Tim O'Brien's Ironic Aesthetic: Faith and the Nature of a "True" Story   By Edward A. Hagan and John Briggs Tim O'Brien's fiction since the 1990 publication of The Things They Carried is sharply focused on the necessity of respect for mystery and a recognition that mystery requires the problematic response of faith. O'Brien recognizes that we simply don't know and aren't likely to know almost everything, but it is our peculiarly modern, materialistic, atheistic focus that causes us to be "so unhappy." For example, the title of the first chapter of In the Lake of the Woods is "How Unhappy They Were"--and we learn almost immediately that John and Kathy Wade are unhapppy because they have "a problem of faith" (4). The focus on faith extends O'Brien's earlier enquiries into the nature of "true" stories; now we learn more explicitly that true stories open us up to accept mystery and liberate us, at least momentarily, from our quest for certainty. O'Brien's recent fiction reveals a contemporary world, split between those who seek certainty either in other-worldliness or in a totalizing materialism that necessitates discontinuity between subject and object. O'Brien's fiction seems to identify this split between what we'll call here the "material" and the "metaphysical" as the cause of divorce, violence and war, anomie, dissatisfaction, the elusiveness of happiness, and, finally, the unrealistic dreams that make life in the present empty and commit his characters to delusive imaginings of the future. These imaginings constitute the false stories that we tell ourselves and others in order to avoid facing the truth. Truth, in O'Brien's universe appears as basic uncertainty and existential ignorance--the precondition of faith. O'Brien attacks the split between the material and metaphysical responses to life by using irony to keep us aroused within the tension that exists between these two modes and worlds. O'Brien's ironic aesthetic does not annihilate either world; instead it makes clear that it is impossible to live in one sphere and avoid the other, as his characters try to do. Irony keeps readers from "fixing" a text (including deconstructing it),1 and thereby assigning either material or transcendent virtues or vices to it. Reminders of Joyce In his recent work, O'Brien appears to be writing with James Joyce much in mind, particularly the Joyce of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.2 O'Brien alludes many times to Joyce, but, more importantly, he shares an ironic perspective with Joyce that unites the material and metaphysical worlds. In fact, much like Joyce, O'Brien seems to realize that because both worlds are apprehended through the consciousness there is no real difference between them. However, through the mode of ironic epiphany, we can come to a consciousness of their connectedness. Irony is the hierophantic mode by which writers of "true" stories show the incompleteness of totalizing conceptions of stories rooted either in the purely material or in the transcendant. But, unlike many of Joyce's characters, O'Brien's characters are unable to reach epiphanies because they remain stuck with their false notions about how to find connectedness. However, the reader reaches them--or can reach them. For the characters of In the Lake of the Woods and the short story "Faith," the world is either entirely materialistic--and therefore magic is the mode of manipulation that will give the magician power over it (sorcery as public relations)--or the world is entirely metaphysical--and therefore magic is mystical. Like the characters, readers of O'Brien's works may wish to avoid the pain his fictions inflict, so O'Brien makes moves to prevent this avoidance. But we are prevented from avoiding it. His irony saturates us with uncertainty; yet we keep looking for certainty even as we acknowledge the shortcomings of characters obviously flawed by their own fixations on certainty. Given O'Brien's insistence on mystery and uncertainty, it is no surprise that he is viewed with suspicion by critics with ideological axes to grind--particularly about the Vietnam War, the inspiration of much of O'Brien's work. Similarly, the lingering devotees of the now old-fashioned New Criticism are likely to misread O'Brien and view his work redemptively, i.e., it offers access into a wholly spiritual world that reminds them of the kind of transcendance found in many constructions of religion. Nevertheless, O'Brien is quite explicit about what is at stake in his most recent fiction. In In the Lake of the Woods John and Kathy Wade are left to unrealistic dreams of "stately pleasure domes" in Verona because of their "problem of faith"(4). Similarly, O'Brien's 1996 short story, "Faith," reflects its title's concern with a faithless narrator, Tommy, who, much like John Wade, is stuck with a hubristic view of his creative powers. This is strongly reminiscent of the arrogance of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. O'Brien's recent fiction has deepened his focus on the issues of mystery and faith that surfaced in earlier works such as his now famous short story, "The Things They Carried." There, both narrator and reader attempt to make sense of the experiences of Lt. Jimmy Cross and his platoon by "accounting" for the items of equipment that he and his men carry as they hump "the boonies"--and the attempt fails. (E.g., "With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away"(5).). As we go down the list of items carried, the physical and metaphysical are always quite clearly entwined. This story closes with Jimmy's futile resolve to "dispense with love" and "to tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture" (25). But the war can't be "managed" in consciousness by the positivist technique of taking a physical inventory of what the soldiers carried, so Cross will never succeed in this false posture. Throughout the book, The Things They Carried, O'Brien suggests that epiphanies are triggered by a contemplation of the metaphysical mysteries of the material world.3 While war testifies to a belief that only the material matters, O'Brien clearly implies that true acts of faith arise out of metaphysical contemplation of the material. He appears to propose that such contemplation is a creative act. O'Brien says this explicitly in his story "The Lives of the Dead": "... when I take a high leap [of faith] into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story" (273). Creative "true" stores--which are acts of faith--offer whatever salvation is to be found. The irony of that salvation is that, instead of finding escape in a hedonist's or Platonist's world, we are graced with uncertainty, pain, and insecurity.4 It is not