SOURCE: "The Long March: A Failed Rebellion," in William Styron Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 50-8.

[In this excerpt, Coale examines Styron's polarized vision of rebellion and authority, particularly what he sees as Styron's confusion over whether to portray the rebellious individual as heroic or as existentially absurd.]

The Long March . . . stands as the prototype for several of Styron's later longer novels. Besides the thrust and crisis of rebellion on which the book is based, we also find the bifurcated hero, the observant witness, and the participant rebel, what David L. Minter has described in American literature as the distinction between the man of interpretation and the man of action or design. Such dialectical characters include Ishmael and Ahab in Moby-Dick, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Coverdale and Hollingsworth in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, and more recently Quentin Compson and Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom [The Interpreted Design as a Structural Principle in American Prose (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969)].

The Long March also looks . . . closely at the individual's relationship with society, at the familiar oedipal struggles of the first novel, at the kind of Manichaean mysteries involving the confrontational polarities and unresolved oppositions in the book, and at Styron's own attempts to come to some metaphysical vision that can encompass all these many attributes and perspectives.

At the core of The Long March lies Styron's description of the suffering that human beings must endure. This suffering seems to be at the heart of the human condition as Styron views it through less southern-nostalgic eyes than in Lie Down in Darkness. Life becomes a long march, full of accident, anxiety, dread, exhaustion, pride, loneliness, and panic, filling the individual with a sense of outrage and violation, locked into some robotized routine. In short, life becomes a war in and of itself. "War was no longer simply a temporary madness into which human beings happily lapsed from time to time," Styron commented in 1963. "War had at last become the human condition."

Suffering provides the underlying motif of The Long March. And Mannix, the Jew from Brooklyn, becomes the emblem of "one of tortured and gigantic suffering" [William Styron, The Long March (New York: Random House, 1952) p. 125]. Such suffering may be part of the hero's role, and if so Mannix would certainly fill that category. And yet since Colonel Templeton firmly believes that "the hike had had nothing to do with courage or sacrifice or suffering, Styron undermines this simplistic heroic notion and leaves to the reader the task of interpreting for himself or herself the ultimate significance of suffering.

Traditional liberal values would place much of the meaning of existence upon the individual consciousness, no matter how terrible conditions had become around it. Essentially, this idea has been the key to Western tragedy as a genre and vision. And yet like suffering, the worth of the individual in The Long March is not taken for granted. For one thing, in Styron's novel individuals can be reduced to mere functions, men to marines, and become conformist, resigned, and even absurd when viewed as mere cogs in a wheel. And from this perspective individual rebellion or protest embodies only the absurd, since such protest can make the individual's situation not only worse but also self-victimizing and, in the end, existentially absurd: "Born into a generation of conformists, even Mannix (so Culver sensed) was aware that his gestures were not symbolic, but individual, therefore hopeless, maybe even absurd, and that he was trapped like all of them in a predicament which one personal insurrection could, if anything, only make worse."

This predicament leaves Styron's wondering about the very nature of Mannix's rebellion against Colonel Templeton's rule: "He only mutilated himself by this perverse and violent rebellion." If Mannix rebels, as he does, by willfully submitting to Templeton's long march, a kind of "rebellion in reverse," then isn't he in effect only proving how pervasive the system really is? If the self has been so corrupted by the system that it can view itself only as a function of that system, and if its way to rebel or to conform in effect proves the same thing, then doesn't Mannix's revolt only prove that without the system, there is no self? And if this is true, then the individual self is a liberal myth that no longer exists, and any individual action, of which there can be no real example, is doomed to meaninglessness and absurdity. But if this is Styron's case, then "individual" rebellion in The Long March has only reinforced what we've already experienced in Lie Down in Darkness: the modern encapsulated self is cocooned in so pervasive a system of social and cultural regulations that Styron's true subject is that web and its continued insidious power in trapping us—and perhaps our hopeless but nostalgic desire to escape and live without it.

Styron sets up his regulars carefully. Each acts his function as a marine, even if it seems to go against his basic instincts as a man. O'Leary believes that all are "inextricably grafted to the system" and should display "a devoted, methodical competence" despite what doubts the person might have. Bill Lawrence symbolizes the clean-cut, spoiled, and arrogant functionary in the system. And Culver even begins to think that O'Leary may be right and Mannix hopelessly, willfully wrong.

