Robert Stone's 1986 novel Children of Light takes place mostly on a movie set—a Mexican location where a screen adaptation of Kate Chopin's The Awakening is in long-delayed production. Stone's narrative focuses on Gordon Walker, the screenwriter who adapted Chopin's novel and then waited a decade for production until “The book was discovered by academics and declared a feminist document” (11). The novel opens with Walker having just finished a summer stock gig playing King Lear. Making sure we recognize Walker—like characters and narrators in all of Stone's novels—as a votary of literature, Stone's narrator comments that Walker's Lear role left him “still up on Lear-ness, chockablock with cheerless dark and deadly mutters, little incantations from the text” (6). In a 1991 interview, Stone called the Lear passage that Walker here recalls—the “unaccommodated man” speech—“the absolute center of Shakespeare and of the English language. … the center of all English literature. … a great light … an electric discovery” (Interview). Between Stone's flipness as a narrator and his reverence as an interviewee lies the ground that Stone's recent and, in many obvious ways, self-consciously literary novels evoke and explore. Immersed in such canonic literariness, Walker arrives on the set well into the action of the novel and well into the shooting of his script. Approaching the location along a mountainous coast road, he stops his car on a promontory that puts him within binocular viewing distance of the filming of the end of Chopin's novel, where Chopin's heroine drowns herself off Louisiana's Grand Isle. Operating, as he does in all of his novels, as a limited omniscient narrator, Stone directs his protagonist's and his readers' attention not so much to what Walker sees but to what Walker wants to see. What he wants to see Stone names “poetry”:

He saw a woman in an old-fashioned gray bathing suit walking toward the water. …

… He saw her walk on, remove her bathing suit and stand naked and golden in the sun. He was seeing, he supposed, what he had come to see.

… tiny distant figures at the edge of an ocean, acting out a vision compounded of his obsessions and emotions. … He felt at the point of understanding the process in which his life was bound, as though the height on which he stood was the perspective he had always lacked. Will I understand it all now, he wondered, understand it with the eye, like a painting?

The sense of discovery, of imminent insight excited him. … that's poetry, he thought.

(129)

Readers of the traditional English-language canon will recognize how much Walker's expectation here rests on the promise of revelation or epiphany that has legitimated our most lasting poetry and prose fiction over the past two centuries. Joyce's “epiphany” or “sudden spiritual manifestation. … the most delicate and evanescent of moments” and Wordsworth's “spots of time” when “our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired” come to mind. Such “spots” also enable Wordsworth's privileged observers “to mount when high, more high.” This imagery reverberates in the very siting of Walker's sense of discovery, on an elevated prospect that—according to convention—makes unprecedented, privileged insight inevitable. Stone also prompts literary-minded readers to recognize the most venerable commonplace Wordsworth exploited. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” elevation and retrospect authorize the poet to claim “the power” to “see into the life of things.” Even the simile for revelation that Stone ascribes to Walker—“like a painting”—echoes the ideal of transcendent revelation that Wordsworth promoted a decade after “Tintern Abbey” in his “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle.” Here the poet works off a painting of an English seaside castle and muses on what he might have produced “if mine had been the Painter's hand, / To express what then I saw.” Wordsworth's desiderata include “the gleam, / The light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration, and the Poet's dream.” But instead of “consecration” or revelation, Walker begins to suspect that “perhaps it was not poetry. … only movies” (129) and, in a turn more reminiscent of the self-suspecting Keats than the self-satisfying Wordsworth, acknowledges that “It had been just like a dream … the same disappearing resolution, the same awakening to the same old shit. … a moment's poetry, a moment's movies” (130).

Stone has devoted his three most recent novels—Outerbridge Reach (1992), Children of Light (1986), A Flag for Sunrise (1981)—to exploring this impasse, where poetry succumbs to the “same old shit,” where literary sensibility and judgment fail, where the question the actress for whom Walker adapts The Awakening asks—“is there a place for art?” (230)—prompts an assured “no.” But Stone's reputation as one of the most eminently literary novelists now working belies or at least complicates this answer.