surprising that O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" can only intimate characteristics of a true war story because his premise is that any absolute definition (certainty) is unattainable (including the certainty of the definition in this sentence). (See also the note on Deconstruction.) The story explores the elusive character of truth and suggests the situations in which we can recognize it. The truth of a story can be sensed, intuited, recognized, but not formulated. Yet despite the obvious futility of our desires for absolute truths, we continue to desire them pathologically, O'Brien indicates. The sickness of our lust for the kind of knowledge, control and certainty provided by false stories is a denial of the metaphysical and an insistance that the material is the only reality. In our false story, life is not truly mysterious; it is merely puzzling like the crossword puzzle that puzzles Kathy Wade. In a puzzle we assume there are answers, though we may be having trouble finding them. Both writer and reader try to solve riddles, and their solutions become reductive statements that give the illusion of control over the story and the illusion of the story's control over reality. In a sense war-making is much like a false story. The warring countries have a wholly materialistic faith that they can control their destinies and the destinies of their enemies by winning the war. Soldiers come to know how wrong this is through their experience of the randomness of war. Thus, despite all their initiations into the warrior's "secrets" during military training, exposure to actual combat makes them realize how little anyone can control anything. Similarly, O'Brien is able to show that a war story that creates the illusion of control is clearly a falsification of war, since war is by and large an absence of control, although armies (like many literary critics) may struggle mightily to claim they have the situation in hand. O'Brien's ironic aesthetic "solves" the epistemological problem of how to tell a true story. Ironic stories are true because they create open, flexible structures that allow us to recognize and feel the very insecurity [even the pain] that drives writers and readers to seek the illusory comfort of false stories. O'Brien's narrator in "How to Tell a True War Story," advises, "If a story seems moral, do not believe it" (76). He's right because moral certainty regularly falls apart when subjected to both war and the ambiguous truth of irony. "Faith," Tomcat in Love and In the Lake of the Woods reveal the operation of this ironic aesthetic in allegedly peacetime settings (suggesting perhaps that the contentions for power embodied in false stories are likely the real cause for war, not geopolitics). It is obvious that materialists desire power; but so, too, do the "other worldly" male types who channel their desires for power into metaphysics. In the case of aesthetes and romantics like Tommy, their low-grade metaphysics spin fantasies about the women they seek to control. Tommy's Persistent Delusions By playing on the very idea of an artist, the story, "Faith," contrasts such low-grade metaphysics (fantasies) with the ambiguous, uncontrollable truth revealed by the ironic artist. Three kinds of artist are at work within the story: Behind the scenes is Tim O'Brien, the ironic artist seeking to tell the truth. On stage are two "false artists," one of them a materialist (Herbie) and the other a metaphysicalist (Tommy). O'Brien's irony reveals the essential sameness of the two modes of "false" art. The materialist Herby Zylstra, Tommy's delinquent childhood friend, and the self-deluded first-person metaphysicalist narrator, Tommy, seek control over Mary Jean. Tommy's mode of control involves lying and misrepresentation of reality whereas Herby physically attempts to keep his sister from marriage (a hint of possible incestuous designs). Neither deals with the reality of Mary Jean, and O'Brien's implication is that therein lies the essential stupidity of conflict, the root cause of wars: the attempt to control what cannot be controlled. Though as a child Mary Jean is pliable, as an adult she makes her own choices (notwithstanding the dubious choice of Kerr as her new husband). The story interestingly parallels the Dedalus and Icarus motifs of A Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. "Faith" is riddled with images of failed flight (from life, particularly as it is embodied by women) and of aesthetic arrogance. Tommy and Herby crash because both "create" false stories in which they are the controlling protagonists of Mary Jean. O'Brien suggests it is false to differentiate between the man of action and the man of imagination. In actuality, Herbie's materialistic actions are driven by metaphysical beliefs about the materialistic, concrete nature of reality. His emotional urges are shaped and warped by networks of metaphysical ideas, including ideas of sin and ideologies of Catholicism. Similarly, Tommy's fantasies about words and other metaphysical concepts have physical consequences that are manifested in his fascination with the possibilities of magical power.5 We constantly turn abstractions into real, physical things. Airplanes, for example, are abstractions that have been given a material form. There are materialistic abstractions and metaphysical abstractions. The materialists feel superior to the metaphysicians and vice versa. But both make up false stories about reality. In fact, the stories are the reality. Irony is required to penetrate abstractions created across the spectrum and reveal that all abstractions are stories, beneath which is something unknown, perhaps immense, and certainly unsettling. Tommy opens "Faith" by detailing his memories of the summer of 1952 during which Herbie and he are eight and seven years old respectively and are fixated on bombing "people we despised" (62). Tommy reveals that a matrix of bombing, creativity, and sexuality permeate his early memories: For me, the bombing was fine. It seemed useful, vaguely productive, but the best part was flight itself, or the anticipation of flight, and over those summer days, the word "engine" did engine work in my thoughts. I envisioned thrust: a force pressing upward and outward, even beyond (62). Tommy's image of a "force pressing upward and outward, even beyond" suggests male sexuality. For Tommy sexuality and bombing are dissociated from their physical essences. Dissociation like his is a key cause of violence because, from the dissociated perspective, babies and casualties are only theoretical. Since true creativity is both physical and metaphysical, dissociating them leads Tommy into a false notion that creativity