes his “living from things that fall.” (3) Ransome, for whom the Middleman works, gets killed before being robbed. Doc Healy advises Jeb (“Loose Ends”): “If you want to stay alive … just keep consuming and moving like a locust.” (Italics added) Human beings turning into a swarm of locusts is a highly evocative image, suggesting the greedy predatoriness that has come to characterize the contemporary American society. Jeb kills for a living. He describes Miami (the city he lives in), bringing out its inherent ethos: “You can smell the fecund rot of the jungle in every headline. You can park your car in the shopping mall and watch the dope change hands, the Goldilockses and Peter Pans go off with new daddies, the dish-washers and short-order cooks haggle over fake passports, the Mr. Vees in limos huddle over arms-shopping lists, all the while gull guano drops on your car with the soothing steadiness of rain.” (45) Asa Levanthal in Saul Bellow's Victim also “perceives the world as a jungle.”⁷ Jeb has been committing murders for Mr. Vee for money, without any qualms of conscience, and rapes the unsuspecting, young Gujarati daughter of the owner of the motel he has gone to rent a room in. The cool, bare description of his act constitutes a powerful comment on this aspect of American society: “I pounce on Alice before she can drop down below, and take America with her. The hardware comes in handy, especially the kris. Alice lays hot fingers on my eyes and nose, but it's no use and once she knows it, Alice submits.” (54)

The style of writing is in conformity with the themes and atmosphere in the stories. It is bare, functional, and unself-consciously unemotional. Irony is used as an important device to probe the hypocrisy of the self and others, while simultaneously functioning as a protective cover for insulating the self from hurts and pain. The imagery reinforces the lonely, bleak, sombre and violent atmosphere and disintegrating relationships. Human beings have become “locusts” to survive, the chandelier is broken, the steps, the path, the house are falling apart, afternoons are “pure dynamite,” Miami is “jungle,” and human beings are compared to gutters: a “laugh leaks out of him” (Auguste), Marshall is “burned out,” and the test of his manliness is whether he can “fuck” a whore; America has gone “down the rabbit hole,” it is to the “Zoo” that Marshall goes in London. The sight he sees in the Zoo is symbolic: “The twenty-eight feet long python, squeezing out Jaguars and crocodiles like dishrags”; the smell that emanates from hot-water ports like Florida, Bangkok, Manila and Bombay is like that of the “snakeshit,” Renata's world needs to be “healed”; instead of a baby, a cat is held on the hip; love has become a destructive force, a tornado which leaves behind “debris,” a room in a house looks “impersonal as a room in a Holiday Inn,” and flowers in New York have no fragrance.

Bharati Mukherjee's fiction is in line with the mainstream fiction written in the post-Second World War decades in America. Robert Stone's novels, for example, portray a Vietnamed America in which aggression has so thoroughly triumphed that tenderness no longer exists. Civilization has given way to the rip-him-off-before-he-rips-you-off law of the junkie-jungle. In Saul Bellow's Herzog, what the hero takes from his family is a tendency to manipulate emotions to avoid adult attachments. Flannery O’Connor's stories underscore the violence that “so unexpectedly erupts, exploding all the values of obedience, politeness and faith.”⁸ The stories in The Middleman competently reflect the trials and tribulations afflicting the American society, but the immigrant experience is not shown as trauma or pain; the immigrants are not caught in the process of becoming, but are presented as finished American products.

Notes

1. Interview in The Hindustan Times, 9 February 1990, p. 3.

2. Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America, p. 445, italics mine. Rpt. in USIS pamphlet, Counterculture.

3. Ibid., p. 446.

4. David McReynolds, “Hipsters Unleashed,” in Seymour Krim, ed., The Beats (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1960), pp. 203-04.

5. Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India, 1989).

6. Josephine Hendin, Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 37.

7. Ibid., p. 105.

8. Ibid., p. 147.