Poststructuralist criticism responds to the modernist sense of alienation by rejecting the assumption of essential individuality. Replacing the belief in essences has been the assertion of codes and texts with and within which man operates. From that perspective, the effort of Ernest Hemingway or Harvey Fergusson to place the individual within a world of creative force is both invalid and naive.

However, … not all American imaginations operate on the basis of eastern assumptions. In the West and the Midwest, where land and life in a physical world are central, individuals seek to align the patterns of their lives to complement the patterns within the environment. To Wright Morris (1910-), one of the most productive contemporary writers, realignment is what the narrative imagination always seeks to do: “Each time the writer creates and solves the problems of fiction, he makes it possible for men and women to live in the world.”¹ Breaking through artificial, enclosing constructs and establishing contact with the energy of living processes is the story of western and midwestern writers. This effort initially has to struggle with frustration, which can become despair, or with nostalgic longing, which can produce stasis.²

“If we should ask ourselves,” says the Nebraska-born Morris in The Territory Ahead (1978), “what it is that the common and the uncommon American have in common, the man in the street and the sophisticate, the hillbilly and the Ivy Leaguer, I think we have an answer. Nostalgia. … Stock taking, inventory, is the first effort of the mind to make itself at home.”³ When Clyde Muncy, the protagonist and narrator of Morris's The Home Place (1948), moves his family from their apartment in New York City to his boyhood home outside Lone Tree, Nebraska, both nostalgia and desire for freedom motivate him. “‘There is no grass in New York,’ says Clyde, ‘no yards, no trees, no lawn swings—and for thousands of kids not very much sky. They live in cages. … It's like a big zoo of kids. A cage with windows and bars.’” During the course of his story, Clyde discovers the obvious, that you can't go home again; but his act of return initiates the process of “stock taking” that enables him to abandon nostalgia.

Clyde Muncy's problems are reflected in the divided narrative that is The Home Place, in this case a divided narrative with unusual divisions. On one side of a page is Clyde's first-person verbal narrative; on the facing page is a series of photographs with their own story. At numerous points, the two texts interrelate, but the division between the verbal and visual worlds mirrors a division in Clyde between his head and his eyes. That division stymies Clyde's impulse to move. He is stuck in nostalgia somewhere between New York and Lone Tree, the urban and the rural, the verbal and the visual. “Each time the writer creates and solves the problems of fiction, he makes it possible for men and women to live in the world.” The Home Place presents us with an obvious fictional problem in the separation of image and word; the effort to solve that “problem” so that men and women can “live in the world” is both the story of Clyde Muncy and that of the Wright Morris canon.

The photographs in The Home Place are black-and-white stills, which have the effect of freezing a fluid world of color into isolated artifacts.⁴ The pictures lack human life (we see the human face, for example, only through photographs of photographs), are high-definition closeups, and stress man-made vertical or horizontal lines. A drab angularity in the pictures emphasizes the fact that natural and human life are missing. Because of the interest in close-ups, we also lack context. We are presented with pieces and made to speculate about the environment in which those pieces exist(ed).

The use of vertical and horizontal lines imposed on natural backgrounds—a fence post driven into barren ground, for example—calls attention to the human forces that broke the Nebraska ground and built the farms and town. These forces countered those in the natural world which would have driven away most people. The lives are therefore testaments to strength; but the unbending quality of the verticals and horizontals testifies both to a stubbornness and to a pride that led to the great dust bowls and a world now lacking color and life.

Given the effect of the pictures, one begins to see a division between what Clyde Muncy wants to find in his return to the home place—a world where his kids can learn to live—and the actual place to which he is returning. There is remarkably little sky in the photographs, for example, and it was sky that Clyde particularly missed in the cages of New York City. We begin with a story that was motivated by nostalgia but that quickly discovers the discrepancy between that impulse and the reality of “home.”

