Lonely, no gun

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Carter, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of what cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved--absolutely and purely--that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone. That Judge Carter fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing more would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It's a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I've tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human existence? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I revise my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on (269).

Another stunned, overwhelmed investigator/narrator in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. Like Libra's Nicholas Branch, O'Brien's narrator chases an ephemeral question with no clear answer, digging through piles of information in the course of pursuing disappeared senator John Wade and the disappeared wife John may or may not have murdered. But this narrator, way off the page, speaking directly only in footnotes, is no Branch, because he doesn't seem defeated by the lack of answers here (though the crime and motives, as in Libra, are on the page, here scattered throughout the novel in O'Brien's brilliantly instrumental use of the tools of postmodernism).

Like Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, In the Lake of the Woods concerns a male protagonist who struggles for an intact identity in the face of dissolution, though arguably Wade's grasp on sanity is even less tenuous. Both men are led to a conclusion; for both men the conclusion involves violence. Furthermore, both men are rooted in a particular historical time: both mens' crises are caught up in the Vietnam War (As a veteran, of course, Wade's crisis relates much more directly.) Wade is a gunman who remains utterly, horrifically, insanely alone: the metaphor O'Brien keeps returning to is a head full of mirrors, all reflecting in. (Both works may well comment on the fragmented cultures of the postwar period in addition to the specifically masculine questions they explore.) There's no potential to get over Vietnam in O'Brien's work; Wade is forever in that blood-drenched irrigation ditch shooting PFC Weatherall, a point O'Brien makes clear through the postmodernist technique of repeating sentences exactly. But as with Leonard English, the historical and the personal intersect for Wade: Vietnam--specifically, My Lai--merely offers a fantastic, phantasmagoric stage on which Wade's masculine demons play (his suicided father called him Jiggling John). The magic Wade turns to--his platoon calls him Sorcerer--is the magic of self- and other- deception, a way of, as O'Brien has Wade think "conceal[ing] demon history from all others and most times from yourself," of "betray[ing] the present with every breath drawn from the bubble of a rotted past" (245).

O'Brien's language of magic and demon history nicely intersects with conspiracy theory, and certainly a senatorial candidate's disappearance, or enscandalization, resonates heavily with the political material beloved by conspiracy theorists. Wade, though, creates his own conspiracy, as a "pro" who knows, like conspirators, how to manipulate surfaces so that the real story remains hidden. But in contrast to English, Wade desires to "evade" the real story, for the real story concerns not a mystic plot with identificatory payoffs, but irrational, directionless violence that simultaneously results from the masculinlist logic of the war and the disjointedness of his soul. Wade is both historical, emblematic of a generation of sixties-fleeing men, and singular, entangled in the cutting binds of his own personal tragedy.