Scarlett’s skeptical views are echoed by those of John Smith in The Dead Zone. Johnny’s paranormal abilities have given him a vision of a disastrous future if Greg Stillson is elected president of the United States. Oh, and by the way, remember, Greg Stillson got his start as a con man selling, of all things, Bibles.
Debating whether to go ahead with his plans to assassinate Stillson, John anguishes over God’s failure to do the job first. He wonders why God would allow such an evil man as Greg Stillson to flourish. Why has God left it to Johnny to do His dirty work?
Even Jack Ryan, an otherwise play-it-by-the-book hero, squirms uncomfortably when asked by a Russian sub captain if he believes in God. Ryan fumbles a bit, then says sure, yeah, he believes in God, “because if you don’t, what’s the point of life? That would mean Sartre and Camus and all those characters were right—all is chaos, life has no meaning. I refuse to believe that.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of religious faith. Ryan believes in God only because to do otherwise would be to support Camus “and all those characters.” Meaning, I suppose, the French.
THE POWER OF BLASPHEMY
Could there be a more secular novel about religion than The Da Vinci Code?
Sophie was skeptical. “You think the Church killed my grandfather?”
Teabing replied, “It would not be the first time in history the Church has killed to protect itself. The documents that accompany the Holy Grail are explosive, and the Church has wanted to destroy them for years.”
Secularism is one thing, but seeming to charge the Catholic Church with serial murder is a whole different animal. Is it any wonder that Vatican officials were outraged over the novel’s assertions or that dozens of books sprang up to challenge fictional anti-Catholic claims that were taken seriously by many readers?
The narrative dynamics of The Da Vinci Code are clear. The protagonist, Robert Langdon, is a man of science, while his antagonists are men of the cloth. The conflict at the crux of the novel is a clash between science and faith, between academics and clerics, between reason and mysticism. Or between secularism and religion.
Consider the way Robert Langdon, the high priest of rationality, explains away religious belief to his love interest/student Sophie. He feels sure that he could provide hard evidence that contradicted the holy stories of every religious belief system, from Islam to Buddhism. He suggests that he could even demonstrate that Christ’s virgin birth was just a metaphor, not a literal fact as so many devout believers assume. But Langdon has decided to let the poor fools stay deluded, for he believes that religious allegory (the lies that religion tells, like Christ actually walking on actual water) is a useful coping mechanism for millions of religious folks. Why spoil their fun?
As spokesman for puzzle solvers everywhere, Robert Langdon is the ultimate secularist. Everything can be explained. All mysteries, all supernatural phenomena, all religious faith, can be dissected and reduced to their component parts. For Robert, there is no rapture beyond logic and reason.
It’s striking that millions of readers, many of them presumably devout believers in one religion or another, could be so swept up by a novel whose central character devotes so much of his time not only debunking Christian symbolism but challenging the very idea of religious belief.
No doubt part of the extraordinary appeal of this work of fiction derives from its handling of religious matters in so direct a fashion. Whether those readers share Langdon’s view that “every faith in the world is based on fabrication” or not, they were clearly energized and possibly even flattered by seeing organized religion take center stage and its iconography and art elucidated in fresh and surprising ways.
FEATURE #9
American Dream/American Nightmare
I’ve not only pursued the American dream, I’ve achieved it. I suppose we could say the last few years, I’ve also achieved the American nightmare.
—KENNETH LAY, CEO, ENRON
Americans delight in reenactments of our national myths. The rise from humble roots to become rich and powerful. A character struggling against injustice and, finally, triumphing over oppression. And we are also grimly fascinated by the flip side of these stories.
Although Horatio Alger’s novels, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, didn’t invent the “rags to riches” story line (folkloric versions like “Cinderella” were around for centuries), Alger’s stories certainly helped to crystallize the vocabulary of a central part of what we’ve come to call “the American Dream.”
