Mirror of Ourselves: Notes on Bukowski's Post Office
[In the following favorable review, Glazier discusses the novel Post Office, in which he sees a cogent macrocosm of the human condition.]
When Post Office, Bukowski's first published novel, came off the press in 1971, an important moment in the history of modern American literature occurred. Bukowski stood like a giant, one foot astride each of two continents: poetry and prose; pornography and belles letters; suicide and sainthood; Europe and America; the underground press and the brackish water of the literati. A truly historic first novel, Post Office was as definitive as a line drawn in the dirt.
Bukowski had stepped forward from the maelstrom of prophetic vision, having established himself securely by such visionary poetic works as Flowers, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960), Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965), and the collection The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills (1969). He was able to turn his hand to fiction with a perspective unequaled in contemporary American letters. He had been through a stripping-down that would've killed any ordinary person. And yet Bukowski, rather than being weakened by each successive defoliation, seemed to get stronger with the knowledge of what was necessary. He approached a level of immediate experience that was almost religious in nature. And when he came out of his motel room with the manuscript of Post Office, the essential worth of his novel was inescapable, built with a prose style that was sparse, honest, and brilliant in its Epicurean asceticism.
The setting for this visionary work is quite uncontrived. Unlike a generation of previous writers who drew their inspiration from Paris, Italy and the Riviera, Bukowski created his universe from the stuff at hand. Everything that was necessary could be found wherever he found himself: in a motel room in Los Angeles, in a cottage in Texas, sitting in his car, in the jaws of the post office. The post office represents dynamically the duality which is the relentless metronome of daily life. Here we have literacy and communication; letters are flashes of narrative whereby events are caught in brief written images sent from one person to another. Yet on the other hand, the post office is representative of another side of modern life: order, authority, bureaucracy, a methodical and corporate process of dehumanization where each person is supposed to feel enriched by the contribution he is making to the organization's goal. This point of view is established firmly before the start of the narrative in "Code of Ethics":
Postal employees have, over the years, established a fine tradition of faithful service to the Nation, unsurpassed by other groups. Each employee should take great pride in this tradition of dedicated service. Each of us must strive to make his contribution worthwhile in the continued movement of the Postal Service toward future progress in the public interest.
The assumptions underlying this code form the justification for the dissolution of individuality in society. Here is represented the kind of conditionality and blind obedience that makes the isolation and madness of modern life possible.
The lesson of Post Office lies in the cleaning up of this mess. The novel provides a clear guide to the necessary first step: realizing that there is nothing to understand. There is no reason for it. Those that reason are those that either contribute to the strata that distance us from humanity or that contribute equally to its power through their own act of retreating. The only way of beginning to understand our predicament is to understand that there is no asking why.
Bukowski opens Post Office with a single simple paragraph: "It began as a mistake." Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, enters the post office quite by accident, hearing that they would hire anyone. He takes the exam and physical, and goes through the motions, finally becoming a temporary mail carrier. Life is a breeze—for the moment. The novel's action starts when he is transferred to Oakford Station and the tyrannical rule of a supervisor named Jonstone. Immediately Chinaski finds himself under the degradation of a normal, ordered world. And it's clear that this world—of bondage—was made possible only through one utterly ironic condition: man's acceptance of tyranny. "The subs themselves made Jonstone possible by obeying his impossible orders," Chinaski explains. He rebels immediately and is quashed. He persists in his rebellion and continues to be suppressed. And though at one point he is even a millionaire through marriage, the process of Post Office is one that continually strips Chinaski down; yet each time this occurs, he pulls himself up with purified vision.
Post Office presents man as a curiosity, blind to his responsibility for creating the process of dehumanization through his own submission to it. The inhabitants of Bukowski's universe are constantly under the thumb of this principle. They are people motivated by temper, attachment, people who are spiritually starved yet stuffed with illusions. Suffering by their own hands, these people question their lot. These are the people on Chinaski's route, caught in a self-consuming cycle between disappointment and anger. For example:
"… I know you have a letter for me!"
"What makes you say that?"
"Because my sister phoned and said she was going to write me."
"Lady, I don't have a letter for you."
"I know you have! I know you have! I know it's there!"
Or, more commonly:
I handed her mail to her.
