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Excerpts from Pike's Folly copyright 2006 by Mike Heppner. Reprinted by permission of the author and in accordance with the Fair Use Act. A couple of years ago in writing about Mike Heppner's novel for The Bohemian Aesthetic I made the observation that Roland Barthes had once written a 250 page book about a 25 page short story by Balzac, and that a similar project seemed to me to be quite possible in regard to Pike's Folly. Since then my views on the elasticity of interpretation here haven't changed. One of my favorite quotes from Barthes is: It is the reader's freedom which gives meaning to the text, not the author's intention, and not what earlier critics would have called its "content". It isn't quite right to say that Nathaniel Pike is the main character of this novel that bears his name in the title - he's one of several - but he's probably the most difficult and interesting. Simply the way he speaks throughout the novel, and the thoughts behind the words that the thoughts convey, are sufficient for a paper-length study. In keeping with Barthes' idea of the reader's freedom let's see what we can make of Pike and some of the people around him in the first fifty or so pages of the novel. As I write this in 2008 most of the typical, mainstream political discourse carried out daily in the United States of America has more or less declined into an endless series of shrill shouting matches between Wingnuts on the right and Moonbats on the left. The general perception, first clearly articulated in Bernard Goldberg's book Bias, is that what has come to be known as the MSM ('mainstream media') is dominated by educated liberals who slant the news and report it in such a way that it always lines up with their own political views. In counterpoint to this, right wing talk radio (as best exemplified by Rush Limbaugh, among others) has galvanized tens of millions of fans and activists and solidified them into a rock solid base of support for right wing views and politicians. The tug of war is endless, often vicious, frequently counterproductive for all sides, and, in the final analysis, probably intractable. Somewhat sadly, people seem to live or die by ideology. In this regard Nathaniel Pike is spectacularly different. At a certain point he remarks "Everything beautiful has been ruined by critics and academics. It's not enough that something just is. It's got to mean something, too." The very first page of the novel is a stunning illustration of Pike's independence from the zeitgiest of the social discourse of his contemporaries: "They ate me alive," said the excitable man sitting across from Henry Savage's desk one June morning in Washington, D.C. "Absolutely tore me to bits. All I said was, 'Those people are no more native American than I am,' which is true. Of course, you can't say things like that in Rhode Island, so everybody went nuts. The Journal took their usual self-righteous stance, the cannibals. I lost all of my old business contacts. Even Buddy wouldn't talk to me. People are so uptight these days, so goddam conservative - and I say that to you as a fellow Republican." "I'm not a Republican," Henry said. "Oh. Then I say that to you as a fellow Democrat." Nathaniel Pike took off his sunglasses, cleaned them with a neatly folded handkerchief and put them back on. In the interim, Henry saw that Pike's eyes were a sparkling blue, like a beautiful woman's. "Anyway, here I am, still dreaming, still going strong, even twelve years later. You can hate me, Mr. Savage, but you can't keep me down, and you know why? Because I don't hate anyone. I refuse to. I hate fakery, I hate falseness, but I don't hate people." Let's look at this.. In the first sentence "they" in "They ate me alive," refers to the PC (politically correct, i.e., liberal) crowd of which several of the New England states are hyper examples. (In short order in the novel one character, Celia Shriver, is introduced as the very personification of this way of seeing the world.) It also refers to the press and media and their subsequent treatment of what they consider to be Pike's indelicate remark about Native Americans. The "excitable man," we note, is sitting across not from Henry Savage but from Henry Savage's desk, a seemingly somewhat meaningless distinction at first blush that reveals itself to be quite meaningful after a little reflection. The important thing isn't Henry Savage himself but rather his desk and what it represents. Savage is a lifer in a federal agency that sells government owned land to private dealmakers. The land is "deemed no longer suitable for public use" - what does that mean, exactly? Why would a man such as Pike, apparently one of the wealthiest men in the country, want it? What is the significance of the fact that the government thinks the land is no longer suitable for public use yet a superstar of the private sector desires it? What does that say about the overall differences between the way government approaches things and the way private investors do? Notice that all this inquisitve mileage comes out of exactly one sentence. The next few sentences open up an even larger reservoir of issues and questions. Pike makes the point - which he believes to be true - that the people who are called Native Americans in the PC community aren't really native to the land at all, then observes that "you can't say things like that in Rhode Island." Whether it is true or not isn't something I'm going to get into here, but "you can't say things like that in Rhode Island" is obviously a complaint about PC rules and regulations - which, insofar as such constitute the expression of merely opinion and not brute fact, would be (to Pike) a kind of restriction on free speech. The remark about the newspaper is a living example of the alleged liberal bias that permeates the MSM. This attitude extends even to the business community and the state's political structure ('Buddy' is Vincent Cianci, the disgraced former mayor of Providence). But then Pike goes a little awry - referring to socio-political liberals who somewhat mechanically toe the line, he says they're "so goddam conservative." This is comically inexact; in fact they're so goddam unfailingly liberal, is what he really means - they're only 'conservative' in their inability to digress from their standard catalogue of ideological orthodoxies. In an attempt to shmooze Henry, Pike tries the comraderie route, and shifts effortlessly when it backfires. The fact that he'll flexibly make himself into either a Democrat or Republican, depending on which has the more pragmatic weight at a given moment, shows how little disregard he has for either ideological preference. Pike likes to think himself an Emersonian, or maybe a Transcendentalist like Thoreau, either of which lies so far from the Blue State/Red State hysteria of contemporary America that we cannot help but characterize a person who practices them an individualist. (In short order we are going to learn that Pike was at one time a producer of porn films, a fact that earns him the respect and admiration of a character named Heath, himself an aspiring filmmaker. This behavioral disposition - this kind of confidence, if you like - of doing what one wants to do without really caring what anyone else thinks about it is another telltale sign of the maverick individualist. Incidentally, Heppner himself is a highly knowledgeable film buff - his collection of art films was a noticeable presence in his home in Massachussetts when we met for a short talk.) Perhaps the statement that's most insightful in understanding the nature of Pike is "I hate fakery, I hate falseness, but I don't hate people." ESSAY TO BE CONTINUED SOON |