Tom Robbins: Elements of Style

1995

Table of Contents

I. The Most Important Thing in Life

II. The Many-Tongued Beast: Language

III. The Many-Bellied Beast: Society

IV. “Pop” Reality and (Counter?)Culture

V. See You in Timbuktu

Works Cited

I. The Most Important Thing in Life...

“The point of Another Roadside Attraction is the reinvention (through perception) of reality, a revitalization of life which logic and authority have dulled beyond appreciation. But as a message, it is not simply preached or discussed. Instead, Robbins makes the actual reading of his novel an experience in the stylistic transformation he has in mind. A successful reading of his book makes the reader an initiate, for he or she has performed the same mental tricks, the same imaginative acrobatics, as have the fictional characters in Robbins’story.

–Jerome Klinkowitz[1]

Discussion of Tom Robbins’ literary project typically breaks down into two frames of reference: the linguistic and the philosophical. Robbins’ relationship with language throughout his career has been a heady romance, the result of which is a unique approach to writing, characterized primar­ily by dazzling extended metaphors. At the same time, he is legitimately concerned with investigat­ing, exposing, and breaking down what he calls society’s “philosophical problems,” those ranging from money and religion to the transience of love and discrimination against inanimate objects; such investigations underlie his novels’ careening plots and the various authorial intrusions he makes into them. These disparate aspects of Robbins’ writing come together, how­ever, in an inclu­sive examination of his approach to literature — and to life — in short, of his style.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “style” first as “1. The way in which some­thing is said, done, expressed, or performed, as in: a style of speech and writing.”[2] This tradi­tional definition constructs “style” in opposition to “content,” or what is said, done, expressed, etc., and typically refers in literary analysis to a writer’s diction, grammar, and other aspects of his use of language. For the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, style takes on additional significance with particular regard to writing:

A language is therefore on the hither side of Literature. Style is almost beyond it: imagery, delivery, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art. Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things take place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed. Whatever its sophistication, style has always something crude about it: it is a form with no clear destination, the product of a thrust, not an intention...[3]

If for Barthes, then, the institution of Literature is a dividing-line on the near side of which style must remain, Robbins carries it one final step across the line, beyond Literature alone. For Robbins, as for Barthes, “imagery, delivery, [and] vocabulary” are crucial to style, but Robbins extends their reference beyond language itself to the substance of his philosophy as well. The elements of the discourse which fills his novels are important in their own right, but less so than their cumulative effect and the mode of their presentation. Thus individual philosophical ideas, analogous to words in language, form the “vocabulary” of his philosophical style; more important are the ways in which they are integrated into a unified “imagery,” and presented — “deliver[ed]” — to the reader. In other words, if, according to the traditional definition, style normally describes substance, for Robbins, style itself is a substantive category: it is the focus of his literary and philosophical investigations, and it lies at the heart of his ultimate message to his readers. In this Robbins moves away from Barthes as well as beyond him. No longer crude, a consciously, intentionally developed style becomes a destination in its own right. Style functions as meaning itself, not merely its presentation: it is not the mere product of a thrust, it is the thrust.

Robbins writes directly on style only in his first book, Another Roadside Attraction. Near the beginning of the novel, the heroine, Amanda, asked by a woman for psychic advice about her marital problems, delivers a speech which the narrator introduces as “what might properly be described as a philosophical discourse”[4]:

The most important thing in life is style. That is, the style of one’s existence—the characteristic mode of one’s actions—is basically, ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing, then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing. (12)

The disappointed client clouts Amanda with her handbag and demands a refund. Her response may constitute a tongue-in-cheek prediction of what Robbins expects the public response to his “philosophical discourse” to be, but it also introduces his sense of playfulness — hence the slapstick response to this presumably profound pearl of wisdom — and his fundamental individualist theme: the development of a “personal” reality which by nature cannot be authoritatively handed down.

Amanda’s account of “style” — her reference to “style of one’s existence” — would appear to refer principally to the notion of “lifestyle,” a concept anchored in a certain shallow materialism which largely faded out after the post-sixties generation. As becomes apparent over the course of the novel, however, style entirely transcends such a limiting denotation, as indeed it does the broader, traditional meaning. Over the course of his life, Robbins has cultivated a unique perspective on reality, one which pervades every aspect of his writing. Style, then, more than “the characteristic mode of one’s actions,” is for Robbins a way of perceiving. Robbins does not seek to convert his audience to any particular point of view — certainly not to any structured cause — other than that of constant questioning grounded in an affirmative, and essentially optimistic, spirituality.

Robbins thus demands an active role from his readers: in assaulting them with a sometimes overwhelming volume of words and ideas, he forces them to forge new mental connections between the two, thus playing out within his fiction what Barthes refers to as “the death of the author.” His linguistic technique is at once deconstructive and reconstruc­tive: ful­ly conscious of the division between signifier and signified, he revels in that division, for it liber­ates him in terms of word choice and, most significantly, word association. Robbins is, at times, exces­sive. At their extremes, his metaphors are inscrutable references, or simply bad puns; like­wise, his philosophi­cal suggestions, when pushed too far, can lose most of their credibility. For the most part, how­ever, he tends to be more careful with his language; while he does treat philosoph­ical inquiry ser­ious­ly, language is his raison d’être, and it informs the structure and presentation of his philosophy.

The development of literature in the twentieth century has seen writers becoming progressively conscious of the various roles that language can play in forging the relationship between an author and his readers. For some, Samuel Beckett chief among them, this awareness engendered increasing frustration: Beckett wrote in 1937, “more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or perhaps the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit.... A mask.”[5] This viewpoint, of course, generates an impossible paradox for a writer — whose career finds its entire basis in language — and Beckett’s work carries linguistic deconstruction to its ultimately destructive end.[6]

Robbins begins from essentially the same starting point as Beckett did a genera­tion earlier: a recognition of the fundamental opacity of language. Rather than allow his words to form a shroud between him and his audience, however, or between him and his philosophy, he shapes them into a palpable tool, with which he breaks down what he sees as veils: social, political, and religi­ous pre- and misconceptions. Indeed, this metaphor of the veil is exactly at the basis of what is perhaps his most philosophically ambitious novel, Skinny Legs and All. Robbins hopes his books to have the same effect on his readers as Salome’s dance has on his charac­ters in that novel: to force them via sensory and intellectual overstimulation to stare through the distortions in which contemporary society shrouds reality. Like Beckett, Robbins deconstructs virtual­ly every tradi­tion­al feature of his novels — plot, character, narrator, language itself — but his tone and intent are playful and conspiratorial with respect to his audience, and his relationship to language is ultim­ately as affirmative as Beckett’s is despairing. While Beckett concludes that esse est percipi— to be is to be perceived — abandoning the prospect of an individual subjective reality, Robbins in effect counters esse est percipere — to be is to perceive — insisting in fact that it is via the act of perception wherein lies individual reality.

