Nietzsche, crime fiction, and the question of masculinity in Denis Johnson's Already dead: a California gothic
著者（英） Hikaru Fujii
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 52‑53
page range 1‑22
year 2010‑03‑15
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014859
Denis Johnson's Already Dead: A California Gothic
HIKARU FUJII
"The earth ... has a skin, and this skin has diseases.
One of these diseases, for example, is called 'man'"
-Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Introduction
The question of masculinity has drawn more and more attention in contemporary American fiction, even among white male writers. Many contemporary authors - Paul Theroux, Stephen Wright, and Russell Banks, for instance - critically examine the issue of male gender in the American cultural landscape. Along such a line of inquiry, Thom Jones' story, "Rocket Man," stands out in its use of Nietzschean ideas in describing a power- obsessed man: Billy Prestone, a light-heavyweight boxing champion, visits his boyhood hero and second in the ring, W. L. Moore, in the hospital. In a conversation that allows them to confirm their male bond and display their masculinity to each other - '''I can hang with anybody'" (219), Prestone insists - the two talk about the champion's next fight; then Moore reads from The Portable Nietzsche, his favorite book, and encourages the boxer by calling him '''The Will to Power personified in the body of Billy Prestone!'"
(227). The story itself does not affirm this understanding of Nietzsche;
instead, by describing two men obsessed with masculinity to the point of self-destruction, Jones ultimately raises the question: are such men the only possible embodiments of Nietzschean philosophy?
Denis Johnson's 1997 novel, Already Dead: A California Gothic - which explores the possibility that Nietzschean concepts function as transformations of masculine subjectivity - can be read as a response to this question. Through the tale of a petty crime and its destructive consequences for the nihilistic protagonist, Nelson Fairchild Jr., the novel pursues a point where the hero's subjectivity, previously defined by a set standard of masculinity, mutates to give way to a different mode of being.
The novel is filled with references to two styles in particular: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the crime nove1.1 On the one hand, Nietzsche's constant criticism of the modern subject and his idea of self-overcoming are turned into a subversion of masculinity; in Johnson, Nietzsche's imperative that "Man is something that must be overcome"
(37) functions as a problematization ofthe masculine.2 On the other hand, the sexist subjectivity of the crime novel, marked by all the cliches of the genre - a male criminal with a perfect murder plot, the bond with another male accomplice, femme fatales, and a detection process - is transformed to give way to a new form of the individual. Following the Nietzschean vision, the narrative accelerates Nelson's nihilism until it reaches its limit and his identity is destroyed at the edge oflife, whereupon a metamorphosis of his subjectivity occurs. Johnson's tour de force, instead of a mere critique of manhood, tries to foster the potential to overcome the force of masculine identity.
1. The Birth of Tragedy
August 8, 1990. While the nation heads toward a war in the Persian Gulf, a man plans to have his wife killed. The criminal, Nelson, is a man of Nietzschean ressentiment in the middle of a crisis - an approaching divorce, a drug-deal gone bad, his father on his deathbed, and a mistress who causes ceaseless fear. In this portrait of a man in despair, Already Dead
follows the tradition of the American crime novel, which "tends toward alienation and nihilism" (Hilfer, xiii). Nelson's first-person narrative cynically analyzes his own situation, where he finds power relationships with others, especially his father, that corner and nail him against what he sees as the dismal coast of Northern California. Trapped in this web of relationships, Nelson reacts by accusing himself and others for this dead end, which leads to his hatred of the feminine. Nelson displays the typical characteristics - "The imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities, perpetual accusation" (Deleuze 118) - of the nihilistic man.
From Nelson's perspective, California appears as a lifeless land, the American Dream at an impasse.
From the beginning, Nelson's dismal mood is clearly contrasted with that of his wife, Winona: she enjoys her life in the Golden State, while Nelson is full of pain and resentment against her. Explaining the role that real estate plays in the Fairchild family, Nelson's words point out his
"weak" position in relation to his wife. "She loves our forty acres," he says.
"She'd do anything to keep it - increase it - divorce me? Without a blink. I think she'd shoot me" (25). With a coming divorce in sight, his place completely vanishes from their property, where Winona now lives alone.