Writing what today might be termed “young adult novels” such as Ragged Dick and Adrift in the City; or, Oliver Conrad’s Plucky Fight, Alger introduced into the national consciousness an image of down-and-out ragamuffins who, through sweat and labor, determination, and a hard-nosed sense of justice, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and achieved some measure of wealth and social success. The heroes of these tales were most often orphaned boys with abundant street smarts who weren’t afraid of a fistfight as a last resort against the advances of a bully.
There is the air of the fairy tale about Alger’s novels. But the foremost achievement of Alger’s work was to develop a clear and vivid narrative that dramatized one of our most treasured national myths: that even the poorest and most disenfranchised among us can achieve prosperity, material wealth, and personal freedom.
THE NIGHTMARE STORIES
While we yearn to believe in these optimistic principles, at the same time Americans seem to take a grim satisfaction in watching the opposite pattern unfold. We love with equal fervor to watch our national myths foiled, to see their limits, their frailty, sometimes even their emptiness.
These are the nightmare stories: a pious, God-fearing community that is racked by hypocrisy and double-dealing and crimes against morality (Peyton Place); the smart, talented, attractive young women who journey off to the big city seeking fame and fortune (and husbands), only to find the tragic hollowness and unimaginable perils of that dream (Valley of the Dolls); the ordinary all-American young man who lives by a Boy Scout’s modest and hardworking creed but falls victim to unthinkable horrors (The Dead Zone).
What about John Smith’s doppelgänger, the sharp, obsessively studious boy from the shabby trailer park who makes his way to Harvard Law School, then lands his dream job in America’s heartland (The Firm)? Ah, yes. Mitch McDeere will meet the dark side of the American Dream as well and make a fatal Faustian bargain, taking a low-interest loan and shiny new BMW in exchange for his own soul, his marriage, and possibly his life.
In Mitch’s case, his belief in the American Dream remains unshakable even after his discovering that very dream has betrayed him and put everything he loves at risk. He takes a breath, summons his courage, and gives it one more college try, proceeding to outwit the Mob, the FBI, and his lethal legal brethren, then sailing off into the sunset of everlasting retirement.
AMERICA HAS BEEN GOOD TO ME
And there’s Bonasera, an outraged father who at the outset of The Godfather pleads for Don Corleone’s help in getting revenge on the boys who beat and tried to rape his daughter. The boys were released by the courts, and now Bonasera comes to the Godfather for the justice he had trusted the legal system of his adopted country to deliver. “America has been good to me. I wanted to be a good citizen. I wanted my child to be American.”
Don Corleone dismisses poor Bonasera for making the mistake of putting his faith in America, not in the Godfather. Later, during a meeting of all the Mafia heads from around the country, Don Corleone makes a statesmanlike speech about what he feels is a belief that binds these criminals together, a belief in the American Dream.
By refusing to be puppets manipulated by the power elite, Don Corleone and his fellow Mafia leaders have laid the foundation for future generations of Corleones. Their children have found better lives. They are scientists and musicians and professors, and no doubt the next generation will “become the new pezzonovanti” (the new big shots, or
ruling class). And who knows about the Don’s grandchildren. Maybe there is a future governor among them, even a president. For “nothing’s impossible here in America.”
When the Don’s son Michael reveals the true nature of the “family business” to Kay Adams, his white bread Protestant fiancée, he echoes nearly word for word his father’s views on the American Dream.
He wants his kids to be raised under Kay Adams’s influence, for them to grow up all-American kids. And he too holds out hope that one of them, or maybe someone in the next generation of his family, will become president of the United States. Why not? Michael learned in a history course at Dartmouth that some of our most revered presidents were raised by fathers “who were lucky they didn’t get hanged.”
THE IMMIGRANT NARRATIVE
If any single creed serves as the foundation for our national sense of self, it’s the promise of social mobility. That hard work and fair play will be rewarded. Anyone can become a star, and conversely, it’s all too possible for stardom to turn into a hellish fall from grace (Valley of the Dolls).