For Robbins, what lies behind the veils are the elements of his philosophical inquiries: the true natures of politics, religion, the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, and the future of human existence. On another, somewhat deeper, level, however, there is in fact also a “Nothingness,” or at least something that is inexplicable in language. Even as he expounds his philosophy from a narratorial bully pulpit which is fairly unchanging across his novels, Robbins undermines his own authority: his most basic message is, in the end, “Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves” (Skinny Legs, 467). Thus the individualist, anti-guru theme which runs throughout his books applies to his own relationship to his audience: he can rend socio-political veils, but for a reader to accept his propositions carelessly as a new Gospel is for that reader to hang a new set of veils over his perceptions, in front of his own personal reality.[7] The philo­sophical component of this mode of perception which is Robbins style, then, is analogous to the linguistic. Just as he contrives exotic relationships among words in order to put American language to a new effect, Robbins encourages new interpretations of American society by suggesting unpredictable, not always rational, connections among the elements of that society.

The constituent ideas of his philosophy are significant in their own right, however, and bear individual examination. Like his language, Robbins’ philosophy emerges within and against a specific historical moment. His early work was very much influenced by the sensibilities of the late-1960s counterculture, particularly inasmuch as the counterculture helped him — via spiritual revivals, psychedelics, and simply the act of questioning social assumptions — make new connections within the milieu of the world he saw around him. Indeed, as a result of Robbins’ relationship to and presentation of the sixties counterculture, Michael Rogers, among the first to conduct an in-depth interview with him, dubbed Roadside “the quintessential counterculture novel.”[8] Robbins adopts rather cynical, at times even paranoid, views toward the institutions of what he sees as a patriarchal, repressive main­stream society — institutionalized religion, government, and so forth — and fear of a nuclear-age apocalypse pervades every one of his novels on some level or another. He does not come across, however, as a Doomsday evangelist; indeed, Amanda has been compared more than once to Candide for her apparently simplistic optimism. Robbins’ creed is “joy in spite of everything,” and for the most part he ignores the political activist and social reformist half of the sixties’ legacy, concentrating rather on personal liberation and expression. He places his faith with the individual spirit, constructed not in opposition to conventional society, but to as great an extent as possible, outside it.

Thus “counterculture” is not in and of itself a sufficient term to describe Robbins’ view of culture. Culture and society are not interchangeable concepts for him: the latter is necessarily an impediment to individual style; the former need not be, as long as it provides starting-points for inquiry, and not prefabricated solutions. Indeed, although he incorporates into his novels, particularly the early ones, imagery unquestionably derived from the counterculture, he also draws extensively from the mainstream, “popular” culture, particularly in crafting metaphors which speak to the widely disparate elements of his audience. In fact, these two supposedly distinct cultures tend to run together, particularly after Roadside, and both are ultimately incidental, not necessary, to his style.

Near the end of his vivacious review of Roadside, Auberon Waugh cautions, “Either one is enchanted by it all, of course, or one is not,”[9] an observation which aptly characterizes the rocky history of Robbins criticism, running the gamut from glowing praise to dismissive condemnation. The first reviews, single paragraphs in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal, reject the novel as “a series of gags for hip college kids”[10] and “an anti-Establishment spoof” composed of “su­per­ficial ideas about hippies and drugs.”[11] Centing derides both Robbins’ philosophical dis­course as “undergraduate essays on current events” and his language as “strangely stilted.”[12] PW’s second review, a year later, of the paperback edition is only slightly less caustic, but it is charac­ter­istic of much of the negative criticism leveled at Robbins in its closemindedness and absolute refusal to engage with him on anything resembling his own terms: “The author expects you to get inside his mind and trip with him. If you can do this—and the younger heads will find it easier than those of us who think the author ought to get inside our heads—there are rewards...”[13]

This attitude persists even to reviews of the latest book, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Karen Karbo, writing for the New York Times Book Review, begins her piece, “My theory on Tom Robbins is that unless his work was imprinted on you when you were 19 and stoned, you’ll find him forever unreadable. A sober 21-year-old is already too steely-eyed and seasoned...”[14] Karbo had her opinions on Robbins set before she even began the book, as a disgruntled reader pointed out the next month;[15] she also notably misjudges the nature of his audience, which in fact ranges from high school seniors to aging baby boomers and includes the intermediary range as well. More importantly, however, she entirely ignores the sense of play which is so fundamental to his style.

Karbo complains of Robbins’ “woo-woo philosophizing,” but not only does the speech she cites from the text belong to one of his characters’, rather than to Robbins-as-narrator, but it is one that that character himself refutes a few pages later. She is of course unable to find literal meaning in the novel’s extended metaphors, but neither does she appreciate the role they play on the more basic linguistic level; she therefore dismisses them without much explanation as “overwrought.” Karbo’s review is a perfect example of the negative criticism which has soured Robbins to critics in general. There are exceptions, of course: critiques finding legitimate fault in a given novel or in Robbins’ work in general, as well as positive reviews of varying depth.

What is notably absent, however, is any significant amount of “high” critic­ism on Robbins. Perhaps because of the paradoxes inherent in — and essen­tial to — his philosophy and language, perhaps because of his expostula­tions against aca­demia, perhaps because he does not on the surface take himself seriously, he has been essentially ignored — apart from a number of theses (BA, MA, and PhD) and a handful of journal articles dealing in whole or in part with his work — by the academic world and the shapers of the contemporary canon. While his omission from the canon and from “serious” journals does not trouble him — or at least it does not trouble the façade he shows the public in his novels and interviews[16] — it represents a misjudgment on the part of literary critics, if for no other reason than the fact that Robbins’ style represents a new and vital force in late twentieth century literature.