is necessarily violent and destructive. This view of creativity is most disturbing because it is coupled with the enticing idea of freedom implicit in the airplane's ability to escape gravity and much more. For Tommy, the engine would be "like a box...which when opened would release the magical qualities of levitation" (62).6 Tommy appears to be more astute than his friend Herbie, who is stuck in a dead, phenomenal world: Herbie literally nails his sister to the cross that he makes out of the airplane, and he becomes a mordant religionist, a "by the numbers," atheistic Catholic. Tommy, on the other hand, gives reign to his imagination and allows his father's substitution of a turtle for an engine to propel him into an almost purely imaginary world of Platonic forms. The turtle empowers Tommy to think of a transcendent engine, "everything it did not mean but should have" (62). The words are important here: Like Gulliver, Tommy says "that which is not." Tommy's imagination gives him license to become a kind of tyrant, who would construe reality to fit his whims. Tommy reminds us of Stephen Dedalus, who as a young boy feels guilty for imagining a "green wothe [rose]"--an act with clear resemblances to Tommy's imagining an "airplane" that is capable of flight when propelled by a turtle. (The airplane is painted green in O'Brien's story.) In the story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Icarus escapes from the Cretan labyrinth by using the waxen wings fashioned for him by his father, Dedalus. Icarus flies too close to the sun and crashes to earth when the wings melt. The fall of Icarus is inevitable because Dedalus has violated the laws of nature.7 Similarly, Tommy's father "sets up" Tommy with the turtle. Tommy attempts to violate the laws of nature by imagining that he can control the turtle so as to make it capable of the propulsion necessary for flight. Such a conception could exist only in a metaphysics totally abstracted from reality. S.L. Goldberg, in The Classical Temper has argued that Joyce is a classicist; his description of the classical temper offers a key distinction that may help in understanding O'Brien's characters: The classical temper displays itself as a responsive openness to life, a firm grasp on the centrally human, a respect for the present reality we all share, an allegiance to the objective, and a mistrust of metaphysical or naturalistic "realities" abstracted from the total complexity of human experience (32). In O'Brien's "Faith" the reader is encouraged to see the pitfalls of both the metaphysical Tommy and the naturalistic Herbie. The latter's shortcomings are easy to discern because the "superior" narrator Tommy makes them clear for us: Herbie is a literalist, whose religiosity is a habit, a way of getting through the day. Catholicism has no transcendence for him.8 On the other hand, the metaphysical Tommy requires our close attention because he has the smoothly entrapping voice of the narrator. Tommy is much like the Stephen Dedalus whom Goldberg has unmasked for us so well. Goldberg's study (like Buttigieg's) reveals the flaw in Stephen's aesthetics: Stephen, in presenting his aesthetic theory, left out "any reference to the world outside the [art] object itself" (53). Thus Stephen has created an amoral art that violates the laws of nature. Similarly Tommy violates nature in making two words--"turtle" and "Tampa"--have meanings (false stories) that are essentially private, abstracted from the reality they actually denote. "Turtle" only faintly resembles an engine, and Tampa, the scene of Mary Jean's encounter with the man she leaves Tommy for, is a city. These terms might work as a metaphor (a turtle is like an engine, like Tampa), but in Tommy's hands they remain privately literal. He sees there "had to be some sort of meaningful connection, a turtleness inside engineness, but right then I couldn't find the logic" (62).9 The metaphor like the airplane doesn't get off the ground. Tommy falsely associates Tampa with the breakup of his marriage in a way that effectively eliminates Tampa's physical reality. The truth is that Tommy's marriage has been shattered by his attempts to manipulate Mary Jean much as he manipulates words. For example, in one manipulation he tries to make himself into what appears to be a man going to therapy. The story suggests that Herbie unmasks him in this by revealing to Mary Jean that Tommy has been merely writing checks to a therapist without actually going to the therapy that Mary Jean has correctly insisted he needs. Tommy's deception echoes his faulty understanding of life, of language, and of art: The check has been disconnected from the therapy, and--in the sense that Goldberg has described as the defect in Stephen Dedalus's aesthetics--the check, like Tampa, is without "any reference to the world [in this case--real therapy] outside the object [the check] itself" (53). In other words, Tommy has "metaphysicalized" the therapy in terms of a physical object--the check, causing it to lose its material meaning. It has become a dissociated symbol of his desire to "please" or entrap Mary Jean in a metaphysical relationship. Tommy is too obsessed to have the epiphanies that words can open up to him when they are connected to the real world; instead he is stuck with a supercilious attitude that prohibits him from understanding words with "meanings beyond meanings" (62). Words for Tommy function like material objects, "Turtle. Tampa." As a consequence, he remains stuck with the boyhood problem posed for him by his father of connecting words to realities.10 He can only see them as mutually exclusive. He doesn't see that his final question--"Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?" (67)--is uttered with a Prufrockian self-absorption and in reality is open to a variety of responses that he himself is not making. Instead he reduces a word to a poisonous material object--arsenic. We may see the comparison of "word" to "arsenic" as metaphor; Tommy does not. His reification of words derives from his inability to see and understand real mystery. Throughout the story Tommy has been fixated on "solving" Mary Jean, much in the same way that John Wade tries to solve Kathy Wade in In the Lake of the Woods. Tommy cannot see his own agency in the demise of his marriage; instead he indulges himself by remembering the lurking behavior of Herbie in spying on Mary Jean and himself at very private moments of their relationship. For Tommy: It's a mystery. Four decades later, and I am alone. Herbie killed my marriage. He murdered love (65). Tommy hangs on to the very childish (and possibly correct) notion that he and Herbie have not changed since they were seven