My argument concerns efforts by Stone and by writers who share his agenda to address this question. Their work evokes conditions that make “no” seem like the ready answer, but also produces conditions that make “yes” seem like a possible answer. Stone's fiction and related work by Thom Jones, Marilynne Robinson, and Don DeLillo strive to make a place for the art we customarily call literature or “poetry.” Stone's last two novels also enact this struggle by evoking familiar aspects of the literary mind as it resists, when possible, and, more often, accommodates itself to industrialized culture, which conditions both the production and consumption of literature.

The donnée for Children of Light, the filming of The Awakening, links two familiar but seldom associated targets of jeremiadic commentary, two familiar forms of cultural production. The filming, Stone's narrator dryly reports, resulted from a meretricious alliance of Hollywood commerce and academic humanities, the institution supposedly charged with sustaining “poetry,” though often accused of trashing it in recent accounts. But the initial impetus for Walker's script involved the conviction of two artists, a writer and an actress:

Long ago, during their time together, Lu Anne had given him Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening. … a favorite of hers. He had written a script, and every day of its writing she had been with him or in his expectation, so that when the principal character of Edna Pontellier was defined in scene and dialogue, Lu Anne inhabited it utterly. In those days they had dreamed of doing it together but it had not turned out that way.

Time passed. The book was discovered by academics and declared a feminist document. Lu Anne had acquired a new agent, who was vigorous, female, and literate. About a year and a half before Walker had committed for the Seattle Lear, ten years after his last revision of the script and six since his last conversation with Lu Anne, a package had been put together. …

… One of the majors was induced to finance and distribute. It was all perceived as prestigious, timely and cheap.

(11-12)

The nouns “document” and “package” confound the canonic status of Chopin's 1899 novel by calling to mind two kinds of shopworn cultural criticism: highbrow attacks on commercial Hollywood moviemaking and reactionary censures of academic literary studies as trendy rather than timeless. An exchange between Walker and his (male) agent a few pages later illustrates the trouble with regarding The Awakening as a “package.” Stone here stresses the glibly, often comically corrupt director's “concern over the feminist perspective” in the novel and the way “He wanted a writing credit. Not for some broad—for him” (18). A recent interview with Marilynne Robinson adumbrates the problem with regarding Chopin's novel as a “document.” One of Stone's few peers among contemporary novelists for sheer literariness, Robinson calls familiar political readings of The Awakening a “misunderstanding.” She objects to “the idea that art should be something that either documents or illustrates thinking that is carried on by other people for other reasons at other levels” (244). “Other people” and “other levels” pit the novelist against perceived efforts in the academy and the mass marketplace (where “the majors” predominate) to exploit literary work and industrialize literariness.

Stone's brief mention of Lu Anne's agent hints, however, at the possibility of resisting this exploitation and challenging the package/document Hobson's choice that our culture-making institutions usually offer. This agent occupies both subversive and traditionalist positions. Mixing insider savvy with insurgent motives and armed only with vigor and literacy, she works from within a discredited Hollywood apparatus to rescue literary achievement and artistic will. She also works effectively in the wake of what Jay Clayton heralds as “the disappearance of the old Romantic notion of the masterpiece” and a renewed appreciation of “anonymity” as salutary cultural developments (30). Less sanguinely than Clayton, Stone's rendering of Hollywood acknowledges this condition that mass culture and literary production have come to share. In Children of Light this residual “Romantic notion” yields to the notion of literature as salvageable package, as compromised document, as stressful collaboration. Into the universe Stone's novel evokes, where exploitation and self-congratulation prevail, Stone introduces an “agent” who draws on two discredited culture-making institutions to produce—however much compromised—“a place for art,” an opportunity for “poetry.” Stone has his characters fail to make good on this opportunity over the course of the story. But Stone doesn't completely deny Walker—or himself—such an opportunity. Instead he allows precariously for the persistence of such opportunities inasmuch as Children of Light itself rehearses such an effort.