II. The Many-Tongued Beast: Language

A language is for [the writer] a frontier, to overstep which alone might lead to the linguistically supernatural; it is a field of action, the definition of, and hope for, a possibility. It is not the locus of a social commitment...

[L]anguage is not so much a fund to be drawn on as an extreme limit; it is the geometrical locus of all that he could say without, like Orpheus looking back, losing the stable meaning of his enterprise... –Roland Barthes[17]

A writer’s first obligation is not the many-bellied beast but the many-tongued beast, not to Society but to Language.… If it weren’t for Language there wouldn’t be Society.…
Once writers have established their basic commitment to Language (and are taking the blue-guitar-sized risks that that relationship demands), then they are free to promote social betterment to the extent that their conscience or neurosis might require. But let me tell you this: social action on the political/economic level is wee potatoes.[18]

Often guilty of hyperbole and self-invention in the interviews and writing he has done over the years for the popular press, Robbins is in the above quote absolutely sincere, at least in his own mind. Among the aspects of his style, language does indeed constitute his highest priority, as indeed it must: without the philosophy which informs their workings, at least some of his best passages could stand on their own as prose poems, but without his particular manner of exploiting the language as a medium for commun­ica­tion, his philosophy comes across only as so much disjointed preaching.

Robbins started his career as a novelist relatively late in life; born on July 22, 1936,[19] he is chrono­logic­ally more a contemporary of the Beats than of the those writers Waugh dubs the California novelists: Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and others, with whom he is often mentioned. His passion for writing, however, has roots in his early childhood: indulging in whimsical exaggeration, he told one interviewer,

My muse was a cradle-robber, a child-molester. She seduced an innocent, blue-eyed, tow-headed, pre-literate tot and turned him into a paragraph junkie. By the time I was four I had written all of the works now attributed to Herman Hesse.[20]

As a child, Robbins would dictate stories to his mother, who would write them down, correcting for grammar, etc.; he recalls in the same interview, “...if so much as one word had been altered I’d throw a tantrum until my mother changed it back to way I had it originally. When I mentioned this recently to my editor at Bantam, he said, ‘My God, Robbins, you haven’t changed in thirty years!’”[21]

Robbins held a number of jobs as a journalist and art reviewer, but his non-fictional prose,[22] while lively and well-constructed, lacks entirely the flamboyant metaphors and unlikely images which have become his trademarks as a novelist. They pervade his fiction from the first lines of Roadside through his most recent work. His tropes craft images, but they also shape and recombine the actual words which describe the images; Robbins tells Ann Oldenburg, “I suppose more than anything else I like messing around with language. Not just words, but syntax and metaphoric relationships.”[23]He claims that the primary purpose of this unique approach to imagery is “[t]o awaken in the reader his or her own sense of wonder.... Language has to exist in an exalted state to awaken wonder. [my emphasis]”[24] This statement is crucial to a definition of his style: Robbins’ novels demand an active role on the part of the reader in absorbing the cornucopia of metaphor which rushes through the text, and thereby in realizing new connections among the words and images manipulated by the author. In this respect, Robbins’ manipulation of language is also deconstructive: he manipulates words into playful, exotic combinations in which they act, stripped of referents, only as signs. Before investigating this deconstructive effort in detail, however, it is necessary to examine the more conventional levels on which Robbins’ metaphors function.

Norris offers a structuralist definition of metaphor derived from Roman Jakobson, which perhaps comes closest to capturing Robbins’ approach to metaphor:

Metaphor involves the perception of a similarity between two otherwise quite distinct fields of meaning, such that the sense of distance is preserved in the act of imaginative leaping across it.... metaphor has come to be regarded as the virtual hallmark of ‘creative’ language, the means by which it breaks with the normal run of day-to-day ‘literal’ usage.[25]

Janet Burroway, in her handbook on fiction, examines the practical creative application of metaphor, and emphasizes the “otherwise quite distinct” aspect of the trope: “What a good metaphor does is surprise us with the unlikeness of the two things compared while at the same time convincing us of the aptness or truth of the likeness. A bad meta­phor fails to surprise or convince us or both.”[26]

Robbins’ metaphors incorporate features of both analyses. He looks constantly to surprise, to shock, but there are times he seems less concerned with convincing his readers of the aptness of the specific comparison he has drawn than with forcing them to bridge actively the two fields of meaning, not necessarily making a one-way leap from one to the other. He evokes images, but often leaves the reader with the responsibility for making his own connections; he tells Strickland that he aims for “something a little more unpredictable, in order to allow a leap of consciousness to take place in the reader.”[27] Thus the first such descrip­tion in Roadside : “It was one of those mellow October days that seem concocted from a mixture of sage, polished brass and peach brandy” (6). Nothing following offers any further explanation or justification for these particular ingredients, and they are odd and disparate enough to be guaranteed to produce a different image in each reader’s mind. In this they are examples of catachresis,[28] which suggests the beginnings of Robbins’ deconstructive approach.

Robbins points out that “you have to use the right word. You can’t just, like a surrealist, throw in cucumber when you mean cat. It’s important to use inappropriately appropriate words: words that once were used a lot and now aren’t or words that are just kind of goofy, yet are precise.”[29] The “goofiness” is an important feature of Robbinsian metaphor, often manifesting as a jarring juxtaposition of “high” and “low” cultural references. Thus he explains Debra Winger’s voice, “which sounds as if it’s been strained through Bacall and Bogey’s honeymoon sheets and then hosed down with plum brandy,” and her laugh, “which sounds as if it’s been squeezed out of a kangaroo bladder by a musical aborigine.”[30] He describes a late fall sunrise: “Like a neon fox tongue lapping up the powdered bones of space chickens, the rising sun licked away at the light snow that had fallen during the night” (Skinny Legs 109); a brown paper bag, “crumpled into a wad of wrinkles, like the fossilized brain of a dryad” (Cowgirls 103); or a hangover “trying to hang a picture on the wall of her skull. A picture of The Massacre of the Innocents painted on black velvet by a hydrocephalic baboon” (Skinny Legs 168). By themselves, “neon fox tongue” and “powdered bones of space chickens,” are unlikely images; together they conjure an image of a sunrise which must be, to say the least, unique. Likewise, a reader who tries hard enough to imagine “a picture of The Massacre of the Innocents painted on black velvet by a hydrocephalic baboon” on its own, let alone nailed to his skull, will surely develop a convincing impression of a hangover.