Nelson refers to another powerful source of his woes when meditating over his current situation: "Right - I know - the world has its horrors, mine among the privileged, American kind. But let my statement stand: I blame my father for myself" (26). This relation with his father has produced the sense of incompetence as a man that has characterized his whole life:
Uneducated in the ways of domestic life itself, marooned on the shore of parenthood without any equipment, his manner of teaching us, my brother and me, was to ask mysterious questions as a way of indicating we'd made some mistake or other .... But in that case where on this earth should I be, Father? Where do you want me, what should I do?
Anything, but only tell me. I don't know what you want! Speak! A child, I'm miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father's sky. Why do you fate me to fail you? (26)
Thus the child turns into a man of ressentiment; his self has always been defined by his relationship with his father, in which he, as the son,always finds himself dominated. He is guilty a priori - in Gilles Deleuze's words,
"pain is made the consequence of a sin, a fault" (129). Repeatedly uttered and finally internalized, the paternal words that indicate a failure the son cannot clearly grasp become the defining principle of his whole being. As Denise Riley argues: "The tendency of malignant speech is to ingrow like a toenail, embedding itself in its hearer until it's no longer felt to come 'from the outside'" (11). Constantly implying the son's deficiency, the father's words indicate the lack of ideal masculinity in Nelson's self; therefore, Nelson's initial situation is akin to the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, which explains that "there is an inescapable debt of negativity, an ontological deficit which can never be repaid, or filled up" (Braidotti 54).
Thus the son desires that phantasmic wholeness he cannot attain, making his situation an embodiment of one of Zarathustra's lamentations: "only man is a grave burden for himselfl" (Nietzsche 193).3
Nelson's sources of uneasiness are not confined to the familial sphere.
His past failure as a drug trafficker has made him a fugitive on the coast of California. As assigned a job by his gang boss Harry Lally, Nelson took money to Italy to smuggle drugs back to California; but, he bitterly remembers, the fear of being discovered by the officials got the better of him, and made him abandon the task. Nelson speaks of his failure and its consequence: "Okay, I don't need to be flip: I can admit that first by my avarice, and then by a compounding cowardice, I earned myself a mortal enemy. And now I'm in a war" (35, emphasis added). While the government prepares for its biggest war since Vietnam, Nelson finds himself in another
war, an asymmetric struggle with Lally's organization which sends after him "the two hunters, and their dogs - clearly part of Harry Lally's program for extracting reimbursement" (35).4
Along with these troubles, Nelson's affair with Melissa is far from stable.
He constantly expresses his fear that she may abandon him: "It's sad to love a woman who won't love back" (37), he says, and in fact she is carrying on a sexual relationship with another man. The girl is described as an unfaithful woman who might betray the protagonist at any moment, confirming Joyce Carol Oates's comments that the "noir tradition, or cliche, has it that women are evil and disgusting if they are sexual beings" (36).
His manly integrity is constantly threatened in his relation with her, his femme fatale.
Everywhere he looks, Nelson finds the sources of fear that belittle him.
At one point, he scornfully analyzes his own current condition, entangled, as he is, in a web of relationships:
I sit out here and think convulsively until I'm numbed by dope and confused by my own brain - think about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region and my region's demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free will? Personal decisions? It's not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands? (44).
He condemns the power relationships that leave him no room for autonomy.
Nelson has become a reactive force within this web, full of resentment against himself and others: "resentment is always based on or in some notion offailure, absence, or lack" (Nealon 277). His sense of incompleteness as a man thus defines his view of the world, which leads him to accuse the sexual other, the feminine. Nelson tries to trace his origins to explain his current situation, which leads him to the masculine/feminine dualism:
"the strong British male is dominating, that he's going to do the horrible
6
things made necessary by the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me who's disarranged my life" (97, emphasis added). In this Manichean explanation of his being, the female part is always responsible for his misery, while the Anglo and paternal half is left blameless.5 The sense of incompleteness and the consequent negation of otherness define Nelson's masculine subjectivity.