and eight and involved in a contest for control over Mary Jean. The contest has shifted to new ground because Mary Jean has taken up with Kersten or Kerr, now her new husband. Kerr is a more obvious kind of materialist for he is "a tycoon," whom "Mary Jean seems proud of." He has lavished his material wealth on her: "She's well dressed. Expensive jewelry, tanned skin, very beautiful" (67). Meanwhile Tommy is pathetically adopting Herbie's materialist strategies by paying "a covert visit to Mary Jean and her new husband" (67). In the end, Tommy is a mere loser in the game of marriage materialism. He actually fails at his marriage because his imagination has drawn a sharp dichotomy between the material world and the low-gauge Platonic fantasy world he prefers. Goldberg argues that Joyce is an Aristotelian, and Joyce's notion of epiphany--a sudden spiritual transformation--requires the connection of the art object to the real world. The imaginative Stephen Dedalus, like the imaginative Tommy, needs to land on the ground in order to ground his spiritual insight in what is actually going on in his world. Neither Tommy nor Steven is able to make a successful landing. Perhaps Tommy could land by going to therapy instead of simply writing the checks to the therapist. Since he doesn't seek real confrontation with his and his wife's pain, she seeks escape from the one who will physically harm her and from the other who keeps her remotely poised on an other-worldly, Beatrician pedestal. In a sense Mary Jean, much like Kathy Wade in In the Lake of the Woods, attracts Tommy's worshipful adoration (and Herby's crucifixion), and, when she leaves him, she becomes the god who has failed. Deconstructionist's Farce/Farcing Deconstruction "Faith" becomes chemically transformed as the first chapter of O'Brien's 1998 novel, Tomcat in Love. Here O'Brien re-invents (or reveals) Tommy as Professor of Linguistics Thomas H. Chippering and shifts the issue of faith to the reader. How can the reader know the truth of a farce told by an unreliable confessional narrator? Must we take him on faith? Chippering, awash in the self-delusion of trying to tell the truth about his life, begins to earn our contempt in the second chapter. The novel's frame provides no trustworthy other source of information. Consequently we must either exercise our own faculty for grasping the character's unintentional ironies or else dismiss the novel as worthlessly mad. Not to dismiss the novel requires opening ourselves up to the problematical state of "not knowing" for certain if we've "got it right." In her review of the novel, Jane Smiley confesses how much the difficulty of having to see the truth of the story through Chippering's farcical fog bothered her reading. "Thus it is," she says, "that Mrs. Robert Kooshof [Chippering's paramour] absolutely needs an actress to play her, just so we could see her for ourselves" (11). A comparison of "Faith" with Tomcat's first chapter, which bears the same title, reveals a few subtle but significant changes. Mary Jean becomes "Lorna Sue"--a name that evokes a greater sense of farce. The chapter changes Chippering's audience: Tommy in "Faith" first directly addresses a jilted man, then later changes this to a jilted woman. The imaginary man had lost a woman who now "lives on Fiji with her new lover" (62) as Mary Jean does with Kerr in Tampa. Tomcat, on the other hand, is addressed throughout to a jilted woman whose man "lives on Fiji with a new lover" (4). The change in emphasis reveals a feminization of Chippering that is supported by other plot elements and resembles the humiliation of Joyce's Leopold Bloom in the Nighttown scenes of Ulysses' "Circe" chapter. The change of emphasis in the novel makes Chippering less sympathetic than Tommy because the self-imaging is so obviously false to his otherwise male predatory instincts. We are usefully alienated, however, because our critical faculties become alerted to the false story Chippering spins out for us. In the larger context of the novel, Tommy's supercilious attitude in "Faith" metamorphoses. Chippering is clearly a thoroughgoing narcissist who relentlessly reinterprets the world in terms of his own needs and desires. Tommy's proclivities for solipsistic word play in the short story become comically hyperextended in the novel. An allusion in Chapter 19 to Macbeth draws attention to Chippering's desire to make the words mean "one thing" (always for him a self-referential thing). Delbert, a Green Beret who served in Vietnam with and allegedly still pursues Chippering, complains, "'This tale...seems told by a goddamn idiot. Doesn't signify jack-anything.'" Chippering reveals his kinship with Macbeth by saying "'It soon will.'" When Delbert inquires, "'Sound and fury?'" Chippering replies. "'You bet'"--an intimation of his intention to use sound and fury to limit the tale's meaning to his own narcissistic solipsism (163). The use of the word "signify" in Delbert's question is another ironic nail in deconstruction's coffin. By making Chippering a professor of linguistics, O'Brien not so subtly lampoons post-structuralist theorists, whom he obviously regards as farcical for their distemper with the nature of words. Followers of Jacques Derrida have accepted the notion that words fail to re-present experience (as if anyone seriously thought they did). O'Brien has understood the covert reductionism of the deconstructionist position. The deconstructionists are like the disillusioned lover who expected an idealistic certainty (a kind of materiality) from language that it realistically could never possess. The discovery that language doesn't live up to expectations leads to an angry (or smug) rejection of the possibility of words to convey truth. (Truth is not at all the same as certainty.) Moreover, in deconstructionist terms, since every piece is assumed to privilege some ideology, every piece is assumed to be reducible to that ideology. The act of deconstruction is the act of reducing the text to its privilege. Labeling the privilege is the privilege of the deconstructionist who employs his assault on language as a way to gain the power of knowing what the real meaning (or meaninglessness) is. Linguist Thomas H. Chippering follows the private traces in words to their privileged meaning (which is always himself). Again and again he weaves a perfect poststructuralist world of nihilistic word play. It's as if O'Brien were suggesting that post-structuralist linguistics is really a form of narcissism at heart. But how, then, does a reader manage to see through Chippering's word play to the truth, which in the post-structuralist world (Chippering's world) doesn't exist? The answer, once again, is