Familiarity with the Massacre of the Innocents, at least as a biblical event if not as one of a number of formulaic Renaissance paintings, is helpful, but not essential in appreciating this image. Robbins’ metaphors often draw on such cultural references ranging from well-known — “The day was rumpled and dreary. It looked like Edgar Allen Poe’s pajamas” (Roadside 306)[31] — to more obscure — “Violet hills and burnt umber buttes rested in their still American places like novels on Zane Grey’s bookshelf” (Cowgirls 170). Zane Grey was a turn-of-the-century Western writer, and the reference is certainly appropriate to its context, if not immediately recogniz­able for a reader. Robbins is evidently aware of his occasional obscurity: having given himself an assignment, “Describe the whooping crane... in twenty-five words or less,” he begins, “Imagine Wilt Chamberlain in red yarmulke and snowy feathers,” and immediately interrupts him­self, “Hold it. You’re assuming that the reader knows who Wilt Chamberlain is. Many people don’t fol­low basketball and wouldn’t understand that Wilt signifies size and strength and arrogance made palatable by grace” (Cowgirls 157). He generally ignores this caution, however, writing of a sky, for instance, that it “recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray.... On this day, already described as meterologically evocative of Victor Hugo at his most dire...” (Jitterbug 11).

Although Robbins cites as an important component of his language “words that once were used a lot and now aren’t,” what seems actually to play a larger role are phrases that once had stirring metaphoric meaning, but have since become, via overuse, what Burroway defines as “cliché metaphors”:

metaphors on their way to being dead. They are inevitably apt comparisons; if they were not, they wouldn’t have been repeated often enough to become clichés. But they have no acquired new definitions [as have “dead” metaphors, as in “running” for office], and so the reader’s mind must make the imaginative leap to an image. The image fails to surprise, and we blame the writer for this expenditure of energy without a payoff.[32]

For instance, in Skinny Legs, Robbins describes a character’s trousers as “open to the four winds, the seven seas, the twelve apostles, and ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall” (273), thus giving the original cliché, “open to the four winds,” via company, new life. Similarly, he expands another cliché in Jitterbug, writing of Alobar, “His voice trailed off, held hostage by memory. Bound gagged, and blindfolded with a swath of ermine ripped from a concubine-stained bedspread, his voice lay in an unlit corner until memory collected its ransom or else took pity [my emphasis]” (95). He returns to the origins of the metaphor and develops them into a form which not only evokes Alobar’s thoughts far more convincingly than the phrase alone would have, but awakens the reader to the beauty of the original metaphor in its own right as discrete image. In another example he accomplishes a similar, if lighter-hearted, effect in a single line: “smiling like the catastrophe that swallowed the Canary Islands” (Jitterbug 214).

Elsewhere Robbins looks directly at well-known literary clichés: “Homer referred in The Odyssey to ‘rosy-fingered dawn.’ Homer, who was blind and had no editor, referred over and over again to ‘rosy-fingered dawn.’ Pretty soon, dawn began to think of herself as rosy-fingered: the old doctrine of life imitating art” (Cowgirls 249). In Jitterbug he applies a similar treatment to a clichéd simile — Priscilla tells her mirrored reflection, “You’re still cute as a button. Of course I’ve never seen a cute button, but who am I to argue with the wisdom of the ages?” (5) — and, near the beginning of Woodpecker, to a cliché not of language but of imagery, writing of the full moon:

The moon was full. The moon was so bloated it was about to tip over. Imagine awakening to find the moon flat on its face on the bathroom floor, like the late Elvis Presley, poisoned by banana splits. It was a moon that could stir wild passions in a moo cow. A moo that could bring out the devil in a bunny rabbit.... (4)

This last quote is actually an example of a conceit, a specific type of metaphor, primarily a poetic trope, which Robbins has adapted into a device essential to his particular linguistic project.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines a conceit as

An intricate or far-fetched metaphor, which functions through arousing feelings of surprise, shock, or amusement; in earlier usage, the imagination or fancy in general.... The poet compares elements which seem to have little or nothing in common, or juxtaposes images which establish a marked discord in mood.

The Encyclopedia identifies two forms: the extended, “the initial analogy is subjected to a detailed and ingenious development,” and the condensed, “the ingenious analogy or discordant contrast is expressed with a telling brevity.”[33]Robbins occasionally employs the latter variety — the “voodoo smell of perking coffee” is an example — but it is when working with the former, the extended, that he creates his best images, and sets the tones and themes that guide his readers through his novels. As Burroway explains, “A conceit compares two things that have very little or no immediately apprehensible similarity; and so it is the nature of the conceit to be long. The author must explain to us, sometimes at great length, why these things can be said to be alike.”[34] Incidentally, the Encyclopedia discusses conceit only in terms of poetry, which is indeed the genre in which the trope has seen the most use. In explaining the term as it applies to prose, Burroway’s only examples come from Robbins’ writing.[35]

Robbins’ first conceit appears well into Roadside, and is the only one in that first book. He uses the Northwest rain (his relationship with which is a fascinating topic in its own right and will be examined later) to accomplish, in the space of a page and without chapter breaks, a transition from describing the idyllic life at the Zillers’ roadside zoo — the geographic center of the novel’s action, the resting place of Christ after his body was abducted from the Vatican catacombs, and, to hear the Zillers tell it, the embodiment of the “meaning of meaning” — to Amanda’s sudden miscarriage:

And then the rains came.
They came down from the hills and up from the Sound.
And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and the pale eggs of the beast.
Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges.…
Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Rave. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilling the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.
Rain fell on the Chinese islands. It fell on the skull where the crickets live. It fell on the frogs and snails in the gutter.… It fell against the windows of the hospital where Amanda had been carried, the blood on her legs diluted with rain water.
…Rain has spattered Amanda’s unconscious eyes, as it now spattered the hospital where for eleven days she lay, some days close to dying. (108)

Although the rain here is only moderately anthropomorphized (certainly less so than the object-characters in Skinny Legs), the build-up of images lends the rain itself weight and credibility as at least the messenger, if not the actual cause, of the misery surrounding Amanda’s miscarriage. The phrases “It rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor…” clearly have no literal meaning; even if a disease or a smell were a result of the rain, neither would actually berained. What is striking is that they do not have a direct metaphoric meaning either, for on their own, they do not describe the rain itself, only the atmosphere and tone of the moment in the book in which it descends. It is this atmosphere that is important for the reader to appreciate, but Robbins clearly allows him considerable latitude in imagining the specifics.

