SOURCE: Fredrickson, Robert S. “Robert Stone's Decadent Leftists.” Papers on Language and Literature 32, no. 3 (summer 1996): 315-34.

[In the following essay, Fredrickson examines Stone's presentation of cynical, disillusioned left-wing sympathizers and amoral leftist revolutionaries in his novels, particularly Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise.]

That “the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity”¹—Yeats's conclusion early in this century—continues to apply, although now the best are bigger wimps, and the worst are more murderous. To Robert Stone, the disintegration of a viable left apparently figures in this decline. Standing at the center of nearly every Stone novel is a marginalized character who may once have identified with the left but then lost faith, turned cynical, yet remains conversant with left-wing issues. These characters are political junkies, often literally, who have become dysfunctional, perhaps because Stone places them in an intellectual and spiritual climate that undermines the foundations of identity—belief in history, belief in the self, belief in coherent morality—on which virtuous political action might be postulated.

Stone, obviously a student of modern political movements, peppers his novels with allusions to the left, some things easily recognized: the civil rights movement, the Spanish Civil War, the McCarthy era, the words of the Internationale, Paul Robeson, Fidelistas, Trots, and Maoists; others more obscure: Lovestonites and Stakhanovites, Sidney Hillman and Daniel De Leon. He and his characters must believe this history worth knowing. Sometimes the left of times past inspires; usually the left of the present wallows in ambiguity. Occasionally Stone treats an old-school Marxist with seeming admiration, for example, a revolutionary named La Torre (A Flag for Sunrise), who despises those he sees “as living without working,” and is “‘the personification of every Marxian insight.’”² But such appreciation is qualified, since La Torre is so true as to be a “vulgarization.”

Finally indeed, all present-day leftists are “vulgarizations of history,” since “‘life, unlike sound philosophy, is vulgar’” (207). Past and present popular causes, the Spanish civil war or Central American uprisings, remain impure compounds, embracing in their revolutionary movement bourgeois elements along with religious fanatics who aim to install the just rule of the Lord. For Stone ideology is always effaced by living history. In fact, Stone says he cares little for ideologues, regarding them as “poison toad(s),” who invoke a “verbal machine.” He bases his politics instead on the only morality there is, “me and the universe,”³ a doctrine of personal responsibility separate from causes. But the individual protagonist in this duo, for example, Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise, proves irresponsible, lacking a sufficient sense of identity to be viable.

I became nervously aware of Stone's fallen leftists while teaching Dog Soldiers to Reagan-Bush era conservatives. Would it be just what they expected and justify their Republican smugness? In this novel we find a child of the old left and a disillusioned liberal, who, having rejected left-wing moral earnestness, decide the most “real” thing they could do is run heroin back from Vietnam. Have we not seen this repeatedly in his other novels? They are replete with characters that John Leonard describes in The Nation as “self-marginalized, bystanding know it alls.”⁴ In A Hall of Mirrors, Rheinhardt, an alcoholic refugee from New York's bohemian left, becomes a right-wing radio announcer in New Orleans whose evangelistic, bigoted fulminations cause a race riot. In A Flag for Sunrise, Holliwell, another heavy drinker, an anthropologist who sees the world from the left yet makes his career out of collaborating with the right—earlier in Vietnam and now in Central America—betrays the nun he has deflowered and simultaneously a revolution in a country resembling Nicaragua. He escapes to sea at the end where he stabs to death—perhaps gratuitously—the hapless Pablo. But in Holliwell's post modern universe, where the sense of words eludes our grasp and identity effaces itself, murder looms as the “fundamental act of communication” (244). With characters such as these, it would be easy for my students to join ranks with one Holliwell critic, a smiling young woman who hears his drunken extemporizing before an embassy crowd in Latin America, and asks him whether his “stylized despair” is not really an “excuse for immorality” (112). Conceivably, as a more disputatious member of that audience asserts, they could regard his “facile nihilism” as a “screen for communistic theory” (110). Stone's fallen leftists might steer my students to Newt Gingrich-like sentiments; imagine the Op-Ed piece: “Soft-Headed Morals of Left-Liberal Elite Lead from Doing Good to Doing Drugs.” The case is reinforced by Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach which also depict one-time left-wing artists who go rotten, debauching on drugs and alcohol. Indeed Stone lets one wallow with these lost souls long enough to share their dread of being outside history (or of history itself having died), and their horror at a Godless universe, because like history, He has also died. Asked whether there is room for God is in his nihilistic vision, Holliwell quips, “There's always a place for God señora. There is some question as to whether He's in it” (111).