Even an eight-year-old girl in a tiny racist town can change the course of human events, as Scout does when she thwarts a lynching. Even a small-town cop who is deathly afraid of the water can go out to sea and help destroy a great white shark that is terrorizing his precinct. And even Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled girl-child with few worldly skills beyond coquetry, uses those skills to full advantage, managing with ruthless determination to flourish as an entrepreneur, then save Tara from the Yankee invaders and the carpetbaggers.
Rhett Butler warns Scarlett that a woman has only two choices: She can either make money and be unladylike and be ostracized by polite society, or she can be poor and well mannered and have lots of friends. Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett says about all that ladylike reputation stuff. She goes on to make her Atlanta lumber mill into a cash machine that supports the rebuilding of her first and only true love, Tara. She’s a capitalist wizard, using her heaving bosom and come-hither eyes to win husband after husband, each one lifting her to a higher income bracket.
That’s not to say Scarlett doesn’t get her hands dirty in a salute to the American virtue of hard work. After the war, back at Tara, she picks cotton, raises vegetables, and masters every skill the “darkies” used to handle. She replicates her own father’s immigrant narrative, starting with nothing, forced to stoop and scratch and eventually rebuild her lost empire through the sweat of her brow and a crafty use of her feminine charms.
At one point, so desperate to raise three hundred dollars to pay the Yankee taxes that threaten to steal Tara away from her, she decides she must attempt to seduce Rhett Butler, who is being held in an Atlanta prison. Without a gown or fitting frock to wear on this crucial mission of enticement, she pulls down the velvet drapes in Tara’s dining room and fashions a fetching dress that she just knows will assist her scheme. Rhett is fooled for a moment or two, until he takes her hands in his and sees how roughened they are from the manual labor she’s been doing back at Tara. He scoffs at her silly attempts to actually toil her way to prosperity. She’s better than that, Rhett believes, more shrewd. He counsels her simply to use her feminine wiles as he uses his masculine ones to gain what advantage she can.
Rhett’s rejection doesn’t thwart her. Moments after leaving the jail, Scarlett is still wearing the drapery dress when she bumps into Frank Kennedy, a successful store owner. Ah-ha. A quick pivot, and she’s got a new potential husband within her sights. The one minor inconvenience with lassoing Kennedy is that he’s the fiancé of her own sister Sue Ellen. But Scarlett brushes that aside and goes neatly from one man to the next, stealing her sister’s beau, latching on to yet another man who can write a check on her behalf.
Scarlett is a whirlwind of cunning and free enterprise craftiness. Maybe her old way of life has been destroyed and the Confederacy defeated, but Scarlett is destined to turn America’s greatest nightmare into her own version of the American Dream.
THE BOOTSTRAP MYTH
The power of individuals to change their own destiny, to rise or fall on the basis of their skills, their smarts, their craftiness, is at the core of each of these novels. No matter how insuperable the problem may be (finding a tiny needle like the Red October in the huge haystack of the Atlantic Ocean), a modest, unassuming, straight-talking, down-to-earth ordinary man with a little ingenuity and determination can save the day—or in Jack Ryan’s case, the world.
As I’ve noted, the novel from its very beginning has been unabashedly democratic. Any reader, no matter his or her race, creed, social class, or previous educational training, is invited to enter freely. And the writers of bestsellers seem abundantly aware of their duty to keep all comers entertained with stories of success, the triumph of social mobility, or its evil twin, the cautionary tale of disaster.
For it’s clear that in these bestsellers there is a right way and a wrong way to attain the American Dream. Take Hollywood mogul Jack Woltz, a man Don Corleone wants a small favor from. Woltz is a self-made man just like Vito Corleone, but there’s something un-American about his makeover.
When he turned fifty, Woltz began to take speech lessons, hired an English valet to teach him how to dress, and employed an English butler to instruct him on social rules. He became a collector of paintings and sculpture and a patron of the arts. All this would be enough to put Woltz on the Don’s blacklist, but what really seals his fate is turning down the Don’s business deal, an act of disrespect that leads to Woltz waking up in bed next to the decapitated head of his prized horse Khartoum.