Robbins revisits the rain conceit at the beginning of Roadside’s last section, achieving with a remarkably parallel structure a vastly different effect:

Rain fell on Skagit Valley.
It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of mallards.
And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
Rain drenched the chilly green tidelands. The river swelled. The sloughs fermented. Vapors rose from black stumps on the hillsides. Spirit canoes paddled in he mists of the islands. Legends were washed from desecrated burial grounds.... Water spilled off the roofs and the rain hats. It took on the colors of neon and head lamps. It glistened on the claws of nighttime animals.
And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.
The rain erased the prints of the sasquatch. It beat the last withered fruit from he orchard trees. It soaked the knotted fans who gathered to watch high-school boys play football in the mud. It hammered the steamed-up windshields of lover’s lane Chevvies, hammer the larger windshields of hunters’ pickups, hammered, upriver, the still larger windshields of logging trucks. And it hammered the windowpane through which I gazed... (329)

The length of this conceit is roughly equivalent to the first; the rhythm and structure of the language are identical, as is the literal situation being described, the perpetual Northwestern rain. Solely by a different choice of words offered for the reader’s association, Robbins now uses the passage to set the tone for tragedy but for the somewhat chaotic uncertainty of the denouement, which includes Marx’s last night with Amanda, his arrest by the malevolent Father Gutstadt, and a final discussion of style. The magic and mystery evoked by the conceit work to upset conventional referentiality, again by divorcing the notion of “rain” from its traditional conception as mere liquid precipitation. Magic and mystery are thus elements of Robbins’ style in that they help to break down any preconceived relationship between words and meaning, sign and referent. In the final paragraph, images of wilderness segue into those of Americana, underlining the importance of both nature and culture to Robbins; the latter also help to bring the reader back from the abstractions of the conceit to the (relatively) normal reality of Marx’s situation.

Over his next four books, Robbins puts the conceit to philosophical use, developing the device as an increasingly effective means of introducing his novels. Each of Cowgirls, Woodpecker, Jitterbug, and Skinny Legs begins with a theme which in some way informs the rest of the book; over the four, each theme is increasingly coherent, though not necessarily rational. Robbins uses the introductory conceit in order simultaneously to shock and to ease the reader into his style: by beginning with a barrage of rich and convoluted language, he jolts a new reader into reading words from a perspective not necessarily informed by the referents culture assumes them to signify. In Cowgirls, for example, water earns the description of “a mathematics turned wrong side out, a philosophy in reverse” (2). The reader is thus catapulted into an active reading role in which unexpected connections among words generate new meanings. At the same time, there is nothing in the preface which is itself essential to the novel’s plot or to its philosophical themes.

Cowgirls begins with a “Single Cell Preface,” dedicating the book to an amoeba, specifically to the first amoeba, which, “for its expertise as a passenger [in the “ongoing odyssey of water”], as well as for its near-perfect resolution of sexual tensions [by reproducing asexually] is hereby proclaimed the official mascot of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues“ (2). Robbins’ intent is to introduce the themes of travel and gender relations, but the amoeba never shows up again in the course of the novel, and the conceit itself is somewhat disjointed, shifting from amoebae’s age to their reproduction to water, and then back to amoebae, etc.. This conceit, then, in lacking both thematic and philosophical unity, is notably less successful than the later ones.

Robbins introduces Woodpecker with a prologue about his new electric typewriter:

If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, “Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting for Easter eggs on a typewriter keyboard?” This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card.
I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3—although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.… (ix)

Between each of the book’s four chapters, patterned on the phases of the moon, there is an interlude returning to Robbins’ deteriorating relationship with the Remington; it becomes a metaphor for his frustration with the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century in the West, a frustration which pervades Woodpecker, and, to a varying extent, all his books. The typewriter’s flaw, like the amoeba’s, as a metaphor for the novel as a whole, is that it does not relate to the text itself; it functions, rather, to justify Robbins’ constant authorial intrusions into the plot.[36] In truth, Woodpecker marks Robbins’ stylistic nadir. The metaphors are heavy-handed, and tend to be too obvious; without Robbins’ typical linguistic style, moreover, the philosophy becomes didactic and uninteresting, and as a result, unconvincing. As Burroway writes, “Much of the pleasure of reading comes from the egotistical sense that we are clever enough to understand. When the author explains to us or interprets for us, we suspect that he or she doesn’t think us bright enough to do it for ourselves.”[37] The novel’s closing line, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood” (277) is trite enough to justify the scathing reviews the book earned; some went so far as to suggest the end of Robbins’ career.

Jitterbug Perfume proves such doomsayers thoroughly wrong. The novel marks a return to the stylistic project begun with the Roadside conceits, enhanced by a more coherent, if still amply complex, plot. Its prelude, “Today’s Special,” is a single conceit which meets all the denotative and connotative definitions of the term in justifying its opening sentence:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . [sic ellipses]
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.…

The attribution of so many anthropomorphic qualities to a vegetable certainly qualifies this passage, under the Princeton Handbook definition, as an “intricate” and “far-fetched” metaphor which “compares elements which seem to have little or nothing in common,... the initial analogy subjected to a detailed and ingenious development”; it also meets Burroway’s requirements. Moreover, the beet, unlike the previous prelude themes, plays a major role throughout the body of novel, and is even essential to the plot.

If Skinny Legs is indeed Robbins’ richest work in terms of the breadth of its philosophical inquiry, it also features much of his best writing, the prelude quoted in the preface above being a case in point. Robbins never elucidates the meaning of “wolfmother wallpaper,” although shorter passages along the same lines pop up throughout the novel. He introduces themes and characters from the body of the novel, without giving away anything significant. He prepares his readers to suspend not only their disbelief but their everyday sense of perception, as he plunges from the prelude right into a two-page description of the protagonist and her new husband “driving cross-country in a large roast turkey” (5).[38] The prelude to Skinny Legs also serves as a perfect illustra­tion of the deconstructive posture which is a central feature of Robbins’ use of metaphor and conceit. Although Robbins, who eschews literary criticism, would likely consider the term “de­con­struction” to be anathema, his use of metaphor is grounded firmly in the discussion which has ranged over the course of this century regarding the nature and potential denaturing of language.