Colonel Templeton, with his set of fixed attitudes and habitualized gestures, embodies the system perfectly: "He had too long been conditioned by the system to perform with grace a human act." For him every action to be performed is a task, not a personal action involving moral value. He is as devoted as a priest to his religious rites, "almost benevolent . . . [one] in whom passion and faith had made an alloy. . . . Above meanness or petty spite, he was leading a march to some humorless salvation."

And of course Templeton is a father figure to his men, the man with the responsibility, half-feared, half-worshiped, but ultimately never really questioned. His men acquiesce to "the voice that commanded, once again, you will," for after all they seem to be as "helpless as children," and "they were only marines, responding anew to the old commands." This "stern father" is someone to both hate and placate. He sets the rules, and his "children" follow or disobey them, but they never question his godlike role. "Culver almost liked the Colonel, in some negative way . . . 'respect' . . . was the nearest approach." "He's not a bad guy . . . just a regular," Culver explains, reducing the father to a function and letting that function circumscribe and conjure up a world in which to function.

Styron's vision becomes confusing here. If the "oldfashioned" sense of seeing things on an individual basis—good verses evil, good guy verses bad guy—is itself absurd, because the system recognizes only functions and effects, and if in his reverse rebellion Mannix proves himself to be just a better player at Templeton's own game, then doesn't the characters'—and Styron's—"outrage . . . at the system, at their helpless plight, the state of the world" seem forced and absurd, too? Is this "real" outrage, voiced by an individual consciousness, or merely the necessary oil in the gears of functionaries going about their business and preserving the system no matter what? Can suffering be made symbolic of some larger metaphysical distress built into the human or a universal condition, or is it merely a physical given, like the necessity to eat and sleep? Is Styron himself stranded between the romantic notion of the individual's attacking the system in order to stand up for superior moral rights or reasons and the more "existential" condition of suffering as a given, with no symbolic resonance whatsoever?

In the workings out of this dilemma in The Long March, Styron tries to achieve a more coherently symbolic significance. Culver and Mannix, however different temperamentally, after all do not remain static. They change and develop, separately and in relation to each other. And yet they are in many ways polarized, a structural phenomenon of the novel that may be built on Styron's own dialectical or bifurcated view of systematic authority and individual conscience, complicated by the oedipal tensions we have already recognized.

The question may finally be whether or not Styron resents authority in and of itself or resents an attitude that some figures in authority exhibit. In any case in The Long March, as a prelude to his later novels, the polarity of vision seems to lie at the heart of the matter and helps to explain the fabric of unresolved confrontations in the novel.

Tom Culver shows all the symptoms of a contented, domesticated civilian suddenly thrust back into war. He comes to realize that all may be "astray at mid-century in the never-endingness of war" and that this atmosphere may account for his sense of anxiety, dread, solitude, and fear, and yet he is understandably at first shocked by his recall. After World War II he enjoys the civilian refuge of children, home, and classical music and fills his sweet thoughts with reveries of "two little girls playing on the sunny grass." His enforced return to military uniform fills him with resentment and dread, and he feels suddenly imprisoned in a nightmare realm of permanent disruption, adrift in the hypnagogic state "like the dream of a man delirious with fever . . . enclosed within the tent, unmoored and unhelmed upon a dark and compassless ocean." He suddenly views his new world "as if . . . through drug-glazed eyes." Displaced, uprooted, and "profoundly alone," Culver epitomizes the ordinary man trapped in a century of war.

Al Mannix is at first far more vocally disgruntled than Culver. He seems bitter, sardonic, and frank and in taking things personally despises Templeton almost on sight. He refuses to answer a colonel's questions during a lecture and decides to walk the thirty-six miles of the enforced march despite the nail in his heel. To beat the system, he feels, one must be the system, and Culver warily watches his transformation into a fanatic, a kind of supraorthodox heretic in the religious ranks, an absolutist bully obsessed with his own demonstration of rebellion, whatever the ultimate import. To Mannix, Templeton becomes "a prime and calculated evil" against which he (Mannix) will fight in his own way. And very quickly "the contagion of Mannix's fear had touched [Culver]."

