[In the following essay, Baughman examines the symbolic meaning of the settings in Alnilam.]

James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, concentrates on three major settings that serve as symbolic constructs within which the principal character pursues transformations in his life. The first setting, an Atlanta amusement park that Frank Cahill, the novel's protagonist, builds as a perverse version of the Garden of Eden, illustrates his fall from or rejection of human society—of family or other human relationships. The second setting, an Army Air Corps training base during the early years of World War II, where Frank searches for information about the fate of his only son, is yet another closed environment, but one in which a highly organized group of air cadets endeavor to ascend beyond the realm of ordinary human experience into a mystical state associated with revolution and nihilism. These two settings represent extreme opposites in the continuum of human society—the first enclosing a purposely isolated middle-aged man whose failure is that of the human heart, the second enclosing a community of visionary, messianic, and potentially dangerous youths, whose failure is that of the human intellect. The third setting, Boyd McLendon's Peckover Hotel, populated by a variety of figures who live near or work on the air base but who are not a part of the air-cadet society, becomes the center point between the two extremes. Within this third setting Frank gains a degree of community that has before eluded him and that is the result of learning about himself in the process of learning about his son. Achieving this center point, a marriage of heart and mind, Frank attains his own personal version of Alnilam, the central star in the belt of the constellation Orion.

Complementing the symbolic settings in the novel are sets of paired images—past and present, sight and blindness, sugar and insulin, water and blood—that further illuminate Frank's search for the truth about Joel and, more importantly, about himself. His struggle begins within his own body when Dr. Ghil warns him that the blood coursing through him is contaminated: “A Niagara of sugar is pouring through your system every hour. We can hold that at bay with the insulin … but you'll have to walk a nutritional tightrope one that balances you between insulin and sugar” (15). Frank's life-altering internal struggle is thus conveyed through the images of blood and water, insulin and sugar; and because he cannot maintain balance on this particular “tightrope,” he ultimately sacrifices his eyesight. In his blind state, Frank ironically achieves a clearer vision of how to find the balance, the center point in his life Moreover, the image of blood introduced in the protagonist's struggle with diabetes is expanded as he confronts the outside world. In each setting Frank considers the nature of blood ties and witnesses of some sort of blood sacrifice, thereby clarifying his proximity to personal and communal harmony.

Frank's early life, when he is healthy and sighted, is characterized by an almost pathological estrangement from others: “After graduation from high school, Cahill had wandered Atlanta, working at whatever carpentry jobs came along. The wandering, the aimlessness, were right for him. … He had met Florence Acree when buying flowers for his mother's funeral; she was the one who had tried to become more than simply an interruption in his existence of measuring, nailing, wandering, and looking without thought” (75). Yet his marriage to Florence, like the other early involvements he unseemingly and thoughtlessly engages in, is “listless” (78) and mechanical; he prefers his own “lonely arrogance” (7) to the bother of “company of any kind” (78), including that of his wife, who leaves him when she is pregnant with their only child.

When Frank puts down roots, creates a permanent structure, he does so, ironically, by constructing an amusement park, though “he [has] no sense of humor” (78). The complex includes a swimming pool, a skating rink, a game room, and “an elaborate half-completed maze-like building … called the Honeycomb” (7); the park is surrounded by a high wooden fence with two towers “like those in minimum-security prisons” (76), from which he watched but remains aloof from daily activities. Like Daedalus, Frank considers himself a master carpenter and maze-builder, though, unlike his Greek prototype, he does not wish to escape from this self-imposed prison.

Instead, Cahill envisions his walled-in park as a Garden of Eden, though one permeated by a dark undertone of unconventional sexuality and complicated by a rubber snake called Buster. Frank and his assistant, Ruiz Alonso, create a game of chance by placing a two-way mirror in one of the women's dressing stalls. When an unsuspecting victim selects this stall in which to undress, Frank and Ruiz voyeuristically observe her undressing and being terrified by Buster. This scene of detached sexual enjoyment associated with unfeeling power over another is reinforced by another scene in which Frank tears off the damaged toenail of a girl swimming in his amusement-park pool. While mechanically making love to his wife, Frank recalls the swimming pool incident, which heightens his sexual intensity, an intensity that has “nothing to do with Florence” (79) and everything to do with his recollection of “the strange vibrancy there in his place between the girl's body and the faint image of her blood dissolving in the water … and this when he was deep inside his wife” (80). In this part of his life, “in his place” of the walled, prison-like, perverted-Eden amusement park, Frank regards human connection with a detachment that makes blood, water, and vision—indeed, life itself—virtually meaningless to him.

Frank Cahill's movement toward a true center point begins when he goes blind and hears soon thereafter of the presumed death of Joel, the son he has never seen. Stripped of his normal sight, Frank learns to depend upon his other senses, “dreams and memory” (90), and imagination, to guide him to a clearer vision of his son's life and his own. Ironically, his quest for Joel leads him into a setting that both parallels and directly opposes the amusement-park setting he is leaving.