“Deconstruction,” as developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, relies on certain notion of the nature of language. It depends for many of its presuppositions on the work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who proposed in the early part of this century that in a given language, every verbalized concept, or signified, is expressed through a word-sound, a signifier, which is absolutely arbitrary, but which is necessarily constant within a culture. Saussure uses a diagram of a tree, representing a signified, the concept of a tree, with its paired signifier, the word “tree,” written above it. He expresses the relationship as , where the bar indicates a tight bond between the two halves of the sign.[39] A generation later, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, realized both the essential truth of this structuralist formula and its ultimate failing: that the construction of sign-systems is subjective and is, moreover, an attempt by the subject to Symbolically order his/her desires. This must be a doomed enterprise, however, based on the subject’s own arbitrary pairings of sign and signified, which s/he takes to be natural and rational but which are really an effect of his/her desire. For Lacan, then, the bar between s and S is not a bond but a divider, signifying the insecurity of the sound-sign association. He therefore modifies Saussure’s formula by inverting it, , in order to emphasize the dominance of the signifier, which actually creates the signified through the act of signification.[40] Norris summarizes, “language is a differential network of meaning. There is no self-evident or one-to-one link between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, the word as (spoken or written) vehicle and the concept it serves to evoke.”[41]

For better or worse, this realization of the essential opacity of language has informed much of the literary criticism of the past few decades, as well as literature throughout the century, particularly the latter half (Beckett again being an excellent example). Rather than allow this opacity to obscure his meaning, however, or to come between him and his readers, Robbins revels in it, secure in the certainty that the words he chooses for his sentences have no inherent meaning outside that which the subjectivity of the reader gives them. Like Lacan, Robbins imagines a “delusional” reading as potentially more liberating and radical than one which ostensibly makes claims of “clarity.” “The wolfmother’s blood roses that vibrated there,” “wild fox barking,” and “history’s tragic glitter” are phrases which do not have readily recognizable referents; moreover, in these arrangements the words themselves do not signify anything consistently across Robbins’ readership. Robbins surely had images in mind when he wrote them, but those images need not be the ones the reader receives; indeed, the author intends the reader to assume an active role in inventing his own images: the specifics do not matter to the book’s plot or any of its other elements. The rain conceit from Roadside , though more subtle and more controlled, has a similar effect. The setting is moved from the mythological to the mun­dane, from the chaos of the ancient Middle East (more or less) to the rain which falls on the Northwest hundreds of days a year.

Robbins explains in his interview with Strelow, “Despite their abundance of visual imagery, my books rely upon literary effects. There is the book and then there is the plot. I strive to keep the plot secondary to the book itself. My books have plots but they don’t depend on plots.”[42] This interview took place in 1982, and his claim applies principally to the first half of his oeuvre, although it is not strictly accurate even with regard to those three books. Robbins’ attitude toward the features of the traditional novel — character, narrator, plot, etc. — is not one of indifference; he rather works consistently to undermine them, in a manner similar to that in which he undermines the traditional, consensual meanings and context of words.

A Robbinsian narrator, particularly in the early novels, serves a significant metafictional role, reminding the reader of the the narrator’s position as storyteller, and thus of the book’s ex­ist­ence as a discrete entity. He does not expect the reader to suspend his disbelief at the absurd­ity of the unfolding fantasy — indeed, there are moments at which he goes to lengths to encour­age disbelief — but he still expects to be paid attention, with the hope that his audience will enjoy and benefit from him all the more for their awareness of his artificiality. Thus, for ex­ample, Marx Marvelous, the narrator of Roadside, still anonymous at this point, interrupts his narra­tion to inform the reader that he has found a dictionary, and suggests, “Perhaps from here on out the reader will note some improvement in vocabulary, if not in overall what-do-you-call-it” (71).

Later — again, before he admits his identity — he recalls, “‘I don’t imagine it storms much in this climate,’ he [Marvelous] noted. ‘But you do admit there’s truth in my observations?’ The ‘but’ that crouched like a strange sailor in the doorway of his second sentence did not in any way tie his first remark to his second one. It was a ‘but’ more ornamental than conjectural” (191). While the dictionary remark was essentially just playful irony, this statement reflects an awareness of the structural and grammatical nature of the text itself, certainly not an awareness a traditional narrator would confess. Marx devises something of an excuse for his stepping out of the narrative and calling attention to himself as author: as the character he eventually reveals himself to be, he is writing the “report” which is to be Roadside under pressure of time, and he wishes (somewhat in vain) for it to appear in fact as though it had been written while the events it records were transpiring.

In Cowgirls, Robbins gives himself a cameo as an outlandish psychiatrist (Dr. Robbins, a role he plays in the film version of Cowgirls as well) to whom Sissy, the protagonist, relates her history, and presumably most of the plot of the book; he also tracks her down at the very end of the novel, and, apparently, writes the novel based on his conversations with her. After the first of these, Robbins devotes a short chapter to a series of single-paragraph updates on each of his significant characters, including Dr. Robbins, and ends disingenuously with “[T]he author (who is also one of the above — which one doesn’t matter),” leaving little real doubt as to his intentions. Dr. Robbins does not play a major role in the plot, however, as did Marx in Roadside, and he gives no explanation, as did Marx, for his authorial intrusions. His object — in this case indistinguishable from his namesake writer’s — is to get the reader to question basic literary norms, just as other features of the book work to undermine other social conventions.