God may not be there, but Satan is. Stone indulges in a perverse gnosticism wherein the only transcendent awareness possible comes through a knowledge of evil.⁵ Stone becomes the novelist of the Demiurge, an explorer of evil's origins. While virtue seems regarded skeptically as square, naive, and ineffectual, evil still holds supernatural force. The Devil continues to fly in this cosmology. A missionary lady in Dog Soldiers, characterizing Vietnam, describes Stone's world when she says, “Satan is very powerful here.”⁶ He waits for Stone's decadent leftists.

Significantly, Vietnam is for Converse and Holliwell, along with many others in Stone's work, the touchstone experience, a haunting nightmare one cannot leave behind.⁷ The memory floods Holliwell's mind continually—the characteristic Vietnam flash—“a mixture of nostalgia and dread” (163). As wars go, there was something seductive about it for those on the left and on the right: “Vietnam had been a popular war among his radical friends. … Popular wars, thrilling as they might be to radicals were quite as shitty as everything else but like certain thrilling, unperfected operas—like everything else, in fact—they had their moments. People's moments did not last long” (408). Vietnam had provided many of them with a kind of “moral fascination” (160). Hence, life afterwards seems lackluster, no longer momentous. Vietnam had been both intellectually intense and sensuously poignant. Holliwell summarizes its bewildering intellectual impact: “A great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration had gone down in Vietnam. People had been by turns Fascist mystics, Communist revolutionaries and junkies; at certain times people had managed to be all three at once” (28). Ideologies confounded, the war's impact lingers in the senses: “Live burials beside slow rivers. A pile of ears for a pile of arms. The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks” (299). Vietnam was a powerful hallucinogen—the bad trip from which no one returns. The most disturbing episodes of Dog Soldiers are scenes from Vietnam early in the novel, the war's depravity capsulized in this snippet of a Marine's conversation: “What I think about … is catching a sapper girl and fucking her to death. I'm a vicious freak” (46). In Vietnam predatory sex and murder, rape and racism, are the same. What follows in that novel is Vietnam coming home to America. Both Stone's left-wingers and right-wingers share Vietnam as a life-changing event, as if it were the war and its moral confusion which obscured any real differences between them. Vietnam summarized a generation's confusion, marking the end of a racist, imperialist era on one hand, and the breakdown of moral order on the other.

Stone's warped and war-wounded figures—the reader may blush to admit—remain the only sure access to the novels in which they appear and force an uncomfortable identification. Converse, the almost affectless, amoral protagonist of Dog Soldiers remains as close as the reader will come in this book to an ordinary human voice, to a kind of recognizable sensibility. Not that Converse has Stone's sensibility or mine, but the brooding voices of Converse, Holliwell, and Strickland resemble their author in having his education and some of his history. It is a hip, educated voice (Stone never went to college, while many of his protagonists seem to have taken an interdisciplinary route wherein one explores the relations among political theory, theology and anthropology), and a left-wing voice, since it buys no conservative pieties about American life, yet it is also an unsanctimonious and politically incorrect voice. Converse cannot even assert basic principles, for example, that it's important “that the value of human life not decline” (40). Instead he parrots this line like a lesson which no longer makes sense. He believes only in “the moral necessity of his annihilation” (185) and cannot identify with those who “acted on coherent ethical apprehensions that seemed real to them” (260). A reified man, an object out of place, he has sensibility enough to realize how he—160 pounds of pink sweating flesh—is vulnerable. Similarly Holliwell, a man “without beliefs, without hope” (26), provides nonetheless access to A Flag for Sunrise. He is embarrassingly provocative when he drunkenly extemporizes before a stunned group of diplomats and intellectuals in Central America, saying: “Mickey Mouse will see you dead” (108). Yet as a man of temperament—an artist possessing a negative capability—he is able to hold onto a world without meaning through the intensity of his sense perceptions. Later, as if describing the role he plays in the novel, he says, “The things people do don't add up to an edifying story. There aren't any morals to this confusion we're living in. I mean, you can make yourself believe any sort of fable about it. They're all bullshit” (387). No one speaks more authoritatively in this book, however. Although Stone never gives readers characters to admire, the reader may empathize as, maimed like Ahab, they quarrel with a universe which shows only the blank face of meaninglessness.