Significant differences proliferate between Culver and Mannix as Styron develops their characters. And in these escalating differences Styron seems to be building his polarized vision of rebellion and authority. Mannix faces death when dangled from a hotel window in San Francisco, while Culver grapples with his anxiety when faced with Mannix. When the explosion occurs and marines are killed, Culver throws up at the scene, while Mannix weeps and sees it as symbolizing a greater evil: "Won't they ever let us alone?" To Mannix, Templeton is evil incarnate; to Culver, a more or less blameless functionary and, however vaguely, a demonic father figure. At one point Culver stops Mannix in his rebellion, as if the more resigned conformist were tackling the outspoken if necessarily doomed rebel—"That's enough, Al!"—but he cries as he does it and feels his own spirit as it "sank like a rock."

Culver's confusion about the meaning of events is met and transcended by Mannix's certainty. Mannix seems to represent a tragic endurance that will continue against all odds. And despite the absurdity of Mannix's rebellion, Styron seems to want us to see an aura of Christian, classical, and humanist values hovering around that character's actions. And yet Culver's confusion proves to be far more human eventually, since he quickly sees how bullying and fanatic Mannix has become. Perhaps only victimhood is ensured when Mannix is confronted naked by the black maid at the end of the novel, as if, as each relates to the other on the basic human level of sympathy and pain, both are recognizing their roles as victims in the larger society and system.

Styron's vision may emerge more clearly in The Long March because he tackles his theme of rebellion and his uncertain attitude toward it more diagrammatically than in Lie Down in Darkness. As he himself has explained, "I wanted to free myself from Faulkner's influence before starting another full-scale book. The Long March was my disintoxication exercise" [Maurice Edgar Coindreau, A French View of Modern American Fiction (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1971)]. . . . he has described himself as a "provisional rebel." and that self-description certainly seems justified when seen in relation to the polarities on which The Long March has been built.

[The Long March] displays endless confrontations and juxtapositions. Chronological time from noon to noon confronts the nightmarish, hypnagogic state of dreams and anxieties. Culver's dream encompasses the night before the long march, with its tales of Mannix's past, culminating in his facing death in San Francisco. At twilight the marines start off on their trek. By 4:15 A.M. they are eighteen miles into the march, halfway to the finish line. And at noon they have arrived at Heaven's Gate, an apotheosis of sorts. The opening scene of horror reverberates throughout the entire tale, mesmerizing Culver and shaking and finally transforming Mannix. Culver experiences his three reveries involving young girls and music, the nostalgia of home and youth.

Styron arranges three friezes in the novel, two between Templeton and Mannix and one final one between Mannix and the black maid. The first emphasizes "classical Greek masks, made of chrome or tin, reflecting an almost theatrical disharmony" between the two marines, when they are viewed in Culver's mind as opposites in a dynamic tension, as polarities set up for eternal conflict: master and slave. The second frieze presents them as "twin profiles embattled," just before Mannix is court-martialed. The polarities hold, but they are now twin polarities, fellow marines upholding the same system. And the final frieze, realized on a more human scale, presents Mannix and the maid as "communicating . . . sympathy and understanding," both victims and slaves of the system that rules their lives. Styron employs throughout his images of classical tragedy and Egyptian slavery as a way of highlighting these basic confrontations.

Polarities also appear on a more thematic level. They permeate the novel like Manichaean mysteries, "Manichaean" in the sense of a pervasive, unresolved dualism, forever entangled and at war with one another, as opposed to the more orthodox Christian sense of unity and deliverance from battle. Sunshine opposes darkness, sound confronts silence, heat undermines the cold. Disruptions threaten chronological sequence and consciousness, just as Styron confronts peace with war, Heaven's Gate with prison, submission with rebellion, and Culver's reveries of classical music and sanctuary with life itself.

At times these contradictions temporarily dissolve into a kind of hypnagogic state, in which all moral categories collapse, nightmare takes over, and anything is possible. With Styron's descriptions of wails in hell in the swamp; of dark seas, spooky glows, and the green light of dawn; of the marines as zombies, ghosts, wraiths, and robots; and of night as one long nightmare of pain and exhaustion, which in Culver "enveloped his whole spirit," the novel seems to enter the disturbingly sentient universe of a Poe tale, and all morally symbolic structures or images that try to embody individual rebellion and the system nearly vanish. "Korea .. . the very idea of another war . . . possessed a kind of murky, surrealistic, half-lunatic unreality that we are mercifully spared while awake, but which we do occasionally confront in a horrible dream," wrote Styron in his introduction to the Norwegian edition of The Long March. "With the reality of some unshakable nightmare .. . in the summer of 1952, I found myself in Paris still unable to shake off the sense of having just recently awakened from a nightmare."