Stone's account of how Chopin's novel moved from academe to a major studio pays close attention to the means of cultural production, the manufacture of narratives and images. It also calls attention to the role personal agency and gender play in such production. Children of Light predictably prompted critics to add it to the canon of dark Hollywood classics including The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon (see Balliet 105; Rich 32; R. Solotaroff 121). But more quietly Stone complicates the relationship between Hollywood itself and the lasting literary production Hollywood exploits (Chopin's work) and provokes (West's and Fitzgerald's). This complication lies in Stone's reference to the role academic literary criticism played in bringing The Awakening to Hollywood. Stone pushes past the familiar “creative writing” party line, the self-congratulatory revivalism that reviles academic understandings of fiction and poetry as the work of “culture vultures” (see Atwood 44; Cheuse 499; Gossman 28). Beyond this easy opposition Stone engages theoretical and historical questions that usually occupy academic critics more deliberately than the novelists who honor this divide allow themselves to be occupied. Entering this fray from the academic side, Elaine Showalter recruits Stone for her feminist “sister's choice” canon, praising the theoretical suppleness of Stone's “dialog with Chopin” and his pioneering efforts to move The Awakening from the ghetto she calls “the academic canon” into the mainstream of literary practice, where novels actually get made, theory gets practiced, and, among the most compelling practitioners, practice gets theorized (84).¹ Such efforts reverberate even more strikingly in the “game of relentless Shakespearianizing” Stone has his protagonists play throughout Children of Light (120), most notably in the encounter between Lear—Walker's defining role—and Rosalind in As You Like It, the high point of Lu Anne's acting career.

Stone's theoretical deliberateness becomes especially striking when we read Children of Light and Stone's 1992 novel Outerbridge Reach as part of a continuing critical project. In Outerbridge Reach Stone elaborates on the opportunity Children of Light left precariously open. The attention characters in both novels pay to canonic works and to extra-academic culture industries, to their own literary and artistic aspirations, to the pains and pleasures of performance all underscore Stone's engagement with the most vexing current theoretical question among literary academics: What makes literature literary? As Gordon Walker's failure to find or make poetry even at the most auspiciously Wordsworthian moment indicates, poetry synecdochically stands for literature and literariness in Stone's fiction. As a counterpoint to this will-to-poetry, Stone pits his well-read main characters against other readers, who find poetry all too easily. Stone stages this contest in both novels. Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach contain remarkably similar passages in which characters argue over the merits of poetry widely regarded as minor or vulgar. When Lu Anne in Children of Light finds herself repeating Longfellow's line “This is the forest primeval,” she turns to Walker and asks, “Gordon, do you know how long it took me to understand that Evangeline was not a good poem?” (196). (The host of the television quiz show Jeopardy provided an index of the compelling consensus Lu Anne escapes when at the end of 1994 he pronounced Evangeline “one of the great poems in American literature.”) Even though readers have seen her deranged for much of the novel, Lu Anne's literary and artistic conversations up to this point (77, 90-91, 120) have been cogent and erudite enough for readers to pause over her claim here to have reached a hard-earned understanding of how poetry works and what makes it “good.” Lu Anne's literary judgment seems consequently to carry enough authorial authority to challenge readers to consider their own valuations of Longfellow, their own criteria of poetic value.

This understanding turns on a more obscure poem and its recent oratorical history in Outerbridge Reach. Here an exchange over “High Flight,” John Gillespie Magee, Jr.'s inspirational Petrarchan sonnet on piloting his Spitfire in 1941 during the Battle of Britain, provides a similar occasion (241). During the 1980s, between the publications of Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach, this poem took on partisan political resonance as an affirmation of the Reaganism that Stone satirizes in Outerbridge Reach. Stone's critique also belongs to the broader Conradian preoccupation with empire and state power (documented by John McClure in Late Imperial Romance) that pervades Stone's writing.

