[In the following essay on Morris's novel In Orbit, Bredahl examines “the outsider” as a sexual force infusing creative energy into the lives of Indiana townspeople who have become static in their habits.]

When the narrator of Wright Morris' In Orbit tells us that his joyfully named protagonist, Jubal E. Gainer, “makes old things new,”¹ he places Jubal in what to Morris is a mainstream of American life: “Pound may have been the first to give the thrust of doctrine to the American instinct to make it new. In so doing he gave official sanction to what came naturally to the natives. In the new world where so much had to be made, or remade, making it new was both an aptitude and a necessity.”² For Morris, the outsider generates energy, and energy—several critics to the contrary—is at the center of Morris' world.³ “Make it new” has obvious sexual implications as well, and Morris' outsider is at once a destroyer of normative values and a stimulator of life. Gail Crump describes the context for sexual vitality in Morris when she speaks of his “belief that life, experience, and the universe itself exist in a state of constant becoming, a belief fundamental to an understanding of his work.”⁴ And we begin to understand the importance of Wright Morris' writings for the twentieth-century imagination when we note how easily Alfred North Whitehead's description of “Creativity” relates to Morris' interest in individuals who can make old things new.

[Creativity] is the ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. “Creativity” is the principle of novelty. … “Creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates.⁵

In these terms making it new becomes essential to life processes; for Morris, it is an ability as important to artists as to outsiders, for “each time the writer creates and solves the problems of fiction, he makes it possible for men and women to live in the world.”⁶ Creating and solving problems of fiction are thus not concerns cut off from experience but ways both of participating in and making it possible for others to participate in the vitality of a dynamic world. Of many fictional problems addressed by Morris, one of the most significant is that of integrating the imagination's potentially divided verbal and visual powers. The Home Place (1948) and In Orbit (1967) are sufficiently separated in the Morris canon so that a comparison of their common interest in pictures reveals strikingly his effort to resolve a fundamentally life denying divisiveness.

In The Home Place, the protagonist, a Nebraska-born writer named Clyde Muncy, arrives at the home place with his city-bred wife and two children. “There is no grass in New York,” says Muncy, “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.”⁷ The search for freedom and room to move, however, does not adequately explain his motivation. The force of nostalgia also shapes the direction of his vision and life, a force evidenced in the narrative's unusual technique of employing both photographs and prose. The dominant qualities evinced by this photo-text technique are those of division and stasis. Because of the division between the verbal and visual powers of Muncy's imagination, his ability to move is negated; the surviving cliche and fossilized remnant of the past distort his perception of the present. Muncy can only go back, seeking a remembered world at the home place. But the going back will later make possible a going forward: “Stock taking, inventory, is the first effort of the mind to make itself at home,” says Morris in The Territory Ahead,⁸ and indeed in the course of the novel Muncy does obtain enough insight into himself and the home place to leave the home place behind.

The photo-text technique of The Home Place exposes the limitations of an imagination dominated by nostalgia.⁹ The pictures in the book are stills, freezing a fluid world into stable artifacts. Mary Ann Flood, in an unpublished 1971 master's thesis, examines these pictures, noting that they focus on artifacts rather than human life (we see the human face, for example, only through photographs of photographs), that they are black and white, that they emphasize high-definition closeups, and that they stress man-made vertical and horizontal lines imposed upon natural forms:

The stress upon lines and the use of black and white composition in the photographs attest to an intellectually controlled vision which desires to construct rules, order, and permanence which run counter to the ever-changing nature of existence. The presence of lines and the black and white, rather than color, photographs connote the world view of the dual nature of existence: the belief in black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. The mind, caught up with abstractions, is divorced from perceiving, and, thereby, from experiencing the thing-in-itself. Externally imposed value systems and abstractions, rather than the concrete manifestations of life, dominate and solidify the picture presented of the home place.¹⁰

In Orbit also centers on a picture but one significantly different from those in The Home Place. Most importantly, with In Orbit we are examining a single picture; the book itself results from a union of verbal and visual: “That's the picture. You might want to add a few details of your own,” says the narrator after the initial description of Jubal. And on the last pages of the text, he says: “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 here, the totality of events described, results from the narrative fusion of verbal and visual. And the dynamic quality of the picture is evidenced in its use of line. The photographs from The Home Place depend upon horizontals and verticals, but this opening from 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 a 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 as opposed to that earlier vision, The Home Place, limited to freezing and fragmentation. 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 no evidence in either the verbal or visual text of the energy originally embodied in the pioneers. We see the products, not the process, of settlement which established new life on the prairies. In contrast, it is energy which 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 which seeks to take in a fluid, thrusting world appropriately sees a story which is at once destructive of the static condition of verticals and horizontals (here imaged in the cutting of the old oak tree) and at the same time explosively creative. When Jubal enters Pickett, we are told that “the words of his song string out behind him like the tail of a kite” (p. 10), imaging as well the tail of a comet or 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” (p. 27). Twister or sperm cell, the thrusting force embodied in Jubal Gainer is, in Whitehead's terms, creative; it explodes internal energies and brings new life 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 certain of its inhabitants. The frequently mentioned photograph images a movement into the center. When that center lies within an individual, like a sperm cell driving toward an ovum, the energy brings a stimulus to life.