Stone's decadent leftists may represent a new sort of protagonist in the sense that Dreiser's Carrie Meeber, Wright's Bigger Thomas, or Flaubert's Emma Bovary represent a departure from past types of human beings found in fiction. Perhaps they are most like Camus's protagonist in The Stranger, but Stone's existential characters pursue actively their peculiar dread, even if nothing is expected to come of it. There's a sort of negative quest motif—the trip gone bad. There is no good reason for Converse to be in Vietnam, or for Holliwell to be in Central America. In Outerbridge Reach, Browne—albeit in no way a leftist—gives up on the trip, a round the world sailing race, but stays on the sea until his suicide, hearing along the way the voices of the void. One takes these voyages for self discovery, encounters the self as void, uncovering the gap between one's fictions and reality. En route identity dissolves. Converse's belief in his necessary annihilation is complemented by Holliwell's difficulty in believing his identity to be anything more than “a series of spasms, flashes” (245). In their besotted world, consciousness itself is a matter of only momentary illumination. They take a Melvillean voyage into knowledge, pushing off from an inner island of safety into a sea of awareness of their own capacity for evil, a place from which Ishmael says “thou canst never return.”⁸ But worse, since this vulnerability is due to an inner emptiness, an absence of both identity and conviction, making Converse and Holliwell easy victims of cynicism, resignation and despair. Stone creates no Ahabs.

These spasms and flashes in Dog Soldiers include both Converse and Marge, his wife, the pair a sort of mockery of the 1970's-chic “open marriage.” They represent Stone at his slimy best in characterization. Since Stone is so careful to specify Marge's left-wing family credentials, and sends Converse to Vietnam as a liberal journalist on a quest, this book reads as an object lesson about the swamp into which left-liberal thinking leads. Converse had gone to Vietnam to write a book, but as he fell into anomie it became obvious there would never be one. Instead he sends back stories where—as a matter of marketing—“he was always careful to assume a standpoint from which moral objections could be inferred” (40). As one who is quite cynically PC, he is like the film maker, Strickland, in Outerbridge Reach, who makes documentaries with the obligatory left-liberal coloration. While publications in Europe buy Converse's stories, he believes nothing of what he writes. He had seen the horror of war during an excursion into Cambodia, and had pretended to weep “tears of outraged human sensibility” (31), but his tears were really those of sheer terror. He realized that the world “was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death” (185). Thus physical vulnerability becomes his only identity; he is a timorous version of the Mailer or Hemingway man, rewriting Descartes's “I think, therefore I am” to read “I am afraid … therefore I am” (42). So after being in Vietnam for 18 months, he discovers there would be no book and no play and consequently takes up dope dealing because, “It seemed necessary there be something” (25). The absurdity of history, the sheer mindless excess of the whole murderous endeavor—exemplified by slaughter of elephants from the air—leads him to conclude: “And as for dope … if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high” (42). So Converse gets involved in moving an expensive package of pure heroin back to the U.S., and finds himself wallowing in a morass of evil way over his head. “I've waited all my life to fuck up like this,” he says (126). Yet he believes this heroin caper to be “the first real thing I ever did in my life” (57). As “a flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil” (the phrase is from Conrad's Heart of Darkness and is quoted as an epigraph to the book), Converse becomes a spineless Ishmael, who—having looked too long into the face of fire—surrenders to forces beyond his own flabby decadence. What in his liberal intellectual background ever prepared him for slogging through this evil swamp where criminals and drug enforcement agents are the same people, where visionaries are vicious, where torture is the norm, and murder has become casual and common?