And yet even in such a clearheaded, short novel as The Long March, Styron has still managed to blur the significance of his tale. If it is a Gothic nightmare, then the "existential-romantic" tangle of self and society is superseded. If it is a morality tale with Gothic trappings, then can it both celebrate the individual and define him only in terms that show him to be merely a function in the larger military-social scheme of things? Is there a thin line between genuine polarities and contradictions, which seem to be at the center of Styron's vision here, and mere metaphysical confusion? Do the oedipal overtones undermine or further explain Culver's and Mannix's actions and beings?

Critics remain divided on these issues. Marc Ratner maintains that "for Styron the great value of action is that, through rebellion, the rebel discovers the evils of the 'System' in himself, cuts through his self-illusions, and exorcises his devils to become a mature person" ["The Rebel Purged: The Long March, " in William Styron, 1972]. But what are we to make of a maturity that leaves a brutal system intact with no real questions asked? Is this maturity or an evasion of the very issues the author seems to be raising? Even tone may be an issue here, as Roger Asselineau suggests: "The satirical tone of many a passage is thus neutralized by the understanding of the futile nature of revolt" [Critical Essays on William Styron, 1982].

Irving Malin mounts a very strong case for Culver as a "solitary observer," as a man who "lies between his superiors, between all the opposites of life. He dangles." To Malin, Culver is trapped both by the marines and by his own body. He "regards himself as an actor in someone else's script" and continues to see visions that, "like Styron's symbolic details, are full of commingled opposites." In the end "Culver feels a 'deep vast hunger' for some transcendental vision which will overarch grottolike peace and threatening storm . . . His hunger dies. He must live with the 'hateful contraries' . . . with war and peace ["The Symbolic March," in The Achievement of William Styron.] Culver, in effect, accepts the book's polarized view of things, which may be essentially Styron's own in 1952. And in doing so, Culver in effect changes nothing. Nothing has been so much learned as accepted.

In Culver's acceptance, however, one can't help but feel that whatever rebellious outbreak has been possible at the beginning of the novel, by the end it has fizzled out. The Long March may leave us as encapsulated as did Lie Down in Darkness, wherein even the exercise of outright rebellion only proves the existence of the walls of the prison cell, and however held up by vaunted polarities and dualistic designs, the cell remains intact. As Norman Kelvin has suggested, "We find opposites striving for union through conflict or love . . . in which heightened awareness, or an intensification of the spiritual, is attempted but unattained" ["The Divided Self: William Styron's Fiction from Lie Down in Darkness to The Confession of Not Turner," in The Achievement of William Styron.] We will subsequently explore this observation in detail.

Culver and Styron seem to be straining for a vision that can unite opposites. But with the seeming acceptance of an institutionalized system with man's place faithfully circumscribed within it, the straining can seem only like carping, whining about and against what the novelist has already accepted as unalterable fact. As one critic has explained, "Styron creates his personae's visions from metaphors of reality. His characters' yearning for the 'impossible state,' for (in their terms) a finer, more desirable world, even for some glorious surceases from the anxieties and pressures of this one, are always built upon what is concrete, mundane, ordinary: as though their symbolic imagination need root itself in the solid stuff of life." That may be an inevitable human condition, but it does bring to mind Styron's more or less contented Episcopalians living contentedly with nature and their Virginian world in Lie Down in Darkness. Such ultimate feelings of ease in the world may dampen any rebellious quests and render them stillborn.

Nevertheless, The Long March lays out in fairly simple detail the developing scope of Styron's vision, stripped as it is of the organ-toned, Faulknerian presence of Lie Down in Darkness. Initially the second novel seems to indicate a breakthrough, a leap beyond lying to standing up. But at the last it remains curiously locked within that essentially polarized and encapsulated vision not yet jettisoned or overcome. The unresolved Manichaean mysteries are presented in all their dualistic elegance, but the nature of rebellion, individual consciousness, and society and the interactions of all of them remain blurred and confusing, if not confused.