For him, then, California reveals its dark face as "a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like ... like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea" (24). The dream has reached its limits, blocked by the sea: it represents the speaker's somber mood. In this sense, Nelson is a typical protagonist from American crime fiction who infects the landscape with "desire and doom" (Hilfer 31). In this world, Nelson aspires to a kind of transcendence:
"In order to get on in this underworld," he says, "you've got to practice bushido, the warrior's way, the samurai's inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury yourself and go to war" (45). The world is conceived as an underworld, and he seeks the way out by waging a war of revenge - his murder plot is activated when the perfect accomplice, Carl Van Ness, arrives on the scene.
2. The Killer Inside Me
"Everything I am is shit," Nelson says, condemning himself "Everything to do with me. Everything I've made" (134). The past offailures imprisons him in what Pierre Klossowski explains as the Nietzschean idea of ressentiment: "the will cannot reverse the flow of time - the non-willed that time established as an accomplished fact. This produces, in the will, the spirit of revenge against the unchangeable" (52). Nelson, a man full of pain, seeks revenge on others; then he encounters Van Ness, who attempts to
kill himself out of despair. Accidentally saving his life, Nelson draws Van Ness into his scheme: if the would-be suicide kills Winona and then perishes as he wishes, Nelson can safely receive the life insurance on his wife, and thereby repay the debt to Lally's organization. The coast will be clear for him to start a new life with Melissa. However, Van Ness, once launched as the incarnation of Nelson's spirit of revenge, increasingly deviates from the plan; instead he carries out a counter-plot to eliminate the Fairchild line. Thus Nelson's reactive will turns back on himself
On the night when Nelson witnesses Van Ness going into the water to kill himself, he is struck with the man's total abandonment: "For him, the planet, and its ponds and such, didn't count" (58). Nelson yearns to be like Van Ness, to transcend all worldly affairs. It is a typical male bond in the noir genre, as Oates observes: "Such males understand one another instinctively; when they meet, their bonding is immediate and unquestioned"
(36). Talking with Van Ness after saving him, Nelson offers him a deal:
"'You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me!
Anyway you do this murder. Then . . . you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide'" (74). As for Van Ness, he does not hesitate to take on this task. '''I will kill this person for you'" (76) is his answer to Nelson, and the course of the plot is irreversibly set.
'''A dangerous chemistry develops between us'" (76), Nelson says to Van Ness, considering his sudden arrival as an opportunity to solve all his problems. As Tony Hilfer characterizes this type of character in the crime novel, "The figure emerging from darkness and absence may be the protagonist's savior" (37). Yet, the relation is only an alliance between two forces of nihilism. Nelson wishes for the death of others, and Van Ness tries to annihilate himself - both are life-negating nihilists. The reactive force of Nelson attracts another nihilistic force and both grow even stronger; the promise of their alliance is nothing but an aggravated version
of the reactive being. As Jeffrey T. Nealon points out, "resentment preeminently produces more reified, effective, and pernicious versions of resentment" (276).
For Nelson, Van Ness points toward the possibility of an ideal world of invincible masculinity where he can enjoy completeness. Van Ness dies, and comes back to life; the suicide returns, but in a different universe where, in his view, he has become immortal: "He'd done it. He'd killed himself And here he was. He was probably dead in that universe, but in this one right next door he persisted; his consciousness had simply moved over into this other, potential world in which he did not die" (68). It is Van Ness's return that leads Nelson to unveil his own creed of eternal return:
Imagine a slight revision of Nietzsche's myth of eternal return ... that it starts again and again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule - every time, and an endless number of times ...
the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a late one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. (94)
In this version, each return of difference works in such a way that it strengthens him, until he becomes invincible. "If this were true," dreams Nelson, "the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman" (95). The difference each return brings is finally subjugated to an idealized masculine identity. The Superman is, in Nelson's version, the name of the hyper-masculine, an ideal to which he continues to conform. He is still trapped in the transcendent value which Zarathustra criticizes - "You still want to create the world before which you can kneel" (Nietzsche 113).
However, Nelson's plot goes astray. As planned, Nelson comes to Winona's house where her dead body lies, being already regretful. "I would do anything to undo this" (133), he says, realizing that he cannot will time
backwards. Immobilized by a sense of incapacity, he is startled when the telephone rings, and Winona moves to take it: "she answers. Turns over.
Reclaims her outfiung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears the death from her throat with a rasping sound" (134). Winona comes back to life as if nothing happened. Over the phone, his brother Bill tells Nelson that their father is dead - possibly murdered by Van Ness.
