Wright Morris’ The Field of Vision: A Re-reading of the Scanlon Story

Joe Hall

Interpreters of The Field of Vision agree with characters in the novel in dismissing Scanlon as “a mummified effigy of the real thing,” more dead than alive (The Field of Viszon [FV] lOl).l While these descriptions are correct, they fail to account for Scanlon’s nevertheless remembering a tale which conveys the core of the creative western myth. This core is the vision of new possibilities open to those heroic enough to make a dangerous journey through unfamiliar territory.

Critics usually think of Boyd as the central voice in the novel, partly because he is the contemporary artist and the only adult character whose perceptions change significantly. Yet, his change is only the realization that the “real” things such as schoolhouses are temporal and unreal while the pictures of “real” things in our mind, established in a context by telling stories, are real and lasting (FV 232). Although Boyd states this basic Wright Morris thesis, he neither tells a story which can free people from their denials nor does he hear the Scanlon story, which is bristling with possibilities.

The tale Scanlon tells is an imaginative reconstruction of “real” events into a story which can enable its hearers to see much where others see little. That the old man in the novel did not create the story but inherited it from his father and now carries it as the “mummified effigy” of the hero in the story does not distract from the story’s power.

Some readers claim that the story is useless because Scanlon failed to turn with the century (FV 32, 42-43; Madden 139; Albers 99). Yet, Morris has Scanlon see better than anyone else what the century was going to be like; it turned back toward the East, which is controlled by materialistic definitions of success, and he refused to turn with it.‘ He waited at Lone Tree, where he had been born, not knowing he was waiting, until his daughter came with her grandson, Gordon, to take Scanlon home with her. When Gordon said his name was Davy Crockett, the old man knew he had an audience.

His refusal to turn with the century is more a negative judgment on the century than on Scanlon. The others in the novel ignore him because they turned with the century and so find Scanlon irrelevant. But those who turned are more the frozen ones than Scanlon. Two years after The Field of Vision, Morris published The Territory Ahead, a set of essays on American literature. In that book he described the twentieth century as a time of escape from new experience (101-102), a way of closing the possibility of seeing underneath us the chaos of a world dissolving, “too tragic for any words” (TA 111). The twentieth century established a business culture “with its downtown men and its uptown women, its out-of-town children, and its mindless cultural problems” (99). Morris follows Henry James in describing the narrowness of the concerns of the business world; it has little use for the hundreds of other relationships possible to man in the civilized world (201-202). “It is not our barbarism,” Morris writes, “but our civilization that gave [James] dread” (189). “Progress” is the great demon which excludes the strange gods who lead us to large notions (21 1-12,230-31).

The “mindless cultural problems” of the twentieth century are illustrated in the characters in The Field of Vision who turn toward the new century. The McKees bought into the century and succeeded; that is, they are clichk-ridden people, having spent thirty years of married life trying to be certain that the one original event in their lives will not happen again. Boyd, who rebelled against the clichks of success, nevertheless has chosen to succeed, though in this case as a failure. Either kind of success is hollow (FV 63; also see Morris’ discussion in “Wright Morris’ Field of Vision: A Conversation,” 149). Having failed to walk on water after kissing McKee’s fianck, his thoughts circle around the kiss, the failed walk on water, and a stolen pocket from T y Cobb’s baseball pants as measures of what did not work.

53

54 The other major character in the novel, Dr.

Leopold Lehmann, is observer and interpreter; he understands the sense of risk and change in Scanlon’s story, but doesn’t have an imaginative fiction that holds his understanding. Lehmann, for example, puzzles over the minotaur image as he watches the bull fight around which all the memories and stories in the novel revolve. In the midst of this labyrinth, he sees the matador gored from behind, blending with the bull for a moment as the minotaur. “Man,” Lehmann thinks, “could only take wing on the thrust of his past, and at the risk of toppling on his face” (114). Much of the novel deals with such risky transformations; when the transformation succeeds, facts are transformed into enduring fiction. Yet, no fiction in the novel provides the open-ended experience of risk in life except Scanlon’s.

