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DeKoven 129 Marianne DeKoven To Bury and to Praise: John Sayles on the Death of the Sixties "Serious" realist fiction can provide the same sort of cultural mythmaking offered by "serious" realist film: a more profound, complex attempt than we can get from television, Hollywood, or other branches of the culture industry to make a shaped, pointed story out of a contemporary experience that appears to us otherwise as shapeless and pointless. Perhaps that is why realist fiction is still pervasive as a cultural moment when its versions of temporality, reality, consciousness and the subject are anachronistic: it meets our undiminished need for explanatory stories, for myth. Such fiction generally gives shape unreflectingly to hegemonic (sometimes emergent) cultural ideology. Some realist fiction, however, undertakes self-conscious cultural mythmaking. Union Dues by John Sayles (1977) tells a particular story of the death of sixties radicalism which I find a generally accurate and compelling version of the origins and implications of that watershed in the history of my generation, and, perhaps, the history of the American left.1 At times, in the following discussion of the novel, it will seem as if I am talking about reality itself rather than either a novel or a myth. I make this disclaimer at the outset not so much to disarm the reader who will see me as naive, but rather to join that reader: I see myself as naive in this reading. Naivete seems the only stance available to the project of using a realist fiction to explicate a political myth. Union Dues divides its attention between a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia, Hobie McNatt, the betrayed innocent from whose point of view Sayles constructs his myth, and who goes to Boston looking for his older brother Darwin (a shattered Vietnam vet disowned by the boys' father for his callous murder of Vietnamese children), and the father, Hunter, who goes to Boston looking for Hobie (Hunter finds not Hobie but Darwin, whom Hobie does not find). These names tell us immediately that we are in the realm of self-conscious cultural mythmaking : "Hunter" the questing hero, "Darwin" the agent and victim of survival of the fittest, "Hobie" the lonely, self-destructive drifter. Hunter's Boston Odyssey takes him through the same lower depths of degrading labor and corrupt unions that he left behind in the West Virginia mines. 130 the minnesota review Since this essay is concerned only with Sayles' version of the decline and fall of sixties radicalism, I will not discuss Hunter's Odyssey: a serious omission, but justifiable in light of my purpose. Hobie is taken in, in both sense of the phrase, by a radical political commune Sayles calls "The Third Way." The novel is set in the fall and winter of 1969, just as the New Left is disintegrating. The Third Way is Sayles's fictional representation of the myriad splinter groups established in the wake of the SDS split. In fact, at least at its founding, The Third Way is not typical — those groups were on the whole very extreme, doctrinaire , and committed to the use of violence. The Third Way, however, as its name indicates, represents instead a rejection of the extremism of both PL and Weatherman or RYM-2. It conceives itself as an attempt to return to an earlier phase of the Movement and to build mass support. The attempt fails wretchedly. Sayles's depiction of the dynamics of that failure replicates very closely my own sense of the fall of the New Left. The Third Way had been founded, after the SDS split, by Mark Remington , a "Movement heavy" and radical media superstar: Remington was better-looking than most all the other fellas, dark and built in the right sizes all over like guys who did gymnastics on the TV ... He didn't have to talk so loud as the others to get attention during group and it wasn't just his looks. He knew how to talk. It was like a movie where the first time they open their mouths you knew which one was the main character ... Mark was with SNCC in Alabama, they told him. Mark was busted in...

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