Marge's left-wing credentials are inherited. Back East she has extended family who are old-timey Hudson River Bolsheviks; they go to National Guardian parties which, Marge says, really take her back, what with “their folk singers and the tame spades” (3). She mocks the old left, among them her father, Elmer Bender. He is a long time communist who now edits “a weekly tabloid with a heavy emphasis on sex” (23) which he sends, without proletarian guilt, to a non-union press to be printed. Of a similar genre, “Marge's mother had been a left-wing Irish vegetarian, a suicide with her lover during the McCarthy era. … Marge was very like her” (24). Marge is also attracted to the drug deal. “Not since she was much younger had she felt so satisfying a commitment as she felt to the caper and to the dope” (74). She is an addict; drugs have come to substitute for political passions in her life. Often the women in Stone novels seem wounded, desiring something only drugs or alcohol can satiate. Marge had once been a 60's activist, but now it is eight years since her participation in the Vietnam day march in Berkeley. At present her only “righteous satisfaction” (71) rises from the dope mounting in her blood. Marge's father is legitimately critical of her generation's use of drugs which he says condition the mind for fascism, but Marge does not listen, perhaps because she believes his mind conditioned for fascism also. (In Stone's work fascism is the catch-all enemy that lurks in all causes.) Marge has turned against all those who have apparently found answers in some system of thought. She tells the guru, Dieter, a has-been mystic who nurses his alcoholism with homemade wine, that she wants God to drop the bomb on all of us. Because Dieter clings to a faded version of hippy idealism, she lambastes him, “You're like my father—he's communist … So many people have it all figured out and they're all full of shit. It's sad.” Dieter retorts, calling her attitude “cheap junkie pessimism” (229), which it is, but like Miniver Cheevey, he keeps on drinking.

Alongside Converse and Marge, the decadent leftists, there is Hicks, the depraved cultural revolutionary, a samurai Rambo, seemingly a man imprinted with an extra Y chromosome. In her stoned incompetence, Marge turns to Hicks for drugs, sex, and the semblance of wisdom. Readers, however, tend to agree with Converse who concludes that Hicks is neither sane nor very smart. Hicks carries the three kilos of heroin from Vietnam across the Pacific for Converse, guarding it as if it were the sacred chalice. Not a junkie himself, nor in this caper for the money, he attaches a holy obligation to this bag of scag. He's an uneducated hip mystic—a devotee of Eastern consciousness—yet like Converse he has seemingly little sense of the value of human life. Hicks has a sort of tough-bar sophistication; he knows the variety of thugs found in sleazier parts of town and can fight his way out of difficult situations. Hicks is someone “not opposed in principle to beating up on crazy people” (86). In a California motel, Hicks emerges from the bathroom with a pistol in each hand, startling his guests—a sort of movie cowboy. (Nick Nolte played him in a movie entitled Who'll Stop the Rain made from the book.) Later he deliberately overdoses a naive, unhip couple, leaving them for dead. Presumably their liberal cant made them deserving victims. Before meeting Converse, the only books that Hicks had ever finished were The Martian Chronicles and I, the Jury. Although he went on to Nietzsche—dabbling in it for 20 years—he demonstrates how much a little Nietzsche is a dangerous thing. Hicks is a pseudo intellectual, a self-styled mystic, multicultural only because he had an Asian wife once. Perhaps Hicks had been genuine in the past, in some hippy golden moment. He is described as someone for whom there had been no distinction “between thought and action” (269), an idea which seems positively dangerous considering the quality of his thoughts. Unlike Converse or Marge, there was no family tradition of politics, no intellectual soil, however meager, to nourish him. Seemingly the man in charge, more savvy than Converse, he leaves a sickening trail of corpses behind him.

A Flag for Sunrise provides a panoply of men and women on the left who have lost their way. Sister Justin, “the earnest nun” (5) has lost faith, and now wants nostalgically some sense of political purpose. She remembers the civil rights movement in Mississippi, where she spent a night in jail, and reads To the Finland Station. She is ready to die uselessly—which she does—for the cause. Father Egan, “the voice of the Christian humanist in a vicious world” (15-16) is ready for alcohol rehab. He works to convert evil—to substitute his voice for an evil one—and fails. Evil remains intractable. A central American anthropologist, Oscar Ocampo, has abandoned career and politics to take up with a pretty boy, and now—subject to blackmail in this macho Latino culture—is ready to serve as a tool for the right. He “used to be a Marxist-Leninist, but now he's a hippie,” (79) says his lover. Yet it is Holliwell who is the most curious and represents Stone's most extensive development of the phenomenon.