Scanlon’s story is at the heart of the novel, but Boyd’s observations help describe its significance. Boyd realizes what kind of story is needed as he reflects on the events of the bull fight and the reactions of the others to it. Early in the novel, Boyd recognizes that he has been a fool; he has pursued transformation but failed, then pursued failure. As the matador is gored, someone asks why he was in the ring if he did not expect to be gored. Boyd recognizes then that heroes are made of risks. Further, he knows that life consists of pieces of experience, stories, and reflections, like a puzzle, except that one does not find the solution to the puzzle. He must create the solution. A major problem in living, however, is to avoid creating a solution that embalms the creator; the pattern has to be kept open, the puzzle puzzling (155).

The twentieth century, Boyd recognizes, has no such open pattern, but all is rendered safe, the risks are gone, and nothing is transformed. Everyone wants to think of himself as being something, not becoming someone (194-95). At this point, Boyd recognizes a change in his perceptions: instead of only failure, he sees beauty in the passion behind struggles everywhere, as in the bull fight-when the bull is dead and the cloth is no longer used in the dance at the center of the circles of life, the passion and beauty are gone (199). Finally, Boyd realizes that if passion is to endure, it, like his memories, must be embodied in a living form, such as a story. Memories endure in stories about the memories: he tells the boy about his capturing T y Cobb’s pocket; then, with the story to animate Gordon, Boyd sets him in the bull ring to re-capture his Davy Crockett hat, re-enacting the story, not an event. Yet, with all this wisdom, Boyd does not

Journal of American Culture find a story which enables him to court possibility instead of failure.

The Scanlon story does all that Boyd and Lehmann think a story should do. That is, i t provides a context for seeing. Twentieth century people avoid such stories, since they could cause them to see that they have not lived. To twentieth century people, Scanlon has a screw loose or “didn’t really live in this world” (14). This last judgment, by Scanlon’s wife, is correct, though meant to be a criticism. Scanlon lives in his story, but to the extent that the twentieth century has shaped itself by turning east and freezing possibility, the old west story cannot be lived in it. Scanlon “had renounced his children the moment i t was clear that they intended to face their future, or even worse, like his daughter Lois, make a success of it” (43). He had determined to stand his ground; Boyd had the insight to note that Scanlon was “a man who found more to live for, in looking backward, than those who died all around him, looking ahead” (44). He grew up listening to his father talk and from that developed the story that nobody but the boy Gordon heard completely.

Morris describes the town Scanlon was born in as having once had some potential, enough to let us know why Scanlon stayed. It might have been a typical turn-of-the-century rural town, built to human scale with the potential of enabling people to live without avoiding most of life. More importantly, Scanlon, listening to his father’s stories, “may have thought him immortal, his mind full of deathless deeds” (47). Those imagined deeds cause the twentieth century to seem a betrayal by comparison. Nurturing his story in the bull ring in Mexico, Scanlon hears McKee ask, “Don’t i t take you back, Gordon?” But Scanlon knows McKee never had a place to which he could go back, since he “had done nothing but try to go forward all of his life” (52).

The Scanlon story creates a past that can launch man solidly into the future as possibility instead of as safety. Lehmann argues that the true thrust forward is not driven by the need to exclude risk and evil, but comes from our evolutionary heritage, a heritage that confuses distinctions between good and evil and notes transformations as the places where life happens (166, 203-205). The Scanlon story, told in mythopoeic language and patterns, is Morris’ masterful embodiment of Lehmann’s theories. It makes clear why Scanlon, telling his father’s timeless story as his own, refused to go forward into the twentieth century.

Wright Morris’ The Field of Vision 55 His story begins with people leaving their

civilized homes for the west, where civilized conventions are irrelevant. In the west, new gods need to be conjured from the landscape; only the character that Scanlon comes to think of as himself is able to 1) recognize that he is not in civilization, 2) abandon the old gods and values in favor of those which seem appropriate to the desert, and 3) die to the self that knew good and evil in the old life. Once these events have happened, he can journey as a different being through hell in order to reach a new self-understanding.