Both “High Flight” and the exchange it prompts illustrate Stone's antagonism to and fascination with “the politicization of spirituality” (McClure 109). This politicization lies in the opening lines, “I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings,” and in the ensuing argument between two Navy fliers over Ronald Reagan's and speechwriter Peggy Noonan's use of these lines to mourn the space shuttle astronauts killed in a 1986 explosion (Noonan 9, 258-59). The narrator warns us that Lieutenant Conley, the younger pilot, “believed in inspirational moments” (240). But the other flier, a forty-something Annapolis English professor and former Vietnam POW named Buzz Ward, argues for resisting such moments: “The pilot in me rejoices. But the English teacher insists it's not a good poem” (241). The last word in this exchange goes to neither warrior. It goes to Anne Browne, a friend of Ward's and the wife of his Annapolis classmate Owen Browne, whose participation in an around-the-world sailing race provides the novel with its plot: “‘How can you arrogantly sit there,’ Anne asked, ‘with people so moved by a poem and insist it's no good? You really are an English teacher’” (241). With the term “English teacher,” Stone evokes the condition I want to describe provisionally as literariness, which contains, sympathetically acknowledges, and ultimately dismisses the claims of both the line fanciers and the inspiration seekers. Though this exchange seems pointedly to divide readers on the basis of what they read for, it negates such schematic divisions inasmuch as Stone identifies English professor Ward with both positions, appreciating yet suspecting—warily embracing—both kinds of response.

While some readers in the interpretive communities Stone depicts read for “inspirational moments,” others, like the Hollywood insiders who swap Shakespeare quotations at the end of Children of Light, cruise the canon for “great lines”:

“Sweet are the uses of adversity.” Jack asked, “That's As You Like It, right?”

“That's it,” she said. She put her handkerchief away. “Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

“Great line,” Jack Glenn said.

(258)

This “great line” perspective points to the most durable form of cultural capital the canon has to offer, its residue of quotability. Shakespeare, the superlative cultural capitalist, still claims the lion's share of this residue, as Gary Taylor argues:

Shakespeare was consciously a quotable writer, whose phrases were made to be memorable. He worked in a repertory system that stood on mutability and variation, with many new plays, frequent revivals, short runs and little rehearsal time. He wanted each overworked poor player to remember his sweet and honeyed sentences, so he made them as sticky as possible.

(1)

Taylor's snappy appraisal elaborates Herman Melville's adaptation of Robert Greene's famous image of Shakespeare as an “upstart crow,” Melville's own earthy reminder that Shakespeare was a modern entrepreneur, a junior partner in “the shrewd, thriving firm of Condell, Shakespeare, & Co.” (543). Taylor flatters the worldliness of professional readers—actors, English professors, novelists—and invites skepticism and even condescension toward centuries of venerating the Bard as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and consolation.

This permeable divide between inspiration seekers and eloquence aficionados extends beyond a writer's understanding of who he or she is writing for to the ways in which reading generates writing. Stone's 1981 novel, A Flag for Sunrise, set the stage for this contest by playing to the line relishers' “weakness for gangsters … who quote Shakespeare, Yeats and Oscar Wilde,” according to reviewer Michael Wood (34). In one such passage, Stone shows two perpetually drunk and stoned gunrunners bickering professorially over and mistakenly conflating two “great lines,” one from Hamlet and the other from Lear. Here, where Dirty Harry seems to meet David Lodge's Morris Zapp, Stone demonstrates how literary language is constructed. This exchange shows how, in John Guillory's account, literary language “forms at the interface between the language of preserved literary texts and the context-bound speech that continually escapes total regulation and hence changes” (67):

Callahan grinned with adolescent mischief and winked at his wife.

“If it be now, 'tis not to come,” he declared. “If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

“Ripeness,” Deedee Callahan said.

“It's readiness, Dee.” …

“I like ripeness better,” Deedee said.

“You like it,” Callahan said, “because it's sexier.”