"The dead woman was alive again" (145), and from then on, the situation is beyond the schemer's control. Van Ness and Winona form a new alliance, and the killer redirects his powers of destruction toward the Fairchild family. When Nelson accidentally comes across his former accomplice on the road, Van Ness speaks of his own revised version of the Nietzschean chain of transformations: "Once you become a lion, a spirit acting from will and making its freedoms, that's the end of it" (201). While Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents the spirit-camel-lion-child metamorphosis, Van Ness rules out the child from the original vision, so that the destructive lion occupies the final stage; there is nothing beyond its violence.
Thus speaks Van Ness, and he carries out his plan. Mter the death and return of Winona and the funeral of the father, Van Ness goes into the woods to kill Nelson's brother. He shoots Bill dead, then plays Russian roulette to test his strength: "He put it to his own head. One. Two. Three.
The pin smacked the cap. The cartridge whispered irresolutely" (240). The murderer again proves himself immortal. His triumph in the murder and the subsequent trial constitute another return; thus he moves on, "in yet another universe, laughing" (241). The killer returns to a new universe in which Bill Fairchild is dead and he is not. Eventually, the former partners confront one another on the California shore. ''A fight to death,"Van Ness, a metal pipe in his hand, declares to Nelson. "One of us dispatches the other one to another realm" (316). Hit in the head, Nelson falls into the sea, and Van Ness triumphs: he takes Nelson's place and erases the existence
ofthe father, Bill, and Nelson, all of whom are springboards for his return to yet another universe.
Nelson comes out of the water alive, but falls deeper into despair and ressentiment. He withdraws to a hotel room, and starts writing a letter to Van Ness and Winona. Aware that they have launched a counter-plot against him, Nelson finds himself in deep emptiness - "Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing. That's what you created" (282). Tracing the beginning of the whole plot, Nelson begins to analyze his own hardened subjectivity in the letter: "A man decides to kill his wife. What's so unusual? ... 'I want her dead; therefore I am'" (284). This modified Cartesian statement testifies to the force of negation at the heart of his being; instead ofthe "I think" as the basis of rational subjectivity, Nelson posits the spirit of destruction, which defines him as a man of res sentiment.
Then the two hunters from Lally's organization, Falls and Thompson, spot him; they shoot Nelson, but he escapes from their manhunt and hides on the Lost Coast. When the wounded protagonist reaches School Marm's Cove, Nelson encounters two ghosts, his dead father and a headless woman, the former being dominant at this stage. The father, incorporated into the son's self, still works on him as the force of interpellation in the Althusserian sense, which defines the son's self, manifesting Riley's observation that
"the afterlife of malignant speech is vigorously spectral" (23). The paternal shadow outlives the father to haunt the son: "The dead father, the father's shadow ... became the sign of the meaning of life, its value" (Klossowski 135).
Nelson prepares to sleep, as his father suggests. Under the paternal shadow, his reactive self does not change but further deepens itself, bringing him to the nihilistic void: "He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and nihilism . .. " (417,
emphasis added). Yet this extreme will to nothingness leads him to a different realm. Taken to its limits, Nelson's reactive being clashes with itself - here the novel corresponds with Deleuze's explanation that
"nihilism is defeated, but defeated by itself" (172). When the force of destruction folds back upon itself, he has a glimpse of the "first messages of a new world - hypnagogic phenomena. He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed" (417-18). It is the destruction of his own nihilistic subjectivity that leads him to a new mode of being.
3. Metamorphosis
The next day witnesses a transformation of Nelson's self: "On the day of his death Nelson Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness" (418).At this extreme point, Nelson discovers another dimension of his existence that extends beyond the paternal realm: the nihilist metamorphoses into a woman. Already Dead thus presents a redefinition of the idea of the Superman, echoing Deleuze: "The overman . . . is a different subject from man" (163). It is not so much a hyper-masculine figure as a transformative force within the selfwhich defies the normative subjectivity.