To understand Holliwell, it is worth retracing the reader's introduction to him. His storyline comes second in the novel, after the incredible introductory episode where Campos uncovers in his freezer for Father Egan a Canadian girl he has killed, forces Egan to hear his confession, and then leaves the priest to dispose of the body at sea. The reader encounters Holliwell in midwinter, mid-Atlantic suburbia where one morning he drinks one and then another Bloody Mary for breakfast before driving to New York on the first leg of a journey to Compostella (a mythical central American country) where he has been invited as an anthropologist to lecture. En route he hears on a country-western radio station a shamefully sentimental story of a high school football player who plays an inspired second half because he had learned during half-time of his blind father's death and realized suddenly: “It's the first time he's seen me play.” Holliwell, fatherless, is overcome and pulls to the edge of the road, sobbing. “So much for morning drinking” (17). The exposition continues in a Brooklyn bar where he drinks through lunch with Nolan, a friend from high school who works now for the CIA. Nolan wants Holliwell to spy on a Catholic mission in Compostella's neighbor, Tecan. Holliwell refuses, but the reader learns he had done such work earlier in Vietnam, a practice anthropologists condemn. After lunch he checks into a Manhattan hotel, sends out for a bottle of scotch, jokes over the phone with his wife about going to Eighth Avenue for some ＄20 fellatio, and reminisces about a New York Jew who taught him the Internationale and might be his actual father. In his old age, this man became racist, despising the black youths of his neighborhood. The reader returns to Holliwell later at the Miami Airport where he is still inebriated. He embarks for Compostella where subsequently he presents an extemporaneous, drunken lecture before an outraged audience, a performance which provokes telephoned death threats.

What does this exposition show? That Holliwell, while cynical, can also be sentimental, that drinking softens him up, that he has a moral sensibility but it has been compromised, that he opposes the moral posture of the CIA and its lackeys, and that he is lonely. It is also a travel narrative, turning on the vulnerabilities of the wanderer, in particular, the drunken wanderer. Each landscape, from the winter marshes of Delaware to Manhattan towers, from the Miami Airport, with its third world connections, to a first world hotel in a third world country, is rendered with all the curious detail of travel writing. Step by step the reader follows an exposed, besotted man who faces death threats with the only armor he can find, the bottle. He chooses the discomforts of travel, as if needing an objective correlative of his inner state. Although it may leave a hangover, his identitylessness seems daring, as if he were celebrating the bizarre sort of freedom Derrida describes.

In Dog Soldiers, Stone makes a connection between Converse's vulnerability—his personal fears—and his politics; he is simply too frightened to be viable. In A Flag for Sunrise, Stone takes us into the intersection of the individual and the political, demonstrating how Holliwell's personal sense of absence debilitates him. He joins Converse, Marge, and Hicks, a whole world of characters who have something missing, a private emptiness. Unlike Sister Justin, who appears to Holliwell to be at home in the world, he lives in a state of existential dread; he pretends he knows too much, sees too deeply to be like some people who act on conviction. This sense of dread is the common factor among Robert Stone's decadent leftists. Like Converse, who chose Vietnam and the dangers of running dope, Holliwell chooses dread and danger, as if he deserved it. They deliberately push off from the green and docile security of what Ishmael calls an “insular Tahiti” to explore the ambiguous darkness lurking off shore. For example, Holliwell literally leaves the shore to dive off a coral reef where earlier, unbeknownst to him, the Canadian girl's body had been buried at sea. The body never appears, but Holliwell senses something down there—“a terror had struck the sea, an invisible shadow, a silence within a silence” (227). The moment haunts him. It is an epiphany which stands at the center of the novel. Whatever is out there seems to be evil, or the evidence of evil. But what has he actually perceived? Is it out there or in him? As Naftali tells Pablo, “There are reefs outside, Pablo. And reefs inside—within the brain of the diver” (256). Holliwell never knows what to do with such knowledge. Perhaps he longs for a palpable exterior evil in order to assuage his sense of meaninglessness. Then there would at least be an opposition.

So among these ambiguities, the haunting possibility of a malevolent force striking terror in the sea is evidently more comforting than the suggestion that there is nothing there at all. After murdering Pablo, Holliwell, sunk deeper in his despair, faces the ultimate fear, that evil is nonexistent. “He, Holliwell, was things. There was nothing better. The absence of evil was the greatest horror” (437). To Holliwell what terrifies is that there is no history, no evil, simply the blank thingness of the universe. “We look at us. The thing looks at itself” (439).