(223)

More pleasure-centered than Guillory's, Robert Alter's view of what makes language literary seems even more apt here: “literature is remarkable for its densely layered communication, its capacity to open up multifarious connections and multiple interpretations,” “encouraging … a balancing act between different possible construals … the high fun of the act of communication” (28, 30). The Callahans' prosier confederate, Negus, interrupts their highbrow banter to admonish them and Stone's readers against “fucking around for kicks.” A reviewer of the novel whose academic criticism has been preeminently alert to such moments of extemporizing attention to “sounds and movements in the English language that carr[y] with them traces of a … community of assumptions,” Richard Poirier, proposes a clarifying reading of this mock allusiveness (Renewal 119). Poirier reads this earnest, earthy interruption as Stone's communicating “an utterly cool preference for wit at the expense of argument” (“Intruders” 39). Poirier's opposing pair—wit and argument—seems to parallel the division between line lovers and inspiration seekers, the censorious distinction with which Professor Buzz Ward outrages Anne Browne.

Anne Browne and Lieutenant Conley and Negus represent the readers Lionel Trilling solicitously worried about a generation ago in his essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.” He named them the true believers in “the Old Faith” who “take refuge first in misunderstood large phrases” and end up “in general incoherence” (26). Such readers achieve as compensations for reading neither the pleasures of wit and the frissons of form nor the reassurance of argument and the consolations of inspiration. In an inventory of Anne's “canon,” Stone evokes both the desire that the true believer's Spartan reading produces and the impoverishment it yields:

Girl we couldn't get much higher. Gonna set the night on fire.

Of course, they had no right to the songs. …

What did we know? she thought. The Notre Dame fight song. The words to “Dover Beach.” … Brideshead Revisited, for the first time since college. The New Jerusalem Bible with its Tolkien translation of Genesis. … Life and Death in Shanghai. Minna Hubbard's memoir of crossing Labrador. … [with an] adoring dedication to her lost Leonidas, the strenuously living, doomed, obedient Spartan.

(220)

Stone opens this catalogue of Anne's cultural capital with lines from the Doors song “Light My Fire,” a sharp contrast to the mostly literary or at least bookish items that follow. The inclusion of a Doors lyric seems at first a bit of casual atmospherics. But it resonates suggestively with Stone's critique of Hollywood in Children of Light and his work as a polemicist in the early 1990s. It also belongs to the perennial postsixties tension that John McClure traces through Stone's work, a “dialogic playing out of these two tensed elements of the sixties counterculture: the commitment to liberating political struggle and the commitment to the kind of mystical quests undertaken by one wing of the drug culture” (89). When Outerbridge Reach was published, twenty-two years after his death, Doors lead writer Jim Morrison had become the mythic paragon of this “culture.” Hence the strenuously conventional Anne's unease over her right to the Doors bears particular consideration, since the 1992 publication of the novel followed closely the release of a movie entitled The Doors, written and directed by Oliver Stone. Early in 1994, in a New York Review of Books essay, Robert Stone attacked Oliver Stone's mythography as the reigning symptom of Hollywood's corrupt history-making. Robert Stone damned Oliver Stone as “a professional in the traditional Hollywood sense of the word,” like the moviemakers in Children of Light, “completely accepting of every traditional method of keeping the message uncontaminated by irony and complexity.” Along with Oliver Stone's JFK and his Vietnam trilogy, The Doors proved for Robert Stone that the “moviemaker was setting out to dramatize nothing less than the history of the second half of America's twentieth century”:

Those who did their best to be crazy in the sixties can find their fondest illusions confirmed in The Doors. … According to the film, the band and Jim Morrison were just as terrific, funny, trippy, and delightful as they imagined. Not only that, but they had their serious side; they read Blake and understood every word far better than their teachers and were really in touch with Native American symbols and traditions in this mystic way. Now, in The Doors, denizens of this period have their own official period movies, accepting the sixties entirely on its own terms, exactly as it would like to be remembered. … beautiful baloney … good show business.