The World War II Army Air Corp training base at Peckover, North Carolina, is an enclosed compound that in many ways resembles Frank's “minimum-security prison” amusement park. McClintock McCraig, one of Joel Cahill's instructors, musing about the layout of the base, emphasizes the abundance of athletic fields, playing courts, and swimming pools. Yet this playground, like Frank's, is surrounded by a wooden barrier, in this case of fir trees. The trees “gave off a steady church-dark and enveloped whoever entered or stood among them with silence and an atmosphere of … some quick, final thing to happen. … It was the unity, McCraig thought, the entire secrecy of the fir trees, the compacted quiet that changed you as it took you in. … He was—had come to be—aware of a sense of privilege, for the secrecy of the field inside the forest was his own secret, he felt, more than anyone else's (114-15). McCraig's sense of the secret power of the training-base location parallels Frank's sense of the secret power of his own amusement-park location; both settings tend to enforce change—the abandonment of normal human values—upon those who enter them.

The training base houses within its enclosed confines a group of revolutionary cadets, of whom Joel has been the messianic leader. The group has adopted the name Alnilam, since Alnilam is “the star at the center of the belt of Orion, which is the most obvious of the winter constellations in the Northern Hemisphere. … It has to be a moving center. … The central star. … The moving center. … It carries you with it, and yet it's always the center. You follow. Everything follows, and holds together” (154).

The motif of centrality is vital to this group, believing, as its members do, that they are the center point of a rebellion against the military bureaucracy that attempts to make the individual “the perfect system-slave” (330). Instead, the cadets envision themselves transformed through their rebellion, as Joel's journal reveals, into a new, mystical, superhuman state: “There is only one victory, and the main thing about it is that when we get it we'll throw it away, and live in a world of nihilism and music. We'll be weightless, in the Second Body, the Old Brain, but still control the ground under our feet” (409).

Though Frank is drawn to the Alnilam group—its members see his search for his son as preordained by his blood ties to Joel, and they regard Frank as a surrogate father to them all—he is always mystified by and wary of the cadets' motives. For if Alnilam promises to elevate its members above the ordinary into a state of artistry and “precision mysticism” (111)—“Navigation was really a form of poetry. So was mathematics in general” (443)—it also enforces a notion of centrality in which the individual is ironically subordinated to the group. Thus, the idea that the “moving center … carries you with it. … You follow. Everything follow” (154) takes on a more sinister meaning—that of mindless, unfeeling adherence to a group.

This identification of the Alnilam cadets with a totalitarian system is reinforced by a pattern of blood sacrifices involving or caused by the group. Joel Cahill is regarded as messiah both because he is the intellectual/spiritual leader of the Alnilam revolt and because he has presumably died in a fiery plane crash. Wrapped in a quilt by the suggestively named farmer Luther Bledsoe, who attempts to help him, Joel leaves a bloody silhouette of his upper body on the quilt's “cathedral window” (271) design before mysteriously disappearing. Joel is clearly associated with the martyred Christ and Christian imagery in this scene, and the cadets have undeniably developed a cult around his memory as sacrificed leader—one who has left behind not only a bloody shroud but also a holy book, his journal.

Joel has also left behind Hannah Pelham, a woman who has been his lover and, in a very real sense, a victim of his power. Hannah invites Frank Cahill to have dinner with her, and on the way to her house, he and his wolf-like guide / guard dog, Zack, are attacked by five neighborhood dogs that Zack savagely slaughters. This bloody scene is juxtaposed with a following one in which Hannah and Frank have dinner and then sleep together. Yet their sexual experience consists primarily of sadomasochistic whipping, a form of sexual activity that Joel has taught her, Hannah explains. Frank's quest for Joel thus leads him through a massacre of beasts to an unconventional, violent sexual encounter, actions that tend to attach the recurrent images of blood and perverse sexuality to the messianic Joel.

Moreover, during the planned chaos of the cadet revolt, further blood sacrifices occur. Zack is cut to pieces by propellers while trying to guide Frank, disoriented by a sugar-insulin imbalance in his blood, through a maze of planes crashing into each other on the airfield tarmac. Captain Faulstick, a veteran bombardier who has become a friend of Frank's, is killed when an airplane collides with his own plane. Following this carnage, Cadet Shears, one of the principal figures of the Alnilam group, promises to bury Zack but dismisses Faulstick's death as “Regrettable. … He just got in the way” (665). The cadet's indifference to the death of an admirable military veteran and “good man” confirms Frank's earlier assessment of his own son: “he was now more certain than not that there was a side of his body that he would not have liked” (433). Frank realizes that Joel and the other Alnilam cadets have misused their powers. They have created a community that has been inspired by lofty ideas but that has become inhumane, bloodthirsty, and unfeeling. They have, in short, embraced a fascism not far removed in its cold, totalitarian nature from the fascism they are being trained to combat. Caught in the bounds of their training camp and in the constructs of their ideology, the Alnilam group finally represents to Frank a system in which both community and intellect have failed.