Wounded and faint, he is in the process of dying - "I am dying in Wheeler, California," he writes in his letter, "a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up the coast from Fort Bragg" (419). Nelson tries to summon the force of the father, namely the form of his familiar self - but the paternal shadow has disappeared: "He called 'Father?' but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father. The Old Man wouldn't show, no phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by"
(421). The nihilistic force of his subjectivity has destroyed itself; there remains only the ghost of the headless schoolmarm who had been, according
12
to Nelson, the victim of the extreme violence of a priest and a Moorish boatman. Nelson relates her story in his letter - running out of ink, he continues to write using his own blood. The word/thing or body/language dichotomy breaks down: there are no clear boundaries between his life and the story of the schoolmarm. His act of writing thus works directly on his self, with his lifeblood itself as the material. Thus he practices an intensive mode of writing ofthe sort that Nietzsche praises: "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood" (40). The letter becomes the transmuted life of the dying man.
Thus a breakdown of the previous form of the self takes place; the paternal voice vanishes, giving way to his writing of the schoolmarm as his sole practice of subjectivity. This is where a crucial change is attained.
Nelson suddenly finds that he is the woman he has been witnessing and writing: "Oh, but he understood now: I am the schoolmarm of School Marm's Cove" (422). The ghost of the headless schoolmarm ceases to be an other in front of him and becomes himself, or more specifically, he becomes her. It is a fundamental metamorphosis of selfhood accidentally attained, dissolving the opposition between masculinity and femininity.6 With the dissolution of his former self, there is no practice of subjectivity other than the act of writing, and the life-blood relates the story of the schoolmarm;
the self assumes the style of the woman. Writing here functions as a force of counter-interpellation that re-defines Nelson's existence. As Foucault argues: "The letter one writes acts, through the very action of writing, upon the one who addresses it" (214). In this metamorphosis, Nelson, now referred to as a "she," releases the memory of childhood from her body:
The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs. Worst were the slow stirrings offrozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up out of her, bursting from her
throat, nothing connected with any memories at all, only the feelings themselves. (422).
Now that the self defined by the paternal shadow has dissolved, the haunting memory the father inscribed on Nelson's existence loses its hold.
In this state of forgetfulness, Nelson is opened to another present, "the anamnestic now," in which '''1' remembers its multiplicity, its being outside 'I,' and forgets itself and becomes open to the radical alterity of un realized possibilities" (Ramadanovic par.30). Here, the hunters and their dogs, who have been chasing Nelson, are affirmed as having provided him with an opportunity to destruct his masculine-bound subjectivity:
The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill.
Their music was the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals, some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude. (422)
From ressentiment to joy: the composition of the self has been altered.
Before this mutation, his subjectivity was constituted by the relations with his overwhelming father, his failure in business, his strong wife and whimsical mistress - now all these forces cease to capture and define the protagonist. Nelson becomes a different combination of those forces that occupy the space of School Marm's Cove: the act of writing, the animal voices, the memory that lets go ofthe childhood trauma, and the approaching men.7 When the nihilist reaches this transmutability ofthe self, he detaches himself from the masculine norm; thus Nelson reaches what Nealon calls
"a certain kind of Nietzschean productivity within subjectivity" (288).
Nelson's self-overcoming is achieved by actively mutating the former self;
he finds an "outside" of masculinity by invoking the force of difference that lies immanent to his being the moment before death. If there is an idea of
14
Overman or Superman in Johnson's novel, it is the potential for self- mutation, which lies outside the normative identity of "man."
4. End of Investigation
October 31, 1991. The "clean war" in the Persian Gulf has ended, announcing the advent of the New World Order, in which American strength occupies a central place. On the other hand, Nelson has been missing, only leaving his letter, a record of war of another kind. Others continue their lives as if nothing happened: the dogs and the assassins have died, Van Ness and Winona are about to marry, while John Navarro, the county officer, is unable to solve the riddle of Nelson's disappearance.
However, Nelson's letter to Winona and Van Ness, now in Navarro's hands, produces an effect that carries the officer beyond the dimension of traditional detective genre. The principle of metamorphosis is at work here, too: the novel mutates the style of crime fiction, taking the detective hero to the "outside" of his subjectivity.