(22)

Oliver Stone's fault, for Robert Stone, lies in his inflation of Doors lore into overvalued cultural capital, in the director's meretricious appeal to such impulses as Anne Browne seems susceptible to here, impulses that Anne must gratify elsewhere or not at all (since Stone set Outerbridge Reach in 1987, four years before release of The Doors).

Both the appeal of the Doors to Anne Browne and many others and the discrediting implications of their legacy that concern Stone reverberate in Thom Jones's 1993 story sequence The Pugilist at Rest, which Stone honors in selecting the title story for The Best American Short Stories, 1992. Jones seems as attuned as Oliver Stone to the idolatry that has surrounded the Doors since Jim Morrison's death in 1971 and features their songs and their enduring youth-culture cachet throughout the book, but at the same time he evokes the aspects of their legacy that the Hollywood version downplayed.

The preferred narrator throughout The Pugilist at Rest speaks in the first person and, according to one reviewer, keeps revealing to the reader some “ambiguous moral lesion” and the tension between “a licensed id and a fragile ego” (T. Solotaroff 256). In one story, “Break on Through,” which takes its title from a Doors song, the narrator reminisces about the reconnaissance platoon he served with in Vietnam. The platoon nicknamed itself after the same Doors song. The narrator focuses on a psychopath, a latecomer to the platoon, in ways that seem calculated to horrify. But he closes the story by mourning his comrade's death along with that of Jim Morrison, which he judges more memorable than JFK's death:

A few months after Break on Through rotated back to Pendleton, Baggit made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. He had barricaded himself for fourteen hours in a Salinas, California, beauty parlor with his estranged old lady before he shot her and shot himself. When the police got inside and found the bodies, a bag of heroin, narcotics paraphernalia, and a blood-stained Medal of Honor, Jim Morrison of the Doors was singing “The End.” … It was July 9, 1971, the day James Douglas Morrison's death had been revealed to the world and all you could hear on the radio waves were the Doors.

(64)

This narrator's “right” to the Doors, claimed with the mixture of his deadpan take on sordid self-destruction and his excessive formality in fully naming the lead Door, calls attention to his failings as a commentator and to the very value of the right he asserts, the very value of the Doors as his cultural capital.

Though it takes its title, “Rocket Man,” from an Elton John song, the last story in The Pugilist at Rest even more pointedly associates idolizing the Doors with a suspect, perhaps even mind-closing enthusiasm. Jones's critique comes across more clearly here because he works through a deliberating, adult, omniscient narrator, who recounts a rising young light-heavyweight's successful effort, apparently one of several, to move his guru trainer from his can-and-bottle-strewn trailer to a nearby hospital detox ward. One of the disciple's stratagems entails softening up his mentor with nostalgia, a memory of how they met, of how the young champ got his start: “The first time I saw you, I was walking home from school and you were in here punching the bag. You were playing the Doors, so I figured you had to be cool. … I had me a hero” (219-20). This reminiscence turns to self-congratulatory rhapsody when he declares his love of boxing and his independence from reality: “Hey, man, I'm like Peter Pan, I don't ever want to go back to reality” (220). This proclamation renders the older fighter unconscious and, in the narrator's words, leaves the Doors-loving young champ feeling “like a fool when he realized that his soliloquy would go unacknowledged.” Thom Jones covers the ground between Anne Browne's reluctant disclaimer of her right to a Doors song and her creator's severe disparagement of the Doors' legacy, especially in its Hollywood incarnation.

The acerbity with which the narrator inventories Anne's cultural capital, a Stone hallmark, reflects what Anne is up against in trying to educate herself away from susceptibility to packaged culture in general, “high” or “low.” Intimations of this struggle surface several chapters after this discordant inventory when Anne visits her husband's employer's Park Avenue apartment, with its “pale Chinese vases full of fresh flowers and a Raphael Soyer ballerina above the mantelpiece” (289). Stone's description becomes even denser with Veblenesque markers and archaeologically layered with cultural capital:

The apartment had been decorated by Thorne's late wife. It was his pied-à-terre … for evenings at the opera and the theater. …

“It's beautiful,” she said.

