Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature: Eros and Ideology by Sam B. Girgus (review)

Reviews 255 Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. By Dave Foreman. (New York: Crown, 1991. 239 pages, $20.00.) Ifthere’ssuch a thing as an intellectual redneck, Dave Foreman qualifies. “I grew up wanting to be a cowboy,”he says of his boyhood in New Mexico. Years later, after co-founding the boisterous environment group Earth First!, he was gnashing his teeth about overgrazing and its beneficiaries, the governmentsubsidized “welfare ranchers” of the West. In between, Foreman followed a winding path. He shoed horses, haunted “cowboy”bars, then donned a necktie and hobnobbed with United States senators as a lobbyist for The Wilderness Society. Also along the way, he rubbed shoulders with erumpent western novel­ ist Edward Abbey of The Monkey "Wrench Gang fame, while steeping himself in nature writersJohn Muir, Robert Marshall, and Aldo Leopold. Given Foreman’s talents, the details of his crinkum-crankum career would make a fine story. He has chosen to pass on only the outline of his life, however, and this mostly in dribbles throughout his pages. Instead of offering “confes­ sions,” the activist spends most of the book justifying monkeywrenching in defense of nature and explaining the philosophy behind eco-raiding. This Foreman does clearly and intelligently. Yet he has written not the autobiogra­ phy his title implies but a primer. The tack is going to leave many a reader yearning for the particulars of Foreman’s “conversion,” the nights around wilderness camp fires with craggy Abbey, and especially Foreman’s version of his recent arrest by the F.B.I. This isn’t asking only for the “Bang, Bang”of his story, as the journalists call it. For we’d prefer to see the philosophy stand up before us embodied in the flesh-and-blood Foreman. Perhaps he will consider the approach for his next book. PETER WILD The University ofArizona Desire and thePolitical Unconscious in American Literature:Eros and Ideology. By Sam B. Girgus. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 236 pages, $31.95/$14.95.) Girgus’s book attempts to trace what he calls “the dialog between consensus and desire”in American literature and culture. He focuses on selected works of Hawthorne, Melville, Howells, Gilman, Chopin, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway to show that “American literature and culture can be described in terms of the collapse of two permanent wishes: the wish for psychic harmony and completion and the wish for collective unity and identity.” His method involves an interesting blend of new historicism, history of ideas, neo-Freudianism , feminism, deconstruction, and old fashioned close readings. Especially 256 WesternAmerican Literature influential for him are the critical writings of Henry Nash Smith (whose work Girgus seeks to modify), Sacvan Bercovitch, Jacques Lacan, and Annette Kolodny. In the last analysis, Girgus’s method is more interesting than his findings. Much of what he says about literature and culture has been said. For example, in 1968 in Melville’s 1'hematicsofFormEdgar Dryden said almost all ofwhat Girgus says about Billy Budd. In fact, most of his material on nineteenth-century America seems strangelyfamiliar. Still, the book contains a new synthesis, and it often produces illuminating readings of passages from individual works. Another problem involves audience. It is difficult to conceive what kind of audience Girgus has in mind. Nonspecialists would have serious problems with the psychoanalytic and literary-critical jargon Girgus uses, especially in his earlier chapters, but specialists (and most non-specialists) would certainly not need to be told that “Melville lacked Freud’s faith in psychoanalysis.” The book’s best parts treat The Great Gatsby, Tender is theNight, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell toArms in light of what Girgus calls “the chaos, uncertainty and fragmentation at the heart of the drive for intellectual and psychological security and wholeness.” Of most interest to scholars of western American literature is Chapter 6, in part on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, including the west coast phase of her career, and Chapter 7, on Mark Twain, especially the discussion of the ending of Adventures ofHuckleberryFinn. Still, Girgus’s method should be of interest to all serious students of American literature and culture. RICHARD TUERK East Texas State University The Indian Lawyer. ByJames Welch. (New York: W...