A little under a third of the way into the novel, he breaks off his narration — which has to this point followed a sequence that is certainly non-linear, though not tremendously difficult to follow — to address his readers and expostulate on his philosophies of literature:

If he has confused you, the author apologizes. He swears to keep events in proper historical sequence from now on. He does not, however, disavow the impulses that led to his presentation of cowgirl scenes out of chronological order, nor does he, in repentance, embrace the notion that literature should mirror reality.… A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time....
Happily, your author is not under contract to any of the muses who supply the reputable writers,[43] and thus he has access to a considerable variety of sentences to spread and stretch from margin to margin... For example:
This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence made of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool.… This sentence is made of the blood of the poet.… This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn’t care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections.… This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior.… This sentence may be pregnant, it missed its period … This sentence is proud to be a part of the team here at Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This sentence is rather confounded by the whole damn thing. (108)

Anthropomorphizing grammatical structures is of course meant to call into serious question the reader’s most fundamental assumptions about the nature of language. Somewhat more subtly, Robbins also highlights the dependence of language on culture: phrases such as “...and doesn’t care who knows it,” “...Jesus Christ as [its] personal savior,” and “part of the team here at...” are quoted directly from sound-bites from the mass media. Finally, the reference to the book itself (”here at Even Cowgirls Get the Blues“), a device Robbins presumably borrows from Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, emphasizes the existence of the book on its own level, a discrete entity existing between author and reader.[44]

The narrator here has clearly stepped out of his erstwhile role as psychiatrist, as well as his primary vocation as storyteller. He assumes the airs of a magician or an alchemist, transmuting literally leaden sentences into Mailer groupies and expectant mothers. This last paragraph is actually about twice as long as what has been quoted; by the time it is finished, the next one, “The trouble with seagulls is that they don’t know whether they are cats or dogs,” (108) which starts a new chapter, seems almost rational. (As in fact it almost is: the following sentence explains it as a metaphor: “Their cry is exactly midway between a bark and a meow.”)

In Woodpecker, as described above, Robbins uses the interludes to digress on the progress of his relationship with his typewriter, but he narrates firmly from the background of the novel, which is where he stays throughout his remaining work. He achieves essentially the same effect, however: in the second interlude, having just informed the reader that he has painted the Remington red, he predicts, “it’s going to have to cope with letters, words, sentence structures with which no existing typewriter has had experience” (123). In actuality, this claim remains an empty promise; at its most radical, the language in Woodpecker is utterly commonplace compared with that of the first two books.

In a way, Robbins’ battle with his Remington symbolizes his slow realization that much as he would like to be, he is not a character in one of his novels, that he cannot awake in the rosy-fingered dawn with one of his heroines. If he withdraws as a discrete character, however, Robbins continues to maintain his persona within his novels as do few other authors. Much as Dr. Robbins switches into second person to address Sissy directly at critical moments in Cowgirls, such as her first sexual encounter with Jelly, or her decision not to have her second thumb amputated, so in Jitterbug, now anonymous, he addresses Pan, regarding the decline of his (Pan’s) worship, switching smoothly from third to second person and back. In Frog Pajamas, as will be seen below, this voice takes over the entire narrative. Even in the anonymous third person, however, Robbins continually steps out of the narrative to address the reader directly. He tells Strickland,

In creative writing classes, one of the cardinal rules is ‘Don’t preach.’ I happen to preach somewhat in my fiction. I... always felt a little guilty about it...
And then it occurred to me one day: why can’t you preach? There are epistolary novels, psychiatric case novels, stream-of-consciousness novels—why not the sermon novel? If you can make it work. The trick is to make it work.[45]

It does not always work; as noted above, Robbins’ preachiness often leaves him less effective with his audience than he might otherwise be. This comment leaves no doubt, however, that he is himself the narrator of all his novels.

Characterization is not one of Robbins’ strongest areas, particularly in the early novels. The characters tend to conform to fairly obvious “types,” and while the details of each of their traits and backgrounds tend to be original and imaginative, they remain on the whole rather underdeveloped. A Robbins novel always features a (usually female) individualist protagonist and a (usually male) iconoclastic guru figure,[46] as well as a number of other sympathetic figures who compete with each other and with the omnipresent narrator for the right to espouse the Truth, a sort of Robbinsian gospel, a right which Robbins rarely grants without reservation, even to himself-as-narrator. Against these are set foils so obvious in their intellectual, spiritual, and/or artistic incompetence as to automatically invalidate any potential counterargument they might make. Flat characters in the service of government or organized religion mouth their pre-ordained clichés without contributing to any sort of philosophical discourse within the novel. The major source of this problem seems to be the fact that Robbins maintains an absolute monopoly on philosophical credibility, and he is either unable or unwilling to create a character who can convincingly argue with him, who provides a believable alternative to his own ethos.

Thus in Roadside the nineteen-year-old Amanda has no problem in making a host of sputtering government officials look ridiculous; likewise in Cowgirls Sissy is played against Julian and the Countess, the former implicitly condemned for his denial of his Mohawk heritage, the latter for his distaste for feminine odors, both thoroughly unsympathetic and ineffectual. One possible exception is Skinny Legs’ Buddy, the Jimmy Baker-inspired Southern Baptist evangelist who hopes to precipitate the Second Coming by destroying the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and rebuilding the Biblical Temple. Buddy’s scheme is diabolical, and his physique — plagued with rotten teeth and a boil-ridden face — is grotesque. He is blessed, however, with a voice “reminiscent of a saxophone... the full, lush volatile sound of, say, Charlie Barnet. There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, a kind of defiance... fecund and round and gloomily romantic” (7-8). The voice grants him a powerful sexual magnetism — normally the hallmark of a Robbinsian hero — and while his aphorisms are as clichéd as any of Robbins’ villains, they are inspired by, and thus have the rhetorical force of, the Old Testament. Lest he present a genuine threat to Robbins’ rhetorical hegemony, however, he is in the end made to look a fool by — of all people — Vice President Dan Quayle, and is shot dead in the climactic scene.

One effect of the paucity of credible foils is that it tends to be entirely obvious when a given character serves as a mouthpiece for Robbins; the only other opinions offered are societal clichés. Robbins protests his innocence, cutting off his radio interviewer’s question, “[In Frog Pajamas ... you say some things that are somewhat surprising,” to insist, “No, no, no-- I didn’t say them... my characters said them. There’s a big difference. They say a lot of things I don’t agree with.”[47] The problem is that he leaves no room for the reader to decide whom to believe: although he occasionally makes clear that he knows his characters tend to sound like him when they wax philosophical — Priscilla wonders of Dannyboy, “did he think she was an audience or something?” and tells him “Jesus, you talk like a book!” (Jitterbug 210) — it is brutally clear that a character like Cowgirls’ the Chink, Woodpecker’s Bernard, or Frog Pajamas’ Larry Diamond acts as a stand-in for Robbins, and that, say, Frog Pajamas’ Belford Dunn does not.