But there is more to this story. As the viewer lives with the photographs, something else begins to happen. Even though no human and remarkably little natural life exists in the pictures, they do not image a dead world. There is “life” here, the felt lives of the people who built the fences, slept in the bed, wrote the poems, or sat in the barber's chair. Though not a life one can return to or recapture, it is real all the same. The discovery of that life coincides with Clyde's discovery of life where he least expected it. When he and his wife, Peggy, visit a neighboring house, he wonders, “What is it that strikes you about a vacant house? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that any house that's been lived in, any room that's been slept in, is not vacant any more. From that point on it's forever occupied. With the people in the house you tend to forget that. … But with the people gone, you know the place is inhabited.” The empty spot on a wall where a calendar used to hang or the old caning in a new chair establishes what Clyde comes to see as “connections” between his world and the life no longer visibly present. When Clyde makes that connection, he is ready to leave the home place, for he has taken stock of his own life.

We do not know where Clyde Muncy goes after he leaves Lone Tree, but we can watch Wright Morris work to solve “the problems of fiction” in the books that follow The Home Place. Indeed, Morris's effort is to integrate the verbal and the visual, to put life into motion, and to draw on energy inherent in the natural world.

In Orbit (1967) is a particularly appropriate text to compare with The Home Place because In Orbit also centers on a picture. This picture, however, is significantly different from the pictures in the earlier book: “That's the picture. You might want to add a few details of your own,” says the narrator after the initial description of his protagonist, Jubal E. Gainer. Later, in the last pages of the text, the narrator comments, “That's the picture: there are those who can take it in at a glance. … But perhaps the important detail escapes you. He is in motion.” The picture referred to, the totality of events described, results from a narrative fusion of verbal and visual, and the dynamic quality of the picture is evidenced in its use of line. The photographs in The Home Place emphasize horizontals and verticals, but the opening of In Orbit develops a different kind of line: “This boy comes riding with his arms high and wide, his head dipped low, his ass light in the saddle, as if about to be shot into orbit from a forked sling. … He is like a diver just before he hits the water, he is like a Moslem prayer-borne toward Mecca, he is like a cowpoke hanging to the steer's horns.” The verticals and horizontals of The Home Place imply the possibility of a vector, but the resultant is missing. With no directed force, we simply have two lines and consequent freezing of motion. In Orbit, however, presents a story of force and motion; the picture taken in at a glance is that of the vector itself, the integration of vertical and horizontal forces. Because the subject moves, the details and forces continually change, and the narrative eye capable of perceiving and articulating this dynamic picture must be able to integrate, whereas the earlier vision was limited to fragmented freezing.

The contentment with nostalgia, which generated the fragmentation of The Home Place, is ultimately life denying. No human faces are seen in the photographs, and there is only indirect evidence in either the verbal or the visual text of the energy originally embodied in the pioneers. We see the products, not the process, of the settlement that established new life on the prairies. In contrast, energy is the subject of In Orbit. In spite of its dispassionate surface, In Orbit is a highly sexual book. A divided imagination denies the possibility of new life, but an imagination that seeks to take in a fluid, thrusting world appropriately sees a story that is destructive of the static condition of verticals and horizontals (here portrayed in the cutting of the old oak tree) and at the same time explosively creative. When the joyfully named Jubal E. Gainer enters Pickett, “the words of his song string out behind him like the tail of a kite” or like the tail of a comet or the tail of a twister or perhaps even the tail of a sperm cell. “As for the overall impression of the boy on the bike, it is that of two cats, piggyback: hard at it.” Twister or sperm cell, the thrusting force embodied in Jubal Gainer is creative because it explodes internal energies and brings new energy to the individuals in Pickett, Indiana. Nature abhors a vacuum, we are told, and the natural forces of Jubal and twister rush into the vacuum at the center of the town and its inhabitants, as imaged in the frequently mentioned phonograph record. When that center lies within an individual, the energy stimulates life as a sperm cell drives toward an ovum.