In the story, Scanlon is the scout for a wagon train. The people have left their homes in the east, carrying furniture that indicates that they expect where they are going will be the same as the place they left. This being the case, Scanlon cannot understand why they left. The further they go in the desert, the more objects they are forced to leave by the trail because of the difficulty of the passage. “You could see what a man valued most in his life from where he put it down” (96). Finally, friends and relations who are old or sick are put out; nevertheless, the process reveals that things are valued more than people, since although things were put off first, people continue to pick up things others had dumped, but “none of the wagons ever stopped to pick people up” (96).

In addition to their materialism and their desire that things be the same where they are going as they were in the place they left, they also expect the same gods to rule the new territory. Yet, to Scanlon, the nature of the desert makes clear that they are entering “the Devil’s country.” Everything is upside down, “with the Devil upstairs and the Lord in the basement,” which might mean the Devil is in control, doing the opposite of what the Lord would be expected to do: he “turned the rivers into sand, and the lakes into salt,” and the more the Reverend Tennant prays, “the drier i t got” (97). That is, life is no longer divided for Scanlon into the usual evils and goods, since perhaps what the Devil does in his own land is “good.” With this concept, Scanlon accepts the nature of the desert they are plunging into and believes that the Devil might have characteristics similar to those which humans have: he is at a “certain disadvantage” in that he wants companionship but cannot seem to take i t and has to “tag along, like a kid, to see how i t worked out” (98).

Scanlon admits that he has not been in a place like this before and so can respond to the place, whereas the others believe what they want to believe, not what is appropriate to a place in which everything is upside down. They, for example, want

to believe in what they saw on Criley’s map; therefore, they follow a trail that exists only on the map and in their imagination. They also want to believe things are not as bad as they are (they cannot imagine hell in their future) and that the Lord rules as he always has. Scanlon, on the other hand, knows the nature of this journey and does not try to support himself by believing things are as they have always been or are the way one would like them to be.

The second episode of the Scanlon story begins in present time at the bull fight. Scanlon hears the Mexican crowd shouting for agua to wet the matador’s cape. Boyd, the eastern adolescent grown- up, uses Pepsi-Cola for water and teaches the boy Gordon how to make it spew. For Scanlon, however, agua means life-giving water in the desert; eastern fools do not know how to value water. When the boy Gordon, for example, is squirting pop into his mouth he doesn’t hear Scanlon tell about the agua that gives life; he is captured by Boyd’s foolishness. Later when Scanlon ends his account of hell, he spits on the Pepsi stains and shouts for water as he envisions his own death-again indicating the silliness of playing with Pepsi when life and death are the stakes for those who can see.

The pervasive imagery of the second episode is death. Agua has not been found in the desert. No living thing is in the desert other than Scanlon and the others with the wagons. Scanlon can hardly believe that the people in the wagons are alive, not only because the desert is empty of other life, but also because their actions are incongruent with their location. They are in the desert because they want the very things they left in the east, but Scanlon knows they are in a place of death (143-45, 150).

Since only Scanlon senses that the ruler of this place, the Devil, can be something of an ally, and since he knows where they are headed and can admit it, then he does not fear it. Perhaps because he was lonely himself, he identified with the loneliness of the Devil early on, and now that identification is strengthened when Scanlon takes a nap in the desert. He imagines the Devil woke him by sitting beside him, leaving some six-sided stones around a hole to signify his humanness. Scanlon develops further his “shameful liking” for the devil, suspecting he “might even need food and water for himself” (146). He puts the rocks in his canteen, not because they do any good, but because they remind him that the Devil might be for him more than he is against him. This indicates that Scanlon is the only one in the party who trusts the situation as i t is and finds some comfort in it. For the others, sheer hostility is arrayed against them; they pray to the wrong power to save them, and they gain any

56 comfort they can scrape together by thinking of places they left.

After Scanlon stores the stone amulets, he climbs a mountain and sees hell, a large black part of the desert, ahead. When he sees it, he also sees the way out of it. There, running through hell, is a canyon. Once one is in the canyon, the only way out of hell is straight through it, following the canyon (146-48). The other men on the journey refuse to believe they have to go into hell to get out of it. They expect a way around.