As an officer, Navarro performs the typical masculine detective novel hero. Divorced three times, he enjoys his relationship with a waitress in town, while playing the game of seduction with another woman - "how comfortable it made him feel to be seduced by a woman of the elevated, arty type" (349). When the affair with the waitress is over, he simply blames it on femininity, preserving his masculine self: "One day he'd seen clearly she wouldn't go to bed with him anymore. Women, in general ... " (428).
Then he continues his game of seduction.
On the other hand, his policing job keeps frustrating him. As the investigator of the death of Nelson's father, he suspects the possibility of murder - the window was open in the room where the body was found, indicating that someone might have broken in from outside. However, with no further evidence to verify this hypothesis, the case is closed. The death
of Bill Fairchild is also ruled as self-inflicted, refusing further inquiry.
Thus a clear division between good and evil cannot be drawn by this guardian oflaw - "he no longer knew what evil was. It rarely got arrested"
(430). In the end, he decides to quit his job and prepares a letter of resignation, when Nelson's letter begins to occupy him. "What was needed,"
the officer thinks, "was a letter like the one he'd been reading the last few days" (427). The remnant of Nelson's detachment from masculinity is about to trigger another mutation, this time N avarro's movement out of the world oflaw and order.
Nelson's letter, now held by the officer, ends abruptly, failing to describe the details of his transformation. Moreover, in spite ofthe officer's effort, it enigmatically refuses to form a comprehensible order - "For days he'd been combing through these unnumbered sheets, but he couldn't quite get them into a sensible sequence" (142). Navarro thus fails as a detective hero who is the "knowledgeable and autonomous subject, restoring order to society through his clear-sightedness at the narrative end" (Messent 7). The letter subverts his masculine subjectivity; it remains incomprehensible as the mystery ofthe Fairchild family remains unsolved, with a "gigantic silence at the center of everything" (280).
Yet the letter does not designate the mere meaninglessness of the signs.
Just as Nelson finally escapes his nihilistic subjectivity haunted by the paternal imperative, his letter, instead of being reduced to the law of symbolic signification, points to the "outside" oflanguage. In Jane Bennett's words, "language is not only a matter of significations and failures of signification ('indeterminacy), it is also about sound, noise, and differential intensities or affects" (153). When Navarro reads and rereads the letter written in blood, he feels it as a kind of music:
He thought he could make out the first words of the bloody entry, but the rest were completely illegible. The blood hadn't behaved like ink,
had worked a microscopic dispersion through the fibers and had averaged out into blots, mainly, with occasional stems, so that it looked as if for his last words Nelson Fairchild had composed a piece of musical notation, a song, a melody, an air. (435)
The officer tries to decipher the words, but he no longer seeks the meaning of the letter. The blood that Nelson inscribes into the sheet appears as
"music," i.e. something irreducible to the realm of linguistic signification:
"Maybe he'd take it to a musician. Maybe it was, in fact, a bit of music. But he wouldn't take it anywhere. He really didn't want to give it up, give it away. It was his. It spoke the language" (435).8 The language ofthe "outside"
attracts Navarro, who is ready to leave his law-oriented job, so that he experiences the double detachment from the domain oflaw.
Navarro has set out to illuminate the past event of Nelson's disappearance: its specific date, place, and the person responsible. This effort to replicate the classical whodunit collapses when the event eludes the officer's grasp and befalls his own self. A dead letter from nowhere - the sender vanishes, and the addressees no longer care about it. Still the letter returns, finding its new reader. The Nietzschean quest intersects with the detective style, producing a chain of transformation that mutates the current form of masculine subjectivity.
Conclusion
Tracking down Nelson's crime and punishment, Already Dead presents masculinity as a form of nihilism. Yet, the novel does not stand for the recuperation of a "healthy" manhood that would satisfy the protagonist's thirst. Instead, it tests the limits of a nihilistic movement where Nelson glimpses and experiences health in a different form, i.e. health as the overcoming of masculine subjectivity. Johnson's narrative thus performs one of the "tentative explorations of the outer edges of the current regime
of subjectivity" (Bennett 146). Given the triumph in the Gulf War, the present state ofthe nation is marked by the reconfirmation of its strength.
However, another "Now" of mutation is attained through Nelson's journey, which is irreducible to the national quest for masculine strength. This divergence of the nihilist's transformation from the triumph of the state can be seen as the incompatibility between the state and the Overman as stated in Nietzsche: "Where the state ends - look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?" (51). The overcoming of manhood is fundamentally a micropolitics that is not integrated into any mass-scale political map.