Little distinguishes Jubal from other teenagers; the narrator in fact makes every effort to stress Jubal's ordinary characteristics. No knight-errant conscious of his direction and in control of his intentions, Jubal has the sniffles.⁵ But Jubal's special quality is not his physical appearance or his intellectual prowess; it is rather the fact that he operates out of the center of himself. Characters in the book accuse him of intention, but Jubal functions naturally, responding directly to stimuli of the moment. Like human sexual relations, his relations with others are center to center, in contrast to the relationships established by the inhabitants of Pickett, where impersonal, distancing newspapers and telephones unite the citizens. Jubal almost instantaneously establishes physical, interpersonal contact with his “victims.” He seldom speaks, so the contact is not verbal, nor does he impose himself on others. Jubal is welcomed by his victims, who similarly respond from within themselves.

These implicitly sexual center-to-center relationships occur in a fertile environment awaiting penetration. Two of the most pervasive images, bees and spray, establish an atmosphere of fertility. The events of In Orbit occur on May 17, a spring day in Indiana. Warm, overpowering smells of springtime fill the air. Bees swarm in the cloying, pollen-laden atmosphere, their masculine activity mirrored by frequent scenes of spraying: Pauline Bergdahl hoses down cinders, a plane sprays for insects, and two Pickett firemen hose the sidewalk. Unlike the bees, however, each of these human actions consciously seeks to hold back natural forces, which might imperil the smooth functioning of an ordered society. The spraying also connotes ejaculation. “Because he is non-fixed, this one also sprays the fireplace and the white sidewalls of Alan's Porsche.” That description of one of Charlotte Hatfield's cats makes clear the connection between sexuality, fixing, and spraying. The book's dispassionate surface reflects the suppressed sexuality of Pickett, but underneath are individuals and a natural world ripe for fertilization. Jubal's victims are beings of potential, and his energies either deflate or stimulate what is within. Energy is transferred, as in an electron's jump from one orbit to another, so that when Jubal leaves Pickett “there is no longer much flex in his knees, much spring in his legs. The words of a song do not trail out behind him like the tail of a kite.” His potency has been spent and needs time to regenerate.

Given the book's interest in both motion and sexuality—to be alive is to move—the frequent uses of the word fix are entirely correct. To fix is both to pin down and to remove sexual potency. Holly Stroymeyer “is a gentle, childlike woman, and like a child she loves to wander. … It's the wandering that had led to problems.” And Charlotte Hatfield does not have “much sense of place. … Charlotte has been trained to live in a house, to use her box, and to purr when petted. But like the cat in her lap, she is a creature who has not been fixed.” In contrast to the sexually stimulating and fertile women, the men in Pickett are unwilling or unable to become sexually aggressive: Haffner is “more AC than DC”; Alan Hatfield can “place the needle in the groove” but doesn't seem to excite Charlotte; and Sanford Avery is limited to rubbing his crotch at the idea of sex.

The central male figure, other than Jubal, is Curt Hodler, a newspaper editor with possibilities, but an individual who works best in a fixed world: “But the forecast is less important than the date, May 17th. The date, strange to say, is more important in the long run than anything in the paper. Day in and day out the news is pretty much the same. … It is the date that gives it meaning. … If the paper loses its dateline it loses its mind. The purpose of the forecast is to pin down the day, whether it rains or not.” Like Stephen Crane's correspondent or Sherwood Anderson's George Willard, Hodler and his occupation indicate his possibilities and his limitations. A man of words in a book whose narrator is keenly sensitive to language, Hodler prefers to fix meaning to words and to stories. He suppresses his potential just as he suppresses his sexual desire for Miss Holly. His envy of Jubal is the envy of action:

“And how is Miss Holly?”

For more than twenty years Avery's cynical answer had been the same. Who the hell would know that? Now thanks to some snooping idler, or passing stranger, that was no longer an idle question. Someone finally knew. It is a torment to Hodler that this essential knowledge is what he once desired for himself. How was Miss Holly. Some idle lecher, some wandering pervert, some bored delinquent, some loyal friend or guardian, envied but unknown to Hodler, and still at large, finally knew.