Harry seemed to be assessing the sincerity of her opinion. His eyes were bright. At first he had appeared cheerful but she shortly saw he was upset.

“The man I bought this place from,” Harry declared, “was well known. He believed in maxims.”

“Maxims?”

“This place was hung with maxims. Proverbs. Fables. Little tales of wisdom. Framed. Out of books. Out of Bartlett's. About the only book he owned.”

“I see.”

“Once I got a look at his corporation's prospectus. Each section began with a maxim. That was the mark of the guy.”

She laughed.

(289)

Anne's reactions constitute a critique of all this purchased culture and its authority. Her responses to Harry Thorne—feigning sincerity, upsetting and questioning the language of her VIP host, and ambiguously laughing—signal Anne's and the narrator's shared recognition of the value imputed to Thorne's impeccable taste and his predecessor's eccentric and eccentrically used cultural capital. Anne's comments and gestures mix accommodation and defiance. She evades while acknowledging an imperative to buy into the two tenants' valuations of their possessions. Anne's evasive acknowledgment leaves open the question of whether she laughs with Thorne at his predecessor's “great lines” or at Thorne's pride in his more tasteful acquisitions and interests and his condescension toward his eloquence-worshiping predecessor.

With its attention to Bartlett's and “maxims,” this passage underscores Stone's broader agenda. His animus toward the cultural acquisitiveness he evokes includes verbal masterworks, here the equivalent of more three-dimensional objets d'art. Poirier, a master in mapping “dramatized” failures in “the struggle for verbal consciousness” at moments of “cultural crises” (Poetry 50, 82), views this animus as part of an encompassing understanding of current literary history; hence he describes A Flag for Sunrise as a book resistant to traditional comforts, even the comfort of traditional eloquence, and concludes that Stone is a writer for whom “literature … no longer informs life and does not even provide, as it did for earlier writers, a resource for wry comments on contemporary decline” (“Intruders” 39). Both A Flag for Sunrise and Children of Light move Stone's craft and his readers to the point where such compensations are discredited and such resources are suspect, while Outerbridge Reach takes this impasse as its point of departure. Stone assigns the bulk of the “true believer” role to the failed global circumnavigator Owen Browne, a flack for a multinational yacht manufacturer, whose voyage becomes an occasion to explore the possibilities of constructing literature and recognizable literariness without relying on these resources. Numerous passages in the novel associate Browne with familiar notions of what it means to be literary. Colleagues characterize him variously as “grossly poetic” (11), as the “chief literary figure” in his office (38), as “a fucking wordsmith” (277), and as “speculating on weighty matters. The Big Picture” (397). Stone's narrator catalogues and describes the selection of books and tapes Browne sails with as “highbrow uplift. … Your basic Great Books for that desert island” (192). Such characterizations set Browne up as the consummate literary true believer, an earnest aesthete with an ear for the “great line,” who, two-thirds of the way into his story, expressly renounces reading (283) in favor of his own thoughts and both the consolations and provocations of evangelical radio broadcasts.

Stone's plot pits Browne against Ron Strickland, a documentary filmmaker commissioned by Browne's employers to record Browne's voyage, and a successful rival for Anne Browne's affections. Stone presents Strickland—practitioner of a decidedly nonliterary art, by traditional standards—as a literary figure when late in the novel a television executive describes him as a latter-day Keats, an artist who aspires relentlessly to deny himself the consolations of transcendence or sentimentality (325-26). As literary discussions among Stone's characters demonstrate, Stone, like Jones and Robinson, stresses this rigor as an aspiration rather than as an actually attainable condition.