irony. It's no accident then that Chippering takes himself so seriously (a superficial, self-conscious seriousness that O'Brien creates, in part, by the almost complete elimination of contractions in the novel version of "Faith"). Chippering has no capacity for understanding irony; he lost it at the early age of his inability to imagine a turtle as an engine. Lacking a sense of irony ironically condemns Chippering to being blindly surrounded by a swarm of unintended ironies he himself creates; he keeps an absurd ledger book--a materialist enterprise--in which he records even the slightest evidence of female interest in him as if, by some calculus, he can compute his attractiveness to women and thus establish his power over them. Chippering tries to control and manipulate his world by deconstructing language for his own ends. An irony of this deconstruction is that his poststructuralist assumption that language is relative causes him to weave one false story after another. A further irony is that his very obsession for control over words and everything else leads to chaos. The reader would certainly be lost in the chaos were it not for the fact that we discover a faith in our ability to see the ironies Chippering is lost in. We see these ironies as irony. Chippering, the deconstructionist, sees his mental games as a means to gain power. Unlike Chippering, we grasp the novel's meaning because that meaning is ironic at its core, and it is our appreciation of irony that gives us the truth about Chippering. In Tomcat as in his other stories, O'Brien's irony calls on us to see the shortcomings of his characters while it disassembles their controlling constructs. The fundamental miscalculations of his characters involve their creation of abstractions (a central mode of control) that lack contact with the real mystery of life. Our seeing that lack of mystery brings the mystery to the foreground. Mystery requires faith, and real faith comes from confronting life's only apparent certainty: that we really do know very little, if anything at all. (Or perhaps we know precisely everything we need to know.)11 It is not surprising that O'Brien would construct his irony as he does because his fiction grows strongly out of his war experience. O'Brien recognizes that war pays homage to one of our ultimate metaphysical abstractions, power. Belief in power is as intoxicating as a lucky streak at the blackjack table (as in O'Brien's short story, "The Streak") because power holds out the promise of providing us with the means to attain our ideal world in a material form. Irony is the opposite of power. Magician's Story The juxtaposition of irony and power are at the center of O'Brien's novel, In the Lake of the Woods. The story reveals the ineffectuality of John Wade, the magician, who lacks any understanding of irony (and hence, truth). Wade's deficency literally leads him to view all situations and relationships as subject to mere clever manipulation--the exercise of power (which turns out to be futile). When faced with the "puzzle" of his wife's mysterious disappearance, Wade--the seeker after power--is powerless to understand what has happened to her, because his old tricks do not work. He's been tricked by his own tricks and so cannot see the truth, though we can. But there is no assurance that we will since O'Brien sets moral traps for us. He tempts us to feel superior to Wade, to avoid seeing how essentially similar Kathy is to John, and to assent to John's final disappearance as an act that possibly redeems him. O'Brien makes clear that John, Kathy and ourselves occupy a world that keeps trapping us into a belief in our godlike knowledge and a denial of life's essential uncertainty. The story focuses on Wade, a Vietnam veteran, who was present at the My Lai massacre where he killed two people in a moment of nervous, terrified reaction. Wade later takes on the role of the politician--a role likely to sucker (succor) an American readership immediately into contempt and superiority. Here we are likely to make a quick, smug equation between the moral perfidy of My Lai and John's choice of occupation. We aren't entirely wrong, but the mathematics required to make the connection is not elementary algebra. The easy conclusion allows us to dismiss John the politician and murderer as "not us" when, in fact, it is we who sent young men like John to Vietnam; it is we who require our politicians to lie to us about their sins (on the premise that only saints like ourselves should be our leaders), and it is we who would be unlikely really to "hear" the facts about John's involvement: He was not a mass murderer; he apparently killed PFC Weatherby and an old man reflexively in moments of shocked horror and confused sensation as he lay in an irrigation ditch.12 We have no basis for moral superiority to John Wade although we may correctly frown upon his manipulations of truth such as his changing of his unit of assignment in official Army records so that he could claim not to have been present at the massacre. We recognize the wisdom of Tony Carbo, the seasoned, nitty-gritty but thoroughly despicable "pol," who unabashedly tells John that he made a play for Kathy, but who also later sees the irony that: ...politics and magic were almost the same thing for him. Transformations--that's part of it--trying to change things. When you think about it, magicians and politicians are basically control freaks (27-28). We, the enlightened, cannot accept the male chauvinist notion that "...Kathy had brought it on herself: she had a personality that lured him on. Fiercely private, fiercely independent" (33). Thus we are likely to feel great sympathy for Kathy, who has had to live with a man who cannot bury a traumatic past history, who aborts a child she wants because they are not ready for it, and who is not able to communicate her own disdain for politics and has therefore lived her life on "squelch." Kathy, after all, only wants "normal" family life. However, the actual nature of Kathy's desires is disquieting and is ultimately not at odds with John's. Its nexus is materialistic: "They envisioned happiness as a physical place on earth, a secret country and a difficult new language" (3). There, in the Verona of their dreams, they would "'find new stuff to want'" (4). Of necessity such a place can only be conceived of in future terms because, by definition, they can never make that Verona real; the dream is based on a notion of a control over their lives that humans cannot accomplish: "When they spoke, which was not often, it was to maintain the pretense that they were in control of their lives, that their problems were soluble, that in time the world would become a