Still, for the reader, Holliwell seems mistaken about evil's absence. The stench of evil is too sensible a presence here and in other Stone fiction; it is the fragrance which draws one to him. Before such evil, however, the decadent leftist falters; he fails to acknowledge it, fails to distinguish it from goodness, fails to deal with it. Stone defines this failure in part as a problem of the ambiguity of circumstances. For example, when Sister Justin succumbs to Campos's blows, we feel evil as something palpable. Seemingly Campos knows it too, but he is able to rationalize that she must be the evil: “‘She herself didn't know how evil she was’” (433). He projects surely; Campos is guilty enough again to seek confession, just as he had after murdering the Canadian girl. Yet Stone questions her action as well, since her “articulate delusions” gave birth to a “terrible beauty” wherein peasant bodies are piled, “swelling in the sun” (414). There are other evil forces, for example the child murderer, Weitling, who is so ghastly that even depraved and fatuous Pablo is repulsed by him. Egan works to grant penance to the unrepentant youth, as if his impotent religion could surmount Weitling's derangement. As an ironic consequence, he enables Weitling to continue. Since Weitling is a serial killer of children, he may be the evil we seek, but then again his conduct appears to be a matter of brain chemicals and not the Demiurge. Another exemplar of malevolence is Pablo, the “vicious and stupid” man (253) who perhaps merits being Holliwell's ultimate victim. Around him, Holliwell feels cornered by “his own personal devil” (421). Indeed next to Pablo, the professorial Holliwell seems a solid citizen. One morning, surging on speed, Pablo takes his dogs for a walk on the beach when—his mind's eye “flashing him shit—death's heads, swastikas, the ace of spades” (64)—he shoots them. Are these flashes Satanic or simply benzedrine? In this ensemble, there are also gun-running mercenaries, the Callahans, Pablo's ill-fated victims, who seem as cold and valueless as any villains in modern fiction. Few mourn their deaths, since it is hard to regard them as human. Both Pablo and Mrs. Callahan, like insects who eat their sexual partners, thrive on sex with a person who will imminently die by their hand.

With all these, Stone's apparent theme goes beyond the failure of left-wing humanism to an indictment of the currently fashionable left-wing rejection of humanism. In the face of real evil, how can anyone who treats language as absence and identity as a sentimental myth recognize evil's potence and familiarity? With the definition of evil, and simultaneously the definition of humanity, obscured, moral distinctions can no longer be drawn. In addition to this betrayal of the intellectuals—and who knows, maybe the same forces which invented deconstruction created Holliwell—the historical causes of this moral failure are many: the failure of ideological systems, the erosion of sustaining culture by consumerism, and the ethical chaos of the Vietnam era.

Thus Holliwell's own loss of humanity leaves us with an ambiguous perspective on the novel's other characters. As one of the novel's centers of consciousness, his ruminations fail to provide the reader with a focused point of view. He may disapprove of the CIA's mission, or the role played by U.S. Diplomats in “American sponsored” shitholes of buttressing the ruling class and training counterinsurgency forces, but he has no solution but to “cauterize” his pain with drink. Thus he becomes part of the problem. As Justin describes his perspective, “despair and giving up are like liquor” to him (388). Qualitatively there may be little difference between Stone's decadent leftists and the worst slime. Just as Rudolph Hoess and Buddy and Olga reside in the same world, Converse and double-dealing drug agents share a moral universe. Like Pablo who wants to fuck a woman and then kill her, Holliwell makes love to Justin and subsequently betrays her. While Pablo is an idiot who believes his murder spree is fated, a fulfilling of divine will, Holliwell is brilliant, and his murder spree—the betrayal of Justin, the stabbing of Pablo—is merely a matter of survival. Were Stone identifiably a left-wing artist, he might portray all of his villains as utterly other, as he seems to do with Campos, the fascist, or with the Callahans, the mercenaries, but many of his characters wriggle outside of any left to right moral positioning and appear decadent in ways indistinguishable from Holliwell. For example, the Englishman, Heath, whose interest in banana republics is imperialist, has a sophistication which resembles Holliwell's. He also can identify the moral shortcomings of others, but he comes down firmly on the pro-American, anti-democratic side, or, so to speak, on the side of Campos.

As someone hopeless and faithless, Holliwell is impotent against those who seem more depraved than he. He betrays Justin's confidence because, like Converse, he finds it “strange to see people who believed in things and acted according to what they believed” (101). A self described liberal, he regards Marxism as “a naive invocation of a verbal machine” (110), the very words that Stone has used, yet there appears to be no system of values to put in its place. While believing it wrong for anthropologists to gather intelligence for the CIA, he abstained when his professional organization voted to condemn the practice because he felt compromised by his work in Vietnam. Would not Holliwell always be already compromised? Characteristically, while he is against America's role in Central America, he foils the revolution designed to put an end to it, remaining a passive agent of those forces which have held him in tow. Certainly he admires Justin's commitment to the revolution: “He had been awed and moved at the measure of her courage and her delusion” (408); nevertheless, he implicates her.