Confronting the limit of Nelson's masculinity at the edge of California, Already Dead also belongs to those American novels which critically examine the westward expansion of America. In Steve Erickson's Rubicon Beach and Stephen Wright's Going Native, the characters travel to reach the West Coast, only to find their movement blocked, while in The Atlas, William T. Vollmann's 1996 text, and Annie Proulx's Postcards, the westward journey eventually turns into a wandering without destination.
These texts testify to the end of the American myth of open space as the promise offreedom and self-fulfillment. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Johnson's first novel,Angels, starts with a woman's eastward bus ride from Oakland; the writer's career begins with the resistance to the national myth ofthe westward expansion. Yet Already Dead does not simply negate the American grand narrative of outside space. Just as the schoolmarm emerges from Nelson the nihilist, the novel mutates the American myth to invent a new space of possibilities: the "outside" is envisioned as the force of difference within the self. Therefore, the nature of inquiry is fundamentally transformed; on the coast of California, where external space no longer exists, the novel reveals the internal, self-differing potential as the "outside" space. The question is how to interrogate and mobilize the
18
current mode of self. 9 One must begin with the end of the Dream - it is at land's end where a new quest begins.
Notes
1 In addition, frequent allusions to demons, resurrections of the dead, ghosts, and channeling in the narrative indicate its gothic elements, so evident in the title of the novel. In its motif of the collapse of the Fairchild family, the novel draws on the American gothic convention, which "adapted a gothic imagery to exemplifY the destructive power of families" (Davenport-Hines 267). However, those gothic characteristics do not form a view of a supernatural that exceeds human understanding: the demons are Nelson's past traumas, the ghosts represent the nihilist's interiority, and channeling suggests the indeterminate character of the self. Such cliches of gothic fiction are deployed methodically in the Nietzschean strategy of the novel.
2 While there have been various arguments on gender issues in Nietzsche's work, a number of post-war thinkers have attempted to define Nietzsche's philosophy in terms of resistance to normative subjectivity: Michel Foucault, GiIles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Klossowski, Judith Butler, and William E. ConnoIly being just a few. Keith Ansell-Pearson summarizes the matter:
"Nietzsche's critique of Christian and liberal notions of the self can certainly be of use to a ... politics of difference" (31).Among such attempts, Jeffrey T. Nealon shows a crucial insight in linking the issue of masculinity with the Nietzschean perspective. In his analysis of contemporary American WAM (white, angry male) discourse, Nealon argues that WAM shows "its pedigree ... precisely in that which Nietzsche set out to analyze in On the Genealogy of Morals and so much of his other work: resentment" (274). Instead of setting the masculine/
feminine dichotomy, Nealon suggests that the Nietzschean perspective can problematize masculinity itself
3 However, the novel presents the "lack" that constitutes Nelson's reactive subjectivity as the product of his power relationship with the father, rather than an essential condition of the subject: the father's words are a force that works on and shapes the son's subjectivity, while Nelson, lacking the power to
overcome the father, has no other choice than to obey. In this view of the self as the product of forces, the novel follows the Nietzschean-Deleuzian view, which holds that "all reality is already quantity offorce" (Deleuze 40). Ail the narrative progresses, Already Dead deviates from the psychoanalytic notion of the subject - it explores the possibility that the existing combination of forces can be rearranged to produce a different form of subjectivity.
4 The two hunters, Falls and Thompson, are eager to display their hard-boiled character; their conversation is filled with cliches of masculine character: "'I should've fucked her'" (369) is a typical example. However, as their pursuit proceeds, the killers begin to show characteristics that defy their initial attitude.
There is a hint of homosexual desire - "Falls runs his hand along Tommy's belly and crotch" (371) - before they break into a Buddhist temple, totally naked.
They also miss a number of chances to kill Nelson. Thus they subvert the codes of hard-boiled masculinity,
5 This binary explanation of self recalls the Polish-German dichotomy of origin by which Nietzsche tries to explain himself in his unpublished final draft of Ecce Homo. According to Jean Graybeal, who analyzes the final revision made by Nietzsche, the writer "rejects and represses maternal inheritance, and distances himself from the negative complex of German attributes with which he associates his mother" (156), while identifying with his Polish father, who represents noble character.