As Scanlon scouts the canyon to find a way to get the wagons down into it, the identity of the place becomes more clear. Huge rocks have been thrown about “as though some giant had been playing with them.” A shadow, one with wings, seems to accompany him, reminding him of the smelly, croaking bird he has been associating with the Devil. He “has a pretty good idea” that the canyon leads to the heart of hell, but he is not frightened; he knows where they have to go, so “if i t was hell they were going to, he wanted a look at i t” (147-48).

When they begin to lower the wagons down the slope into the canyon, they encounter the strangeness more fully. After two wagons have been lowered into the canyon, the rope snaps and the third wagon crashes. A young woman, Samantha, then shoots the bird, as if i t were to blame, and it falls on the shattered wagon, as if that were its target. The other women, seeming to relish the stink as animals would, clean it and cook it. They seem no longer human: one woman who used to fear death seems pleased by it now, and “nobody troubled to thank the Lord” for the bird-perhaps because they are acting like animals and because they at last sense that the bird is not from the Lord- at least not from the one to whom they usually Pray *

While the bird is being cooked, a strange wind starts where they are and sucks out the fire. A “crazy- looking cloud” scrapes up the canyon and drops dry rain on them which “scared Scanlon worse than no rain at all”; then a mule died as if the wind had sucked his life out (149-50). These signs suggest death, but Scanlon is not afraid of dying. He is, however, afraid his fellow humans will eat him after he is dead. He leaves them in order to die by himself (being off by himself made him feel so good that he “ran around like crazy, hooting like a kid” [ 1501) and comes into the black place, which is like a dead sea. This unearthly place disorients him:

Journal of American Culture He couldn’t tell you if he walked backwards or forwards, or to the right or the left. He couldn’t tell you if he thought that was right or wrong. As a matter of fact, he didn’t care, but the one thing he could tell you, if you asked him, was exactly where he was. He was in Hell. Knowing that, he didn’t seem to mind it so much. (151)

Right and wrong are ambiguous now, as is direction. He has ventured into hell and so is open to any possibility now.

The only thing that concerns him is that he can not know what time it is so he can know “when he had done what he could” and therefore “ought to give up” (186). Finally, he stumbles on the body of a man “who had been dead for some time.” The wind makes a “ghostly music” come out of his mouth, ‘‘a wild‘ hollow- sound, like a shell. . . . Scanlon had the feeling he had seen the body somewhere, and he had. The crisp yellow beard was his own. The dead man was himself” (187). He was not surprised by this because he knew “there were two men within him, and he knew for sure that one of them had died.” He suspected it was the better man who was dead, and that he had died of knowing he was in Hell.

The “better man” in Scanlon is the part that knows the good and evil, as i t is in most eastern, settled people. Now the “shadow” no longer haunts him; the part of Scanlon that is left is that which felt a “shameful liking” for the Devil, whereas that in him which was ashamed of this affection, the “better man,” is dead. The man who is left is prepared to make the risky passage through hell, knowing what it is he is going through and prepared to meet i t for what i t k3

The discovery of the death of his better self also gives Scanlon new knowledge which changes his situation. First, the man who had died had made tracks into hell, whereas Scanlon had made only grease spots. The tracks changed the nature of hell: “but i t was not the same sort of Hell, with tracks in it, anymore than Scanlon was the same sort of man, now that he knew who had died, and what time i t was” (187). The tracks in hell seem to mark it, making it penetrable. In a similar way, Scanlon, knowing his better self has died, is able to orient himself to time. The Devil has already killed everything in him that it could want (his sense of good and evil), so it is too late to try to save these qualities. He is free to journey without fear across hell; there is nothing he can lose.

Back in camp, Scanlon is confronted with three people who live by the old virtues. They believe in themselves as favored, valuable beings, and in the things which they think give them value. The

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Wright Morris’ The Field of Vision 57 two men encourage the most “civilized” woman to put on all the clothes and jewelry she can so they can take it with them as they leave to save themselves. Since they do not recognize where they are, they will not listen to Scanlon, who knows that “the thing about Hell was that you had to go in, if what you wanted was out” (189). They try instead to skirt around hell and all three die. When Scanlon finds the woman’s remains, “no one had taken the rings from her fingers, the money from the purse at her throat, or the gold from the extra teeth she had brought along.” Those like Scanlon who know they are in Hell and that i t is time to make the passage through it have no use for this kind of extra baggage. He, with his better self dead, is not intimidated and does not insist that something is wrong with his fantastic view of what is happening. He takes the women, children, and Reverend Tennant straight into hell. When they are well into it, they discover “water cupped in a rock, and one of those little six sided stones at the bottom of it” (190). Since Scanlon connects the stones with the protective nature of the Devil, he takes this as a sign that the Devil has brought them through, just as he led them in.

