Tom Wolfe's American Ubermensch: I Am Charlotte Simmons and the rhetoric of "manly courage".

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-SEP-07

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I

Tom Wolfe's most recent book, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), is a campus novel replete with the kind of literary pyrotechnics for which Wolfe has long been famous--the point-of-view shifts; the extended and extensive use of dialogue to establish both scene and subjectivities of characters; and the liberal use of quirky punctuation, to include rampant ellipses, colons, italics, and exclamation points. Perhaps more importantly, Charlotte Simmons is a novel buttressed by the sort of pre-composition reportage through which Wolfe has traditionally established authorial ethos and expertise. In several pre-and post-publication interviews, Wolfe speaks of having conducted observational research at college campuses across the United States--Stanford University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, among them--to gather and verify Charlotte Simmons's material. (1) Armed with his considerable stylistic repertoire, then, as well as a commitment to journalistic evidentiary grounding, Wolfe pursues in the novel the realistic representation of his heroine Charlotte Simmons's first semester at the prestigious Dupont University. Charlotte is a brilliant and chaste eighteen-year-old who hails from Sparta, North Carolina, a town tucked deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains, whose economic lifeblood is the production of Christmas trees. She commences her undergraduate career hoping to begin a process of lifelong learning that will facilitate her transcendence of a quotidian upbringing. What she finds at Dupont, however, are fellow students almost exclusively of privileged backgrounds whose concerns alternate between greed, substance abuse, and casual sex. She finds, too, a campus run by faculty members who largely separate themselves into competing deterministic camps, a split occurring along a sciences/humanities dichotomy: first, there are the behaviorists, who speculate that there may be no free will, that genetics and the pressures of one's environment may hold the key to the entirety of human experience; and second, there are the Theorists, who raise anti-foundationalism to a foundational level, who make of relativism, Relativism. (2) Within this debased environment--a reductive one that presupposes a lack of validity inherent in individual experience--Charlotte will lose her virginity at a beer-soaked fraternity formal, experience acute clinical depression, nearly flunk out of school, and prepare to enter her second semester paralyzed by a hyperactive, normalizing consciousness of social status.

The genius of Wolfe's novel is that it pursues Charlotte's demise in a darkly comic manner, thereby carrying the reader for some seven hundred pages. Wolfe was rewarded for this achievement at bookstores across the country, with Charlotte Simmons landing on bestseller lists, just as did Wolfe's most popular previous works--to include, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), The Right Stuff (1979), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and A Man in Full (1998). (3) Despite this success--or possibly because of it--Charlotte Simmons's critical reception has been mixed. Positive reviews of Wolfe's work laud its energy and tend to welcome the novel's sometimes dogmatic depiction of the contemporary life academe. For instance, in a disarmingly honest attempt to save the text from its detractors, the novelist-critic Barbara Scrupski writes that Charlotte Simmons lays bare the limits of "the ethics of the liberal elites," or those who speak "the voice of affectlessness, of studied, deliberate 'cool'" (87, 88). Scrupski continues:

It must surely be painful to see Tom Wolfe point out to them so vividly the faults of their dream: these are no children of nature running free, but foul-mouthed, spoiled teenagers, drinking themselves sick, engaging in games of psychological cruelty [...] and indulging in random, meaningless sex. (90)

Negative reviews of the text have latched on to its graphic and grueling depictions of sex acts, with Jeff Baker, in a review for The Oregonian, even going so far as to suggest that Wolfe's authorial gaze is akin to that of "a dirty old man" (E7). Yet possibly the most interesting review of the book, positive or negative, is that offered by Michiko Kakutani, the longtime book critic for The New York Times. Comparing the novel to Wolfe's two other works of extended fiction--The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full--as well as to Wolfe's 1989 realist manifesto, "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast," Kakutani concludes that Charlotte Simmons lacks dynamism. Calling the novel "flat-footed," Kakutani writes, Mr. Wolfe does not tackle the zeitgeist. He does not tackle big-city racial politics, big-business financial shenanigans or big-time criminal justice as he did in his first two novels [...] Instead Mr. Wolfe takes on the momentous subject of college life (college life? Yes, college life!), and in the course of a very long 676 pages serves up the revelation--yikes!--that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes and use four-letter words. (E33)

I will address this charge, one I agree with, although I still manage to find the novel riveting. Charlotte Simmons does indeed lack a certain amount of dynamism, and we may trace this lack directly to the dissolution of the novel's protagonist. In the corruption of Charlotte's rectitude, readers witness Wolfe losing faith in the ability of an exceptional character--a character whose intellectual and emotional aptitudes distinguish him or her from more "common" stock--to achieve a transcendent wholeness of being akin to Friedrich Nietzsche's Ubermensch, or "overman." This wholeness, the evolution of Wolfe's understanding of which I chronicle in panoramic fashion here, is an ideal Wolfe has pursued for much of his career; it acts as a counterweight to the increasingly sterile and systematized nature of postmodern American life. Given Wolfe's loss of faith in this ideal, Charlotte Simmons reads less as a fluid exercise in imitative form--that being the essence of an effective journalistic narrative such as The Right Stuff or A Man in Full--and more as a didactic moral imperative (albeit an entertaining one). In short, Wolfe holds that in place of becoming an overman of sorts, the most likely outcome for America's contemporary Charlotte Simmonses--those young people who possess the intellectual acuity and nascent fellow-feeling necessary to lead a just and vital society--is that they will become the kind of people Nietzsche labeled "tarantulas."

II

Nietzschean philosophy plays a prominent role in Charlotte Simmons, just as it does in Wolfe's earlier essay collection, Hooking Up. (4) Within the frame of the novel, Nietzsche's direct influence is largely mediated by Miss Pennington, a character who serves as teacher and mentor to Charlotte during the latter's high-school years. The most significant example of Miss Pennington acting as Nietzsche's medium occurs early in the text, shortly after Charlotte delivers the valedictory speech at her high-school graduation. Charlotte's parents hold a party after the graduation, an event Miss Pennington attends. Four of Charlotte's male former classmates, all of them half-drunk, attempt to disrupt the party; the males already in attendance stop the boys from doing so under threat of violence. Once the boys leave, Miss Pennington tells Charlotte the following in confidence:

"All they got out of that commencement was that one of their classmates is exceptional [...] far above them, and there's always the type of person who resents that. You remember we read about the German philosopher Nietzsche? He called people like that tarantulas. Their sole satisfaction is bringing down people above them, seeing the mighty fall. You'll find them everywhere you go, and you'll have to be able to recognize them for what they are." (29, Wolfe's emphasis)

Miss Pennington's comments here paraphrase the manner in which Nietzsche figures tarantulas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885). In that text's second part, Nietzsche writes, "What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge"--thus they speak to each other. "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not"--thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. "And 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!" (212)

In place of allowing the tarantulas to debase her, Miss Pennington would have Charlotte "'keep [her] eyes on the future'" (Charlotte Simmons 30), a statement roughly paraphrasing Nietzsche's exhortation that "life must overcome itself again and again" (213). Charlotte is clearly to develop what Nietzsche terms "the will of the truthful"--an ideal that embodies the proper ends of the will to power. Through the will of the truthful, Nietzsche writes, one becomes "Free from the happiness of slaves, redeemed from gods and adorations, fearless and fear-inspiring, great and lonely" (215). Instead of developing such a will, which is to say, instead of becoming the overman, Charlotte fails to recognize the tarantulas she...

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