Little distinguishes Jubal from other teen-agers; the narrator 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. But the special quality about Jubal 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 boldly to stimuli of the moment. His relations with others are center-to-center, just like human sexual relations, 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, a masculine role repeated in frequent scenes of spraying. Pauline Bergdahl hoses down the cinders, a plane sprays for insects, and two Pickett firemen hose the sidewalk. Unlike the bees, each of these human actions consciously seeks to hold back natural forces which might imperil the smooth functioning of an ordered society. But the spraying as well images ejaculation. “Because he is non-fixed, this one also sprays the fireplace and the white sidewalls of Alan's Porsche” (p. 28). That description of one of Charlotte'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” (p. 152). His potency has been spent and needs time to regenerate.

Given the book's equal and integrated relation between 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, we are told, “is a gentle, childlike woman, and like a child she loves to wander. … It's the wandering that has led to problems” (p. 12). 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” (pp. 34-35). 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 turn Charlotte on, 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.

(p. 14)

Like Stephen Crane's correspondent or Sherwood Anderson's George Willard, Hodler's occupation indicates 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.

(p. 20)

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” (p. 75). 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” (p. 77) indicates both Kashperl's potential—he deals with the “clothes of men missing in action” (p. 74)—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 a stimulus for 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” (p. 87).

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” (p. 87). 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 explored more fully. Thus 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 a 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; 2 and 8 focus on the force that is Jubal; 3/4 (Holly) and 6/7 (Charlotte) narrate Jubal's stimulation of two sexually responsive women; and 5 presents the bloodless puncturing of the town's center. The symmetry of the book is suggestive of the sexual act itself, a penetration that breaks cherries and shatters hollow dreams followed by a withdrawal that ultimately is stimulating rather than deflating.¹¹

In Orbit, then, is a picture of a single motion; our efforts as viewer/reader are to see the whole rather than fix by seeking 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 sees a world of motion and unity as evidenced by the picture he describes. 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 sootsmeared portrait of J. S. Bach on his chest. His face is black as the bottom-side 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 high school dropout fleeing the draft.

(p. 9)

The use of detail and figurative language is particularly striking in this passage, and it 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 struggles to perceive shape while the narrator enjoys exploring the motion of an integrated picture. As the narrative and structure are acts of penetration, so is the use of language—thus the fascination with metaphor and simile. In contrast to Hodler's need to use language to fix change, the narrator is sensitive to the power of language to open up, 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 which conclude the paragraph just quoted take the crisply detailed opening and put it into motion by allowing the imagination the freedom to work with those details in multiple ways. Thus the opening lines both particularize 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 early 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.”¹² The fiction of Morris is a particularly good place to see the expanding universe of one man's imagination.¹³ 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 Morris' imaginative attempt to explore the territory ahead, to conceive and articulate an integrated, dynamic, fertile—in a word, a living—image.

Notes

1. (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 80. Further references to In Orbit will also be to this edition and will appear in the text.

2. Wright Morris, About Fiction (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 79.

3. Critics are divided in their perceptions of the underlying thrust of Morris' work. To many the dominant force is nostalgia, even a T. S. Eliot “still point.” See, for example, the [essays by J. C. Wilson [“Wright Morris and the Search for the ‘Still Point,’” Prairie Schooner, 49, ii (Summer, 1975), 154-163] and Joseph J. Wydeven [“Consciousness Refracted: Photography and the Imagination in the Works of Wright Morris,” Midamerica, 8 (1981), 92-114]. Gail Crump, on the other hand, stressing dynamics in Morris, sets herself in contrast to Wayne Booth and David Madden whom she describes as tending “to treat transcendence in itself as an unalloyed good.” See The Novels of Wright Morris (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 9.

4. The Novels of Wright Morris, p. 4.

5. Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 25-26.

6. About Fiction, p. 11.

7. (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1968), 6.

8. (New York: Atheneum, 1963), p. 8.

9. Because of the interesting use of the photo-text technique, The Home Place is frequently discussed by scholars who seem to be in agreement that the book is one of Morris' weaker efforts. In particular I refer to writings by Alan Trachtenberg [“The Craft of Vision,” Critique, IV, iii (Winter, 1961-1962), 41-55], David Madden, Wright Morris (New York: Twayne, 1964), and Gail Crump (p. 55). The Home Place, says Crump, for example, “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” (p. 57); and Madden: “Although the photographs are excellent, their relation to the text is more literal and less interesting than in The Inhabitants (p. 52). I disagree with such readings for the reasons I set forth in my essay. The divisive, static world established by the photo-text technique is precisely the problem with which Clyde Muncy's imagination has to deal.

10. “The Hero-Witness Relationship in the Fiction of Wright Morris,” University of Florida Master's Thesis, 1971, pp. 16-17.

11. Gail Crump offers an interesting 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 Pickett—suggests the motion of the open road, while opening and closing the book with almost identical framing passages suggests the completion of an orbit” (p. 186).

12. P. 229.

13. See Roger J. Guettinger, “The Problem with Jigsaw Puzzles: Form in the Fiction of Wright Morris,” Texas Quarterly, II, i (Spring, 1986), 209.