6 In her analysis of the figure of women in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Tamsin Lorraine argues that Life, whom Zarathustra represents as a woman, is a force of futurity that allows for self-overcoming: "She it is who cannot be pinned down, who always requires new words, new songs, new ways of being. To win her, one must always be trying something unprecedented, and letting the old perish in the attempt" (125). This idea is close to the state Nelson finally reaches; with his old self broken down and his words in blood, the man activates the force of life, through the figure of the schoolmarm, that triggers his metamorphosis.
7 In its description of the release of the childhood memory, the novel demands a careful distinction from a solipsistic affirmation of the masculine self. The frequent references to the Gulf War in the narrative function as a counter-
example against such a risk, by pointing to the radical difference between the national amnesia and Nelson's memory mutation. The war in Iraq, at the end of which ''Americans greeted the Feb. 28 cease-fire with relief and pride - relief at miraculously few U.S. casualties and pride in the brilliant performance of the allied forces" ("Gulf War" A26), succeeded to some extent in clearing away the trauma of the Vietnam War, which kept haunting American masculinity.
The victory offers an integral opportunity to affirm the collective manhood of the state: it is the anti-masculine memory that becomes the object offorgetting.
Nelson's joy, on the other hand, lies elsewhere: while the national narrative erases its "bad" memory in order to affirm its manly integrity, Nelson opens a line of becoming-other by forgetting the masculine mode of existence; there is a huge gap between the two movements of memory.
8 This view of language follows Deleuze and Guattari, whose concept of "a purely intensive usage of language" is opposed to "all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it" (19). Therefore, the workings of Nelson's letter differ from Butler's notion of "a radical resignification of the symbolic domain" (22), as well as from the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic.
Unlike this signification-based attempt, Nelson's writing in blood points to the non-signifying force oflanguage. "Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits" (Deleuze and Guattari 23).
9 Similar attempts to explore the transmutability of selfhood can be found in a number of contemporary texts, with different emphases; Don DeLillo's The Body Artist and Rebecca Brown's The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary locate the potential for self-mutation in the body, while Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Powers' second novel, and Meditations in Green by Stephen Wright examine the function of narrative act in the (re-)constitution of subjectivity.
Works Cited
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. "Nietzsche, Woman and Political Theory." Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory. Ed. Paul Patton. London: Routledge, 1993.27-48.
21 Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings,
and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 200l.
Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.
Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.
Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point, 1998.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 1962. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson.
New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
1975. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. "Self Writing." 1983. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed.
Paul Rabinow. New York: New P, 1994.207-22.
Graybeal, Jean. "Ecce Homo: Abjection and 'the Feminine'." Oliver and Pears all 152-69.
"Gulf War, and Peace, Revisted." Editorial. New York Times 2 Aug. 1991, late ed.: A28.
Hilfer, Tony. The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.
Jones, Thom. The Pugilist at Rest. Boston: Back Bay, 1993.
Johnson, Denis. Already Dead: A California Gothic. New York:
HarperCollins, 1997.
Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. 1969. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London: Athlone, 1997.
Lorraine, Tamsin. "Nietzsche and Feminism: Transvaluing Women in Thus Spoke Zarathustra." 1994. Oliver and Pearsall119-29.
Messent, Peter. "Introduction: From Private Eye to Police Procedural- The Logic of Contemporary Crime Fiction." Criminal Proceedings: The
22
Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London:
Pluto, 1997.1-21.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. "Performing Resentment: White Male Anger; or, "Lack"
and Nietzschean Political Theory." Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics. Ed. Alan D. Schrift. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 274-92.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1892. Trans. WaIter Kaufmann. New York: Random, 1995.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "The Simple Art of Murder." The New York Review of Books. 42,20 (1995): 32-40.
Oliver, Kelly and Marilyn Pears all, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.
Ramadanovic, Petar. "From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche's Active Forgetting and Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster." Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001): 44 pars. 30 June 2006 <http://muse.jhu.edul journals/postmodern_ culture/vO 11/ 11.2ramadanovic.html>.
Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005.