happier place" (16). Kathy (like the electorate that rejected John's quest for the U.S. Senate) no more wants to know about the My Lai massacre than he wants to remember it: When he tries to broach the subject, she cuts him off (22). Later, he reveals quite correctly that there was no way for him to repent when he asks, "'What could I tell her'" (189)? In fact, Kathy has a characteristic much like that of a magician (John, for example), a "curious motion Kathy sometimes made with her fingers, a slight fluttering, as if to dispel all the things that were wrong in their lives" (133). Yet, the novel sets us up to dislike John's behavior so much that it almost deadens us to the questions that we might well ask about Kathy's secret lover, Harmon, or why in her letters to John while he was in Vietnam "she rarely mentioned the war" (36). We might also be forgiven for ignoring these questions because we have hope for spiritual insight on Kathy's part; she seems to have had experiences which resemble Joyce's epiphanies. If we read "Faith" carefully however, we should be suspicious when she imagines: ...a puzzle world, where surfaces were like masks, where the most ordinary objects seemed fiercely alive with their own sorrows and desires. She remembered giving secret names to things, carrying on conversations with chairs and trees....It had always seemed so implausible that the world could be so indifferent to its own existence, and although she'd long ago given up on churches, Kathy couldn't help believing in some fundamental governing principle beneath things, an aspect of consciousness that could be approached through acts of human sympathy (170-171). Yes, we might be tempted to say, Kathy is on to something essential here, for indeed "human sympathy" is what John needs for his My Lai memories. In fact, "human sympathy" or love is the genuine product of a proper immersion in the ironic world of pain and insecurity. However, we don't know if Kathy has ever had these glimmers of insight because this passage is located in one of the "Hypothesis" chapters. Moreover, it's just possible that Kathy has negated the world of actuality by giving "secret names to things" (controlling reality like Tommy and, at another level of irony, like O'Brien, the author) and has, in fact, lost touch with reality by "carrying on conversations with chairs and trees." Perhaps her behavior isn't sympathy but avoidance. Kathy is not alone in possibly having glimmers of insights that are undercut by irony. The novel closes with John setting out on what seems to be an attempt to join Kathy. His thought processes reveal the possibility that he may really love Kathy. The problem is, if we have fully entered the irony of the story, we can't be sure. Beginning his journey into the Minnesota lake country, "a couple of minor truths had now appeared, or whatever the certainty was that held his heart when he thought, Kath, my Kath" (252). The invocatory nature (compare: "God, my God") of his memory of Kathy suggests that she remains on her pedestal. Nevertheless, he recognizes: "Love, he thought. Which was one truth. You couldn't lose it even if you tried" (252). The attachment, or whatever it is, seems to drive him toward Kathy, wherever she may be, and we should not be unimpressed. We should, however, be alert and cautious about Wade's goal, "A place where one plus one always came to zero" (253). Our doubt about this place is well worth having since doubt is the arena of faith (or love, which may be the same as faith), even if we aren't sure that John is quite ready to believe in anything. Our only hope, however, is to live in that realm of faith. We recognize that John is now performing a last magic trick, but we don't and can't know whether it is mere trickery or an insightful recognition, a step on the road to epiphany. In either case, O'Brien reminds us that Wade is attempting to perform the ultimate trick that he had imagined earlier: He did not know the technique yet, or the hidden mechanism, but in his mind's eye he could see a man and a woman swallowing each other up like that pair of snakes along the trail near Pinkville, first the tails, then the heads, both of them finally disappearing forever inside each other. Not a footprint, not a single clue. Purely gone--the trick of his life. The burdens of secrecy would be lifted. Memory would be null. They would live in perfect knowledge, all things visible, all things invisible, no wires or strings, just that large dark world where one plus one will always come to zero (76-77). Transportation to this other world is, as Buttigieg makes clear in his study of A Portrait, the aesthete's ticket to paradise, the place of no history that can only be apprehended by magical detachment of art from life. Nevertheless, Wade may have traveled beyond this to a moment of recognition in which he sees Kathy as "Not quite present, not quite gone, she swims in the blending twilight of in between" (291). It seems unlikely, though, that John could really rest content with the "in between," for his vision of the two snakes swallowing one another up--although it comes close to understanding the paradox of the "in between"--is probably flawed, or at least double-edged. The image seems to require us to remain ignorant about whether we are really controlling or being controlled (swallowing or being swallowed?). Wade wants to be a magician, and magic functions by creating the illusion that things appear and disappear while the magician is in control. Given Wade's character, is it likely he would give up his control? Nevertheless, O'Brien leaves us with the ambiguity that Wade may have indeed finally broken free of his own magic and accepted the unsolvable riddle of swallowing and swallowed snakes. Meanwhile, we are left in the agony of having forgiven Wade only to realize that perhaps we shouldn't have. Ultimately the narrator tells us: Sorrow, it seems to me, may be the true absolute. John grieved for Kathy. She was his world. They could have been so happy together. He loved her and she was gone and he could not bear the horror (305).13 We can accept that John is sorry, but the evidence of the story is overwhelming: They could not have been happy together for the simple and terrible truth (to paraphrase the concluding question of the novel) is that John was a man who in his life was a monster. Each of us can both dismiss and recall our memories but we can surely not escape them. (Therapy usually involves recall of a past that we finlly face.) Perhaps in John and Kathy's "true" story we can each recognize ourselves, seeing the illusion of our attempts to escape from who we are, feeling freed by their story to experience our own existential ambiguity and uncertainty. In the Lake of the Woods also frees us from the conditioning of the "whodunit" story, which falsely leads us to believe that we always find out who was responsible and what exactly happened. O'Brien offers hypothesis after hypothesis but leaves the "plot" of the disappearances unresolved. To enjoy the story, we have to seek a different kind of satisfaction--that of a "faith" in the mystery's unspoken meaning. To bring us to this "faith" and "truth" the novel itself reveals how conditioned we are by "whodunits" and other such false stories. True stories offer the possibility of freedom from the false stories we are always concocting. Such freedom is linked to mystery, ambiguity, compassion, sympathy. The true stories of O'Brien's ironic aesthetic suggest a very powerful argument for literature as freedom.   