At least one reviewer of Outerbridge Reach noted the temptation to identify Strickland with Stone on the basis of both their similar aesthetics and their identical initials (Edmundson 43). This conjectural correspondence not only allows for some latitude in reading Outerbridge Reach as a manifesto; it also confronts literary-minded readers—like Buzz Ward—with the failure or limits of the sort of hybrid, multimedia, hip yet rigorous art Strickland practices and represents. In a rigorously self-denying closing plot turn, Stone finally denies Strickland his working material. His film and tape footage, his production notes, his copies of Browne's logs, even his parking space have been stolen, and he's suffered a savage beating. The triumphant perpetrators, Stone suggests, are agents of true belief—true belief in so-called family values, the sort of “good housekeeping” Marilynne Robinson disparages in Housekeeping and in corporate beneficence. These agents sought to present Owen Browne as a hero and an upright citizen, an officer and a gentleman rather than an eccentric, a liar, and a capricious suicide. The fundamentalist reading habits that vexed Trilling, and around which I've been building my argument, can help explain Stone's challenge to the mass production and consumption of values. Stone's critique aligns the consumers of such products with readers who approach literature as true believers. This critique belongs to a broader movement in contemporary fiction. In passing, I've allied Stone with Marilynne Robinson and Thom Jones, producers of much smaller oeuvres, in their contending with industrialized fundamentalism and the annexation of literary production to this industrialization and to the managerial counterrevolution Stone challenges in Outerbridge Reach.

Among novelists whose output and longevity resemble Stone's, Don DeLillo stands out, in part because he expressly claims Stone as a comrade in “conscience” and craft in a recent Paris Review interview (290). Trilling's mantle of fundamentalism more literally fits the antagonists in DeLillo's most recent novel, Mao II, than in Stone's recent novels. Even more attuned to convergences between aesthetics and topical politics, Mao II shows a successful, long inactive novelist named Gray first overwhelmed and then roused to futile action by true believers. Such believers include a partly deprogrammed Moonie and an assistant who turns Gray himself into a cult object, just as the Andy Warhol silkscreen that gives the novel its title may mock or reinforce the iconization of the legendary Chinese revolutionary. When Gray sets out to take on another set of true believers, an Islamic militia in Beirut, DeLillo perhaps too pointedly gives Gray's crusade a decidedly literary dimension. The object of his quest is a hostage poet for whom Gray will offer to swap—to sacrifice—himself. The effort DeLillo depicts follows and puts to the test the program for staging the move of an artist from private to public life—for “Extending oneself into the public realm … to deal with the absence of action”—that Stone recently described in a forum on American fiction (Boyers 65). Both Mao II and Outerbridge Reach promote the legitimation of literature as resistant or at least antagonistic to true belief. Not surprisingly, both books came out in the wake of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, whose shadow hovers conspicuously over DeLillo's novel, though perhaps more ominously and insidiously over Stone's, where the promoters and pursuers of true belief talk and dress like us aspiring resisters, study in the same schools, listen to the same songs, watch the same movies, read the same books and newspapers. Rushdie's post-fatwa credo, a 1990 lecture entitled “Is Nothing Sacred?” spells out the desideratum that Mao II and Outerbridge Reach promote, the sense of what literature, particularly the novel, should do in the face of true belief and the politics of jihad: offer low-tech resistance to external control and produce opportunities to “hear voices talking about everything in every possible way” (107, 111). The difficulty in such resistance lies in the recognition of the allures of true belief and the mass-produced images and narratives that sustain it.

Note

1. A movie version of The Awakening was released in 1992. Its retitling as Grand Isle recalls the only scene actually shot in the course of Children of Light, which might lend some credence to an argument that Stone's 1986 novel had a revisionist influence on the 1992 adapters.

Works Cited

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Boyers, Robert, Moderator. “Talking about American Fiction.” Panel discussion with Marilynne Robinson, Russell Banks, Robert Stone, and David Ruff. Salmagundi 93 (1992): 61-77.

Cheuse, Alan. “Writing It Down for James: Some Thoughts on Reading towards the Millennium.” Antioch Review 51 (1993): 487-502.

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Grand Isle. Dir. Mary Lambert. Prod. Kelly McGillis. TNT (Turner Home Entertainment), 1992.

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———. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” With Thomas Schaub. Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 231-51.

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———. “Oliver Stone's USA.” New York Review of Books 17 Feb. 1994: 22-23.

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