Pickett's dealer in army/navy surplus, Kashperl, also prefers to fix events, although he, too, is fascinated with action. “Is it more than a tree that falls? It falls to give this day its meaning. To give Kashperl a cud for his idle, vagrant thoughts.” For Kashperl, meaning is something tangible to cling to in a day when experience appears chaotic. “A preference for the fading title, or the missing author, or better yet the rare volume that proved to lack both, a country waiting to be staked out and mapped by Kashperl,” indicates both Kashperl's potential—he deals with the “clothes of men missing in action”—and his preference for fixing the unknown. He is content with being sedentary, with vicariously living off the experience of others. Both Hodler and Kashperl find an event food for thought rather than stimulus to action. Kashperl even shares the desire of Avery and Hodler for Miss Holly: “But that was not what the fat man was waiting to hear. He wanted what Jubal had had without all the trouble. He wanted the cherry.”

Structurally, Jubal's encounter with Kashperl—chapter 5—is at the center of the nine-chapter book; in chapter 5 Jubal is also at the physical center of Pickett. He penetrates the town just as he does individuals, revealing a fertile world ripe for stimulation. The bag of cherries smashed on Haffner's head nicely images the condition of the town and Jubal's effect upon it: Kashperl—and Hodler and Avery—“wanted the cherry, which was actually more than Jubal had got.” The earlier book, The Home Place, breaks in two, a verbal and a visual text; In Orbit, however, is a single picture, initially taken in at a glance and then probed. Instead of a two- or three-part structure, In Orbit is a verbal/visual whole that seems to be continually moving. It is very difficult, for example, to speak of its beginning, middle, and end. Instead, we move into and then out from Pickett and its inhabitants. Chapters 1 and 9 present the picture taken in; chapters 2 and 8 focus on the force that is Jubal; chapters 3 and 4 (Holly) and chapters 6 and 7 (Charlotte) narrate Jubal's stimulation of two sexually responsive women; and chapter 5 presents the bloodless puncturing of the town's center. The movement of the book is suggestive of the sexual act itself, a penetration that breaks cherries, shatters hollow dreams, and is followed by withdrawal.⁶

In Orbit, then, is a picture of a single motion; our effort as viewer or reader is to see the whole rather than to extract meaning. The picture combines the deceptively simple and apparently static with the powerfully dynamic. Clyde Muncy's vision of the world in The Home Place was dominated by division and meaning, but the narrator of In Orbit, as evidenced by the picture he describes, sees a world of motion and unity. His use of language in that description is part of the vision:

This boy comes riding with his arms high and wide, his head dipped low, his ass tight in the saddle, as if about to be shot into orbit from a forked sling. He wears a white crash helmet, a plastic visor of the color they tint car windshields, half-boots with stirrup heels, a black horsehide jacket with zippers, levis so tight in the crotch the zipper of the fly is often snagged with hair. Wind puffs his sleeves, plucks the strings of his arms, fills the back of his jacket like a wineskin, ripples the soot-smeared portrait of J. S. Bach on his chest. His face is black as the bottomside of a stove lid, except for his nose, which is pewter-colored. He has the sniffles and often gives it a buff with his sleeve. He is like a diver just before he hits the water, he is like a Moslem prayer-borne toward Mecca, or he is like a cowpoke hanging to the steer's horns, or a highschool dropout fleeing the draft.

The use of detail and figurative language, particularly striking in this passage, characterizes much of the writing in the book. The narrator approaches language as though it were at the same time a visual and a verbal medium. Curt Hodler, the newspaperman, struggles to perceive shape, while the narrator enjoys exploring the motion of an integrated picture. Like the narrative and the structure, the language is an act of penetration—thus the fascination with metaphor and simile. In contrast to Hodler, who needs to use language to fix change, the narrator is sensitive to the power of language to open, focus, extend, and expand our perceptions. For the narrator, language is not a device to get at meaning. In Orbit yields very little “meaning”; rather, it describes an event. The verbal medium penetrates, probes, that event. The lines that conclude the paragraph quoted above take the crisply detailed opening and put it into motion by allowing the imagination the freedom to work with those details. Thus the opening lines both particularize—“This boy”—and set in motion the picture that will continue to be explored. The narrator perceives a world of possibility, and his ability to use language allows him to penetrate, experience, and verbalize that world.