By comparing Woltz’s hoity-toity vision of the American Dream with Don Corleone’s rise from poverty, we get a vivid contrast between the false version of the dream and the authentic one.
To escape Mafia violence in his homeland, young Vito Corleone was sent off to America at the age of twelve to live with friends. As a youngster in his adopted land, he labors in a grocery store and after a few years marries a sixteen-year-old Sicilian girl and settles down in a Tenth Avenue tenement.
But Vito Corleone is destined for greater things. He will lift himself up from destitution and hardship through the use of intelligence and icy courage. After murdering a neighborhood tyrant named Fanucci, who was reputed to be a member of an offshoot of the Mafia, Vito settles into the olive oil business. Largely because of the respect (and fear) he’s earned through removing Fanucci’s ruthless rule in the neighborhood, his business flourishes, and Vito begins to employ a certain leverage to make it flourish faster. His business plan sounds like a dark parody of a Wharton School MBA course.
Vito Corleone spent years building up his business until Genco Pura was the bestselling imported oil in the whole country. He undercut his business rivals in price, he strong-armed store owners to buy less of his competitors’ brands, and once his rivals were in a weakened position, he tried to buy them out. Since his olive oil was not in any way superior to the others on the market, it was the Don’s own reputation as a “man of respect” that gave him a stranglehold on the imported olive oil industry. The fact that he had a reputation as a cold-blooded murderer certainly didn’t hurt his rise.
Part of The Godfather’s immense popularity is no doubt due to its sly straddling of these two positions. On the one hand, the novel portrays a group of cutthroat criminals who use whatever bloody means necessary to succeed; on the other hand, the book could as easily be described as a tribute to the prototypical immigrant family, whose traditional American moral virtues (the Don refuses to deal drugs, for instance) and loyalty to friends and family allow them to overcome great obstacles and escape a life of poverty.
AMERICAN CYNICISM
The dark side of the American Dream is an equal and opposite force in nearly all of these megabestsellers. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, the black man who is falsely accused of rape, is found guilty of the crime, though it is clear to everyone in the courtroom down to the youngest child (our girl Scout) that he is innocent. Justice is not even c
lose to being just. While Atticus might take some solace in the fact that the jury took an especially long time to hash out their guilty verdict, that small step toward judicial fairness is small indeed and might seem more like a sad rationalization of bigotry than a hopeful view of social progress.
Similarly, cynicism toward the American Dream of success drips off every page of Peyton Place. Like the story of Roberta and Harmon Carter, a married couple with one son who live on a street that was considered the “second best” in Peyton Place. They could easily afford to live on the best street or even build a twenty-room castle if they weren’t concerned about appearing ostentatious. Drawing attention to themselves is a little dangerous because these two conned their way to their improved social class status.
When they were young, Harmon Carter and Roberta Welch were an item. But it was clear to Harmon that his job as an accountant at the local mill was not exactly the fast track to the American Dream. So he planted a sinister seed in Roberta’s mind by giving her constant reminders of the likely trajectory of their economic life together.
It’ll be paycheck to paycheck, he tells her, the grim life of an office worker. She deserves more than that, he assures her. Roberta should have furs and diamonds and the most fashionable clothes. But none of those wonderful material possessions will ever come her way with him stuck in a dead-end job.
Though Roberta claims she loves Harmon and always will, whether they are rich or poor, clever Harmon will have none of that, and he turns her argument around, saying if she loves him that much, then that deep love will not desert her while she’s married to Old Doc Quimby, the rich man whose house she cleans.
Roberta caves, and the scheming devils put their plan in motion. Of course, poor Old Doc falls for Roberta’s seduction, and all of Peyton Place has a good long snicker. The Doc gradually realizes what a fool he’s been, and a couple of weeks before the first anniversary of his marriage to Roberta Welch, Doc Quimby presses his revolver to his temple and kills himself.
Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 14