He summarizes his own activities as “the business of his dry spirit” (140). Alienated from his family, which from a distance appears solid enough, a loving wife and two daughters, Holliwell's anthropological research is, nevertheless, about families. His acknowledged business in life “was to husband and father, to teach, even to inspire, and to endure. These things were not trivial” (245). Still he collapses before despair and becomes incapable of sustained relations with others. He has been only an observer, spending his life

hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate. That was his relationship with the world. And he himself—more and more losing touch with the family he had made, a bastard of no family origin, no blood or folk. A man from another planet forever inquiring of helpful strangers the nature of their bonds with one another.

(166)

Nevertheless, Holliwell's observations are often brilliant. For example, he has insight enough to indict Uncle Sam for his shameless marketing of American popular culture (Mickey Mouse seeing us dead); that is, America's hawking of consumer trash which supplants indigenous cultures. “Our popular culture is machine made and it's for sale to anyone who can raise the cash and the requisite number of semi-literate consumers” (108). We recognize here that another cause of Holliwell's seeming lack—his missing something—is a particularly American malady; as a substitute for a deeper, richer culture, America buys and sells mass-produced, cheaply made consumer trash. To Holliwell and Stone, whatever might be good about our culture (our “secret culture,” 110) cannot be exported.

On the subject of history, another of Stone's thematic concerns, Holliwell is particularly professorial. He tells Justin, “God doesn't work through history … That's a delusion of the Western mind” (387). Justin responds that his idea is too abstract to follow. Yet actually it is Holliwell who rejects all abstract notions of how history works. Caught between Christian eschatology and the Marxist belief in an inevitable proletarian revolution, Holliwell regards history as purposeless. Stone's decadent protagonists see neither place nor purpose for themselves in history. Thus Holliwell's conclusion, “A man has nothing to fear … who understands history” (439) affirms that the absence of meaning in history takes us beyond hope, and thus beyond fear.⁹ Yet this very nothing may be a void that provokes fear. While Holliwell may feel at home at the conclusion, his resignation is anything but mellow.

Holliwell is a compellingly disillusioned cynic whose sloganeering captivates, as if the art of language might soften the pain of his attachment to despair, or as if clarity could provide an antidote, yet his words are but another opiate. After knifing Pablo and throwing him over-board, he speaks of “the Abridgment of Hope.” When about to be saved, he tells his rescuers, “The eye you see it with … is the one that sees you back,”¹⁰ a sentence with a variety of meanings which for some, but not Holliwell, provides divine insight. Finally, Holliwell concludes, “He had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it” (425), as if life were excrement. Holliwell speaks cleverly even when he cannot see clearly.

Yet perhaps Stone would rather nurture a revelation than a revolution. The discredited leftist perspective is ultimately supplanted by the mystical visions of others. Stone hints at religious insight. Father Egan conjures up the lotus within the flower, the soul within the body, an immanent principle of virtue which speaks to us. In her moment of death, Justin feels the divine in the brief interlude between shocks: “then something began to come. … stronger than the strong, stronger than love.” The “trickster” Christ gives her the last word, which she thrusts at her murderer, a final divine joke: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (416).

Ultimately we must conclude that while Holliwell may be central to this story—the decadent leftist with which Stone is characteristically concerned—he is not the only option. Justin dies tragically but ecstatically, believing she serves a greater good. Other revolutionary figures seem to know and to act in ways beyond Holliwell's desperation. Ortega, the proposed leader for after the revolution (Is he Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega?) is also a cynic, knowing that they will “dispense life to some and death to others in the name of a form of humanity which for all we know may never exist” (210), yet he works to bring justice to his “accursed suffering country.” “Hombre,” Ortega said, “there is no Jesus Christ. There is no philosophy in a shack or in the gutter. There is not yet even such a thing as the People. There are only poor creatures like you and me, my comrade—and we propose to bring these things about. We propose unto death” (210). Here is a cause worth dying for.

Left alone with Holliwell at the end, it is impossible to recommend his well constructed cynicism and despair. He is a cowardly, unfit survivor. The conclusion offers none of Melville's consolations, neither Ahab's nobility in fighting Job-like against meaninglessness nor Ishmael's cautious recognition that while there is a “wisdom that is woe, there is a woe that is madness.”¹¹ We seem to be left only with the madness. Evil appears real and powerful in these books, yet it also eludes us. It is everywhere and impossible to pin down. How really can Holliwell go on? Wallowing in such evil would be salutary only if he were ultimately to transcend it.