In an essay entitled “The Immediate Present,” from a book of critical essays, The Territory Ahead, Wright Morris discusses what he sees as the relationship between art and life. “We have a need, however illusive, for a life that is more real than life. It lies in the imagination. Fiction would seem to be the way it is processed into reality. … If man is nature self-conscious, as we have reason to believe, art is his expanding universe.” The fiction of Morris is a particularly good place to see the expanding universe of one man's imagination. The urge is to live fully in a universe whole and alive. In Orbit, then, is only in part the story of Jubal E. Gainer. It is also part of Morris's imaginative attempt to explore the territory ahead, to conceive and articulate an integrated, dynamic, fertile—in a word, a living—image.

Notes

1. Morris, About Fiction, p. 11.

2. Critics are divided in their perception of the underlying thrust of Morris's work. On the one hand, many consider the dominant force in his writing to be nostalgia, even an Eliotic “still point”; see, for example, J. C. Wilson, “Wright Morris and the Search for the ‘Still Point,’” and Wydeven, “Consciousness Refracted.” Gail Crump, on the other hand, stresses dynamics in Morris and contrasts his views to those of Wayne Booth and David Madden, whom he describes as tending “to treat transcendence in itself as an unalloyed good” (The Novels of Wright Morris, p. 9).

   Morris has commented in an interview that nostalgia is a starting point from which the individual moves forward.

   Nostalgia, the past, which I first had to rediscover as a matter of personal self-discovery, can be traced in the novels, I think. First the infatuation with the past, a conviction that the past was real and desirable, and should be the way life is. Then a somewhat scrutinous and skeptical attitude toward the past. After which the present begins to come into the picture. … Then the past begins to be questioned, and over a period of eight novels, the past first dominated, then was compelled to recede. … In a way my books show a development of an escape from nostalgia.

   (Bleufarb, “Point of View,” p. 45)

   See also Waterman, “The Novels of Wright Morris.”

3. Morris, The Territory Ahead, pp. 19, 25.

4. Because of its interesting use of the photo-text technique, The Home Place is frequently discussed by scholars, who seem to agree that the book is one of Morris's weaker efforts. I refer in particular to Alan Trachtenberg, who writes that “one weakness of this book is that the pictures, which are all direct and straightforward, with an occasional close-up, compete with the narrative for our attention. Seeing them on alternate pages of the text, we cannot always experience them and the narrative simultaneously” (“The Craft of Vision,” p. 46); to David Madden, who states that “although the photographs are excellent, their relation to the text is more literal and less interesting than in The Inhabitants” (Wright Morris, p. 52); and to Gail Crump, who says that the novel “does demonstrate Morris's increasing insight into his past, but the insight is evidenced only on the conceptual level, not in mastery of his fictional technique” (The Novels of Wright Morris, p. 57).

   I disagree with such readings. The divisive, static world established by the photo-text technique is precisely the problem with which Clyde Muncy's imagination has to deal. More helpful, I think, is Mary Ann Flood's Master's thesis, “The Hero-Witness Relationship in the Fiction of Wright Morris” (1971).

5. About Jubal Gainer, Morris says, “I see him as a rather ordinary, ignorant, open-ended American juvenile. He has an opportunity to do what we think of as irrational. I consider him absolutely normal and his seeming psychopathic elements are introduced by the options within his situations. … The situation creates the violence. He is not violence-prone at all. He is merely another young man on a motorcycle, full of beans, and he's young, and he's ignorant, and outside of that he's Huck Finn” (Conversations with Wright Morris, p. 30).

6. Gail Crump offers a different description of the book's intriguing structure: “The image of orbiting brings together both transcendence (being out of this world) and immanence (being in motion through space-time), and the book's structure—nine brief chapters following Jubal's frenetic rampage through Picket—suggests the motion of the open road, while opening and closing the book with almost identical framing passages suggests the completion of an orbit” (The Novels of Wright Morris, p. 186).