"BILLS! BILLS! BILLS!" she screamed. "IS THAT ALL YOU CAN BRING ME? THESE BILLS?"
Bukowski's power of straightforward "seeing" is evidenced, in the face of this hysterical loss of human dignity, by his honest reply, "'Yes, mam, that's all I can bring you.'" Or, again, in a moment of quiet emptiness: 〈block〉
When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching.
We had both been robbed.
These are people, like Chinaski's millionairess wife, Joyce, who have lost touch with what is real. Chinaski's value as antihero is his resiliency, his ascension from the "death" of blind obedience. He speaks no other language but the real. There is no swaying, no circumnavigating the issues. Bukowski is without sympathy in standing true to the world as it exists in front of him. We witness this when Chinaski, married to Joyce and living in Texas, experiences a rare mood of benevolence and leaves work early to do a little shopping. By the time Joyce gets home that evening, Chinaski has prepared a feast, including a plate of golden, fried-in-butter snails that repulse her immediately. Eventually, however, she tries one, then examines the others on her plate closely. Finally, she breaks:
"They all have tiny assholes! It's horrible! Horrible!"
"What's horrible about assholes, baby?"
She held a napkin to her mouth. Got up and ran to the bathroom. She began vomiting. I hollered in from the kitchen:
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH ASSHOLES, BABY? YOU'VE GOT AN ASSHOLE, I'VE GOT AN ASSHOLE! YOU GO TO THE STORE AND BUY A PORTERHOUSE STEAK, THAT HAD AN ASSHOLE! ASSHOLES COVER THE EARTH! IN A WAY TREES HAVE ASSHOLES BUT YOU CAN'T FIND THEM, THEY JUST DROP THEIR LEAVES. YOUR ASSHOLE, MY ASSHOLE, THE WORLD IS FULL OF BILLIONS OF ASSHOLES, THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE CARWASH BOY HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE JUDGE AND THE MURDERER HAVE ASSHOLES."
The line that Bukowski draws in Post Office is one that encompasses an essential decision. Man stands at an important moment in world history and cannot seem to step forward out of sheer blindness to common, ordinary facts. Man can be seen in the birds that Bukowski sets free in Post Office, birds that Bukowski could no longer bear to see imprisoned. He takes the cage outside and opens the door, daring the birds to step across the line. There is a dramatic moment of hesitation while they deliberate about whether or not to go. The essential challenge of Post Office is before them. Their accountability for their own self-determination is placed squarely under their eyes. They fly off. When Joyce returns, she is beside herself:
"Do you mean to say you let those birds out of the cage? Do you mean to say you really let them out of the cage?"
"Well, all I can say is, they are not locked in the bathroom, they are not in the cupboard."
"They'll starve out there!"
"They can catch worms, eat berries, all that stuff."
"They can't, they can't. They don't know how! They'll die!"
"Let 'em learn or let 'em die."
Chinaski does not simply express this philosophy: his life embodies it. Taking your fate into your own hands, despite the outcome, initiates the process of restoring man's humanity.
The marriage to Joyce ends, just as do all of Chinaski's relationships in Post Office, just as Chinaski's association with the post office will. After a long grueling battle, there will have been enough. It will be time to look at life with clearer eyes. To make a simple statement. There is an almost mystical wisdom expressed each time Chinaski moves on.
She even helped me pack. Folding my pants neatly into suitcases. Packing in my shorts and razor. When I was ready to leave she started crying again. I bit her on the ear, the right one, then went down the stairway with my stuff. I got into the car and began cruising up and down the streets looking for a For Rent sign.
This scene, on its own, is compelling; yet the philosophical insight comes with Chinaski's observation of his own humanness. Stripped again of everything and looking for a place to live with no previous preparation, he comments, "It didn't seem to be an unusual thing to do." Chinaski survives because he keeps his eyes on the road and refuses to wallow in any kind of self-pitying analysis.
Post Office sums up the entire human dilemma in a few simple choruses. The proof of the truth of Bukowski's vision lies in the continued popularity of Post Office and all of Bukowski's work, both here and abroad. There is a delicate balance that must be evaluated—between what we endure and what little ground we need to claim for ourselves. Without complex theories or expressions of insurmountable entanglements, Bukowski provides a clean and simple answer in a clear and direct style: the answer is right here. It's as easy as looking in the mirror.
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