Works Cited Buttigieg, Joseph A. A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective. Athens, Ohio, and London: Ohio University Press, 1987. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957. Dubus, Andre. "A Father's Story." The Times Are Never So Bad. Boston: David R. Godine, 1983. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U.of Minnesota Press, 1996. Goldberg, S.L. The Classical Temper. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Penguin, 1964.   ---. Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Irony. Trans. Lee M. Capel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968. O'Brien, Tim. "Faith." The New Yorker 12 Feb. 1996: 62-67. ---. In the Lake of the Woods. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1994. ---. "Nogales." The New Yorker 8 Mar 1999: 68-73. ---. "The Streak." The New Yorker 28 Sept 1998: 88-91. ---. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1990. ---. Tomcat in Love. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Scholes, Robert, and A. Walton Litz. "Epiphanies and Epicleti." In James Joyce. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin, 1976. 253-256. Smiley, Jane. "Catting Around." Rev. of Tomcat in Love, by Tim O'Brien. The New York Times Book Review 20 September 1998: 11-12. Stone, Robert. "Miserere." The New Yorker 24 June & 1 July 1996: 112-121.   1 As some post-structuralists have admitted, the deconstruction of ironic texts is impossible. Since the irony has already deconstructed them, it is pointless to deconstruct the deconstruction. Terry Eagleton says of the post-structuralists that criticism becomes an "unsettling venture into the inner void of the text which lays bare the illusoriness of meaning, the impossibility of truth and the deceitful guiles of all discourse" (126). This is certainly not the truth of O'Brien's aesthetic. The deconstructive approach is, in an important sense, not different from more traditional literary theory, for example, New Criticism. Deconstruction and New Criticism both proceed from the unacknowledged assumption that if there is a meaning or truth in a text, that truth must be statable ("writable" to use Barthes' term) in abstract terms. The truth must be categorical in some sense. The New Critics discover their truth in an idealized, transcendent category which synthesizes various possible meanings. The post-structuralists take a via negativa approach, denying truth and meaning to the text (as a collection of abstractions) entirely. Much critical theory is purblind to the kind of truth writers like O'Brien, Joyce and Conrad believe they are writing. For these and many other writers, truth is not a category or abstraction; it is a revelation, both immediate (not transcendent), obvious, and unspeakable. Categories and abstractions are entwined in this truth, but they do not contain it. Such truth is no more a thing than the life force is a thing. Such truth is, in other words, something neither reducible to critical abstractions, nor dispelled by nihilist critical ideologies. By reducing metaphors to metonyms, deconstructionists presume to deny literary metaphor's power to reveal truth as mystery. But as Conrad said in Heart of Darkness, "The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily." Too often criticism seems actively hostile to mystical, literary truth and seeks to redefine literary works so as to tame and control them for the sole aggrandisement of the profession of criticism. Deconstruction appears to be no different from other reductive forms of criticism in this regard, though its underlying reductionism is well disguised.   2 O'Brien's understanding of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man appears to follow closely that of Joseph A. Buttigieg, whose 1987 study, A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective, reveals Joyce's insistence on the connection between the metaphysical and physical worlds. Buttigieg argues persuasively that Stephen Dedalus's aesthetics are flawed by his alienation from the real world of sense experience. Buttigieg points out that Joyce sees Stephen Dedalus ironically, and even sees Stephen's irony ironically. Buttigieg shows that misreadings of A Portrait, particularly the failure to observe the distance between Stephen and Joyce, gave the novel a high place in the holy of holies of the New Critics, who had been repulsed by naturalism and positivism in literature.   3 Joyce's narrator presents Stephen Dedalus's definition of epiphany in Stephen Hero: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance: --Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know what it is: epiphany. Note especially that Stephen talks of the clock as "an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture." The things described in "The Things They Carried" are similarly catalogued, but the epiphanies keep transforming them into more than just material objects. Note, however, that it is important to both O'Brien's and Joyce's method that the spiritual manifestations are rooted in the perceived reality of the material world.   4 "The Lives of the Dead" resembles the last story of Joyce's Dubliners, "The Dead": in its title, in being the last story in a volume of stories, and in Gabriel Conroy's epiphany that Michael Furey, Gretta's dead lover of her youth, is alive in her imagination. Whatever grace comes to Gabriel at the end of the story is an awakening to life's sorrow and transience.   5 "Faith" also resembles Joyce's "Araby," in which the young boy narrator hopes unrealistically to secure a romance with Mangan's sister through the "Eastern enchantment" of a bazaar with the "magical name" of Araby.   6 Tommy resembles John Wade from In the Lake of the Woods in this fascination with magic. Like John Wade, Tommy understands mystery on a very elementary level; it's a matter of trickery. He speaks like a third-rate Platonist, who has some notion of the "ideal form of flight": "My engine would somehow contain flight" (62).   