The book takes us to the heart of an American dilemma. In the end it is not about latino revolutionaries but about Americans. Stone's American left-wing figures are aware, articulate, marginalized, and unhappy. In America after Vietnam, positive political action seems impossible, an attitude now reinforced by post modern, post structuralist intellectual fashion. The intellectual left has undermined any notion of viable being or positive action. For Stone, two mechanical, murderous forces—armies that clash by night—exist, one unconscious and inhumane—the right, and the other all too highly conscious yet no longer able to assert its humanity—the left. Americans like Marge, Converse, and Holliwell, act in futility, as if meaningful political action were an impossibility.

Notes

1. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” (11.7-8). Yeats, however, saw the problem from the right, the best being those who represent tradition, while the left was being taken over by extremists. For Stone, it is the left which has lost conviction.

2. A Flag for Sunrise (New York, Knopf, 1981), 207. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses.

3. Robert Stone, “Me and the Universe,” TriQuarterly, 65 (Winter 1986), 229-234. Elsewhere Stone reacts strongly to “nineteenth century prescriptions” such as Marxism being applied to the twentieth century (“East-West Relation,” Harper's 279 [Nov. 1989]: 64). He dislikes the ultimatums of ideologues who call for “socialism or death,” wondering over gentler alternatives “Why not socialism or less socialism?” (“Havana Then and Now,” Harper's 284 [Mar. 1992]: 45).

4. John Leonard, “Leviathan,” Nation (April 13, 1992): 489. Leonard, reviewing Outerbridge Reach in this article, identifies better than any other Stone critic his characteristic concerns.

5. See Robert Solotaroff, Robert Stone (New York: Twayne, 1995) for lengthy discussion of Stone's gnosticism. The absence of God and the presence of some “malign deity,” (65) characterize a world where political people are atheists in terms of God, but capable of believing in a seemingly supernatural evil force.

6. Dog Soldiers (New York: Ballantine, 1973), 9. Subsequent quotations will be given with the page number in parentheses.

7. See Frank Shelton, “Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers: Vietnam Comes Home to America,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24:2 (Winter 1983): 74-81 for a different treatment of the Vietnam theme.

8. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Bobbs, 1964): 364. On the last page of Chapter 58, “Brit,” Ishmael warns us that there are grave dangers in acquiring knowledge of that undersea world of cannibalism which surrounds one's insular Tahiti of selfhood. The problem of knowledge in Stone's work and in Moby Dick is that certain horrors of existence seem to be more than the human spirit can bear.

9. Stone provides a variety of other theories of history. For Latin American revolutionaries history is personified as a “cold bitch” (210), but she is real; for Bob Cole, a journalist seeking to report the truth who is tried and killed as a spy, history is the arena in which truth and justice will be revealed; for Naftali, history is an enigmatic force that “will turn you around every time” (253).

10. Among possible readings for this line are Father Egan's transcendentalist idea that the soul's eye and God's eye are one and the same, Pablo's insane projection of his demented vision as being a divine vision, and Holliwell's empty sense that there is nothing out there, that the eye looking outward and the eye looking at us represent the same blankness. In Holliwell's case, there may also be the sense of the eye being a mirror which reflects his narcissistic preoccupations.

11. Ishmael reaches this conclusion after discovering the dangers of knowledge (543).

Works Cited

Leonard, John. “Leviathan.” Nation 254 (1992): 489+.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Bobbs, 1964.

Solotaroff, Robert. Robert Stone. New York: Twayne, 1995.

Stone, Robert. Children of Light. New York: Knopf, 1986.

———. Dog Soldiers. New York: Ballantine, 1973.

———. “East-West Relation.” Harper's 279 Nov. 1989: 63+.

———. A Flag for Sunrise. New York: Knopf, 1981.

———. Hall of Mirrors. New York: Viking, 1987.

———. “Havana Then and Now.” Harper's 284 Mar. 1992: 35+.

———. “Me and the Universe.” TriQuarterly 65 (1986): 229-234.

———. Outerbridge Reach. New York: Ticknor, 1992.

Shelton, Frank. “Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers: Vietnam Comes Home to America.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24.2 (1983): 74-81.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956, 184.