Scanlon’s story does not represent a dead end, but is a tale of courageous risk-taking that is a theme of the best of the frontier stories, passed down, reformulated, and finally handed to people who seem ready to hear it. The Scanlon story, far from representing a failure to feel or to commit oneself (Crump 120), proposes a hero for the next century, the person who has died to his expectations and thus is prepared to meet the strange gods waiting for him if he has the courage to go through the deserts of hard experience instead of trying to skirt comfortably around. The bearer of this story, Scanlon, is only an “effigy of the real thing,” but he nevertheless carries a story that can make a creative response to the century possible. Recog- nizing such stories as guides to seeing can also enable us to distinguish between frontier stories that have the power to encourage a risky thrust into the future and those stories that might freeze us into nostalgia.

Notes

‘Madden, for rxample, takes Scanlon as proof of what happens if all lines lead to the past. He believes Scanlon failed to build anything for future generations. Crump appreciates Scanlon’s story more than others, naming his dream the “most powerful narrative thread” in the novel, but concludes that this powerful tale is designed to evade

the present. He correctly identifies the desert as the intolerable wasteland of the twentieth century, but believes the “real,” or morally responsible Scanlon dies in the desert. Consequently, Scanlon fails to commit himself to facing the desert. Crump seems to ignore how the mythical Scanlon fulfilled the story-teller Scanlon’s moral: “Shortest way to Heaven’s right smack through Hell.” Only the Scanlon of the story goes into Hell; the others try to skirt around.

Fullerton believes that Scanlon’s “refusal to confront the modern world” leads him to subvert the sensibility of his great-grandson “so completely that the child risks the loss of meaningful life.” Albers concentrates on how the characters struggle to break free from the past; the frontier story embodied the self-made man dream with no means of realization in the twentieth century. Whereas Boyd and McKee break free, they are lost in clichks. Scanlon, however, is lost in “the secondhand fantasy of his father’s trek west.” Albers quotes Morris as stating that “character. . .is primarily an imaginative fact, a fiction to which the flesh is incurably responsive. It is the fiction that shapes the fact.” Still, Albers does not recognize that Scanlon’s fiction takes on a significant life of its own, providing the “imaginative fact” to which flesh might creatively respond.

2In an interview, Wright Morris said that Scanlon types are products of a tension in certain “personalities that will almost compel them to believe in the most bizarre types of escape. . . .The small plains community, or the western community, will provide the environment that makes these people possible. In such a community, we make myths about ourselves” (“Wright Morris’ Field of Vision: A Conversation” 150). The interviewer was not interested in how such myths might help break the grip of the ordinary on those able to push their clichks to deeper sources, so Morris said no more on this subject.

)See Crump for an interpretation in which the death means that the morally responsible Scanlon is left behind dead. Since this one is dead, Scanlon fails to commit himself; from here on he evades emotional commitments. Crump overlooks the reality of the desert. Only the one open to new moral commitments and not overly tied by emotional commitments can make it “right smack through Hell.”

Works Cited Albers, Randall K. “The Female Transformation: The Role

of Women in Two Novels by Wright Morris.” Prairie Schooner 53 (1979): 95-115.

Crump, G. B. The Novels of Wright Morris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

Fullerton, Adelyn. “Myth, the Minotaur, and Morris’s The Field of Vision. West Georgia College Review 16 (1984): 1-8.

Madden, David. Wright Morris. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965.

Morris, Wright. The Field of Vision. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1956.

- The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

“Wright Morris’ Field of Vision: A Conversation.” The Black Warrior Review 10 (1983): 143-55.

Joe Hall is a Professor of English at Oklahoma Baptisl University in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

Marcy Expe&tion lithograph, Ackerman Printers, Border of El Llano Estacado. 1854.