Boyd McLendon's Peckover Hotel, the novel's third major setting, represents Frank's center point in which heart and mind are balanced harmoniously. The hotel, located outside the air base, is a maze-like construction that Frank, significantly, has little trouble negotiating, unlike the maze of mystical, conspiratorial ideas he encounters inside the base. In the hotel McLendon provides Frank lodging, food, drink, and conversation—social amenities that he has not fully experienced in the other two settings. Yet a far more meaningful connection between these two men helps Frank form a basis for companionship that he has scorned in the past. McLendon, like Frank, is alone because he has lost his wife and family. Yet his relationship with his wife has apparently been an affirmative one, ended not by estrangement and abandonment, as Frank's marriage has been, but by death. “‘Everybody's dead!’ McLendon said, slowly but not bitterly. ‘My wife, Shirley Dell, died about six years ago. … She bled to death in the hospital. Before that I had twins, a boy and a girl, but they died fast’” (188-89). McLendon's lack of bitterness over the deaths of his loved ones, his apparent satisfaction with meaningful blood ties, with fulfilling relationships however brief, counters Frank's sense of emotional alienation from his own wife and son.

At McLendon's table, Frank participates in his most important discussions, those with two war veterans, Captain Lennox Whitehall, who now teaches navigation at Peckham air base, and Captain Claude Faulstick, who instructs the cadets in the theory of flight. Whitehall, Faulstick, McLendon, and Frank form “a special group” (194) founded on mutual respect; yet this group supports and praises individuality, unlike the Alnilam cadets, who subjugate the individual to the group. Furthermore, Whitehall and Faulstick lament their present plight of “wandering-around among these boys” (196), drawing a clear distinction between themselves as seasoned veterans and the inexperienced novices they train; these mature men have developed their ideas about flying and the military through their combat experiences, their blood sacrifices; whereas the Alnilam cadets base their theories on pure intellectual and mystical speculations.

Moreover, Whitehall's most significant reflections are presented not to the cadets but rather to the other mature adults at McLendon's table. Unlike the young member of the Alnilam group, Whitehall tempers the solely intellectual by voicing the emotional center of his war experiences. Because of his navigational skills during a particularly bloody mission in the South Pacific, Whitehall has saved the lives of his crew members. When Faulstick comments that the saved men must have “loved you after that,” Whitehall replies, “Love me? Do you think that really comes into it? Gratitude? Respect? Awe, maybe, even? You're kidding when you say love, Faulstick, but you may just be right” (214). Whitehall has saved the lives of his comrades by relying on himself, his intelligence, his skill; but he has not separated himself from—elevated himself above—the needs, of others. In a statement reminiscent of Whitman's “I was the man,” Whitehall declares, “I was the guy, and they were the others, and we didn't die. We want out to kill people, and we must have killed a good bunch of them … and the main feeling when you're on your way back is life; it's a life feeling … you want to become a doctor, or a saint. You want to do good for little children. … You don't want anybody to be lonely or scared” (217). Whitehall's declaration illustrates that the Alnilam cadets have aspired to achieve but finally have failed to comprehend: that the individual can rise above the ordinary yet still have compassion for others, that the heart can be as important a source of power as the intellect, that the two finally cannot be separated if the individual is to survive.

Frank absorbs the lessons of this “special” society—the amenities McLendon offers, the message of comradeship Whitehall provides, and the compassionate understanding that Faulstick voices—and expresses it in terms of his own experience: “They had come here, to this hot room, this whiskey and meat, because of him. He rallied to himself as he had always done since the total of his blindness, as the center, the reason for the disembodied voices that called themselves humanity, wherever he was” (197). Through his new vision in blindness Frank encompasses their experience and their message and, in doing so, connects with them to discover both himself and the humanity he shares with them.

Initially, Frank's cold, distorted heart keeps him confined within his self-created prison / park. His distance from others marks his extreme position outside the community of man. In order to resurrect his dead son, at least in his own mind, Frank moves into the secretive world of an opposing yet equally extreme social unit. At the Peckover air base, Frank confronts a system that attempts to crush and subjugate the individual, primarily through an unfeeling, tyrannical intellect gone mad. Finally, the protagonist achieves a harmonious balance between these extremes at McLendon's Peckover Hotel. In this setting Frank Cahill experiences a renewal to life once he discovers a balance between the mind and the heart, between the individual and society; he thus reaches the center point that is his own Alnilam.

Work Cited

Dickey, James. Alnilam. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1987.