7 The epigraph at the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man is taken from a description of Dedalus's art in Ovid's Metamorphoses and suggests that his art violates the laws of nature. The epigraph reads: "Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes", or, in English: "And he sets his mind to work upon unknown arts [and changes the laws of nature]." Significantly, the reason that Dedalus engaged in the activity of building the waxen wings bears a marked resemblance to Jimmy Cross's thoughts of Martha. Dedalus was inspired to make the wings because he was weary of his long exile from the land of his birth. Thus Jimmy Cross, similarly exiled in Vietnam, "constructs" a military posture for himself at the end of "The Things They Carried." His posture violates nature and is inspired by perverted spiritual (but actually highly materialistic) fantasies about controlling a woman: "He should've carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long" (6). 8 In this regard Herbie resembles Luke Ripley in Andre Dubus's story, "A Father's Life," and O'Brien's view of a moribund, "atheistic" Catholicism bears resemblances to Dubus's work in general as well as the work of Robert Stone, most notably Stone's 1996 story, "Miserere." In all of these stories there are knee-jerk Catholics who organize their empty lives around habitual Mass attendance without any apparent awareness of the miraculous nature of the central Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Significantly Joyce uses transubstantiation to describe his work: As Joyce explained to his brother Stanislaus, "there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the mass and what I am trying to do...to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own...for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift" (Scholes, 255-256).   9 Tommy's statement probably anticipates the farcical deconstructionist, Thomas H. Chippering, of Tomcat in Love. Chippering does find the "logic" of metaphorical terms through deconstructive analysis. While the magic of metaphor depends on our appreciation of the dissimilarity of the terms in a metaphor as well as their similarity, the logic of deconstruction turns metaphors into metonyms. Construing metaphors as metonyms reduces the play of the terms so that one term merely stands in for the other. There is no tension between the two.   10 Tommy's tyrannical reassignment of primary meaning to words with other, more obvious and generally accepted, first meanings resembles what the English Jesuit does in A Portrait when he imposes his pronunciation of "tundish" upon the Irish--a tyranny that confuses Stephen and adds to his sensory disorientation. Stephen is denied the Irish inflection he finds natural for the word and is asked to accept the unnatural tyranny of Church and State that is summed up so well in the person of the English Jesuit. The alliterative possibilities of "tundish," "turtle," and "Tampa" don't require too great a leap especially since O'Brien seems to have Joyce's A Portrait so much in mind. Seamus Heaney comments at length on Joyce's use of the "tundish" incident in the PBS series on the English Language.   11 O'Brien's 1998 and 1999 short stories are careful to distinguish this sense of faith from a false, blind faith. "The Streak" suggests a resemblance of gambling addiction to marriage; both are as chancy as blackjack. However, we are left to see both the dubiousness of marriage as a game of materialist chance as well as the ironic truth that playing the game of marriage does require a kind of continuous chance-taking. "Nogales" reveals the terror of sexual attraction for an unloved woman who has apparently never made a leap of faith until she suicidally places herself in the power of a homicidal criminal to whom she desires to surrender. O'Brien appears to be struggling to distinguish compulsion from faith, almost as if he knows that contemporary critics and readers--unable to understand the relationship of mystery and faith, glibly dismiss faith as mere blindness, which it is not. In fact, faith in O'Brien's ironic aesthetic is the act of seeing.   12 Stephen Dedalus suffers similarly from confused sensations, and the resemblance between John's irrigation ditch in Vietnam and the "square ditch" into which Wells had "shouldered" Stephen is strong. The square ditch incident frequently recalls for Stephen his sensory repugnance to the "cold and slimy" water, "And a fellow had once seen a big rat plop into the scum" (Joyce, Portrait, 14). Stephen resolves his sensory disorientation by negating its reality. Similarly, John finds love to be a confusing sensory experience; he remembers "...how she'd looked at him in a way that made him queasy with joy, totally full, totally empty" (186). John's memory of the sensory experience of the irrigation ditch is recalled for him by the smell of the boathouse and by the smell of the boiled dead plants. We are told that "The dank odor [of the boathouse] revived facts he did not wish to revive" (191).   13 The use of the word "horror" here recalls Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and there are other echoes in the novel as well (e.g., "unsound" (41)). A major Conrad theme is that we create fantasies about ourselves and imagine that we will act in certain ways according to our ideas--believing that we are in control. However, reality comes along and proves that we do not even know ourselves. In Lord Jim young Jim believes he will be brave and that that is his story. Then, in a moment of crisis he reflexively jumps off an apparently sinking ship leaving its passengers to fend for themselves. Jim then spends the rest of the narrative trying to reconfigure his life story so that it conforms with his ideal of conduct. In the end, he courageously takes a bullet fired by a grieving father but his brave act betrays and abandons his wife. Thus, Jim's initial failure to live up to his story proves it was a false story, and his later fatal success in living up to his ideal story also proves it was a false story. Conrad's narrator, Marlow, equates Jim's ideal-story with "the call of his exalted egoism" (313). Against Jim's ideal-story Conrad surrounds the narrative with a vast uncertain universe. Jim's benefactor, Stein, advises him, "A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?... No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up..." (163). Jim is unable to submit himself to this universal element of uncertainty--or is he? Conrad's ironic aesthetic appears to be quite similar to O'Brien's.