In one other respect Robbins’ approach to character is apparently unique: his examination of the nature of inanimate objects goes beyond anthropomorphism to full-blown characterization. The Chink suggests, “every aster in the field has an identity just as strong as my own” (224), an idea Robbins first exploits through his metaphors: October comes in “like a lamb chop, breaded in golden crumbs and gently sautéed in a splash of blue oil” (Woodpecker 191), and an old woman holds “Indian summer in her lap like a cat” and “reach[es] out lazily, as if to scratch Indian summer behind its ears” (Cowgirls 111-3). Beyond this relatively conventional level, however, objects express actual emotions — when she leaves home, Kudra stops “in the yard only long enough to kick with all her might a flabbergasted basket of rope” (Jitterbug 89). They even free themselves of inanimacy: in Skinny Legs a group of Jerusalem-bound pilgrims is composed of a dirty, purple sock, a conch shell, a painted stick, a can of pork-’n-beans, and a silver dessert spoon, all literally traveling from the West across America, and then across the Atlantic Ocean.

Robbins makes an attempt to rationalize their acquired locomotion through a cryptic hodge-podge of quantum mechanical references, invoking phrases like “velocity of electron recoil,” “scattering angles of photons,” and “vibrations” (70), presumably under the assumption that most of his audience will either not realize or not care that he is making no sense whatsoever on a scientific level. Indeed, he sees quantum mechanics as a means of reconciling science and mysticism; he tells the reader that “it is on those [sub-atomic] levels that ‘magic’ occurs” (70).[48] The explanation, however, is largely irrelevant. Beyond whatever actions they actually do in Skinny Legs, the objects represent in a certain respect the embodiment of the sign itself. A few of their personalities are in fact defined by their material existence or overt symbolism: Painted Stick and Conch Shell were both originally religious artifacts from the Middle East, and their obviously phallic and vaginal physical natures define their genders in the novel.[49]

Dirty Sock’s speech reflects the coarseness of his polyester and, perhaps, the gruff charm of his former owner, Boomer; and Spoon, a timid Catholic, entertains secret, sexually-charged fantasies of being caressed by smooth ice cream and warm tongues. Each of these object-characters may be seen to some extent as having personalities which are extensions of their physical natures. With Can O’ Beans, however, Robbins breaks even this tenuous concession to his reader’s expectations. He/she — Robbins states explicitly that the bean can is not genderless, but rather male and female once — is a philosopher and an adventurer, possessed somehow of vast knowledge on ancient religion; he is in fact, apart from the narrator, Robbins’ most consistent mouthpiece in Skinny Legs. Thus Robbins breaks down not only notions of animate and inanimate, but also, via a philosophizing bean-can, form and function, sign and referent, even the very ideas of sign and language. The beet conceit in Jitterbug, in its associations of an (albeit inanimate) vegetable with “the murderer returned to the scene of the crime,” “the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon,” “the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma” (Jitterbug 1), and so forth, has a similar effect: while it does not embody a sign divorced from its referent, as does Can O’ Beans, it is certainly anthropomorphic, and it defies all consensual definitions of the word “beet.”

This literary deconstruction — on what is thus a fair number of levels — is meant to be edifying for the reader; Robbins also has a good deal of fun in the process of writing it. It serves an important practical role as well, however. Robbins’ style would lose most of its impact were he to take himself too seriously. He plays his characters off one another, and off themselves; he does the same as narrator, thus keeping himself — linguistically and philosophically — to a degree in check. For example, having had one character claim near the start of Roadside that Mon Cul, John Paul Ziller’s baboon, is “the only creature on earth, man or beast, who knows an English word that rhymes with orange” (36), and repeating the claim several times in the first half of the book, Robbins later gives the narrator a rebut, “...I believe that the flying saucer was Jesus’ customary mode of transportation no more than I believe that Mon Cul knows an English word that rhymes with orange. There is no limit to the nonsense some people expect you to swallow” (243). Likewise, in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Larry Diamond, Robbins’ principle spokesman in the novel, completes a long theory about civilization being brought to the earth by amphibious mammals from the Sirius star system. Gwen, the protagonist, to whom he has related the theory, expresses her disbelief, to which he responds, ending the chapter, “That’s good.... Frankly, I don’t believe it, either.”[50] Even the narrator emphasizes that his words should not be taken blindly at face-value; writing of the significance of the bean can in Skinny Legs, he asks,

Is it inappropriate, then, that a painter, Andy Warhol, had caused the soup can to be the most recognized image in contemporary art? Is it mere coincidence that the most representative Parisian dance is called the cancan? Or that the famed French film festival is held at a place called Cannes? Yes, of course it is, but no matter...” (82).

There are times, to be sure, when Robbins abandons all self-restraint; the results are sometimes exceptional, as in the wolfmother passages in Skinny Legs, but in other places, his wordplay simply descends to the level of prosaic puns. Ending a chapter in Jitterbug in which he has offered some valid criticisms of the excessive rationalism of the European Enlightenment, he describes 17th century Paris as “a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse” (174). Ziller, who styles himself a magician, claims “I am always voyaging back to the source,” for which he earns the moniker “source-rer.” (Roadside 50). An animated argument about psychiatric philosophy between Dr. Robbins and his employer, Dr. Goldman, becomes known “in psychology circles as the Gunfight at the I’m O.K./You’re O.K. Corral” (Cowgirls 238), and among the “Twelve Most Famous Redheads,” claims Woodpecker, is “Judas Iscarrot-top” (45). In Frog Pajamas, Gwen mentally responds to one of Larry’s remarks, “If that is a compliment, then a rapscallion is a hip-hop onion” (90), and when a horse is killed by a ricochet in Cowgirls, the narrator writes, in a particularly forced pun, “The horse died with fresh grass in its mouth. Even so, death is the last straw” (326).

Referring to Cowgirls , Robbins’ editor at Bantam, Ted Solotaroff, recalls to Mitchell,

...by page three I was in love with it. I eliminated 13% of the bad puns — stuff like astronauts getting poon-Tang on the moon — but Tom’s a natural resource; you just have to let him go. Like Blake said, the road of excess leads to knowledge.[51]

That may well be true, but Robbins himself admits in the same article, “Playfulness can get corny and it can get dumb and it can get frivolous.... It depends on how you play.”[52]

Robbins comes close to spelling out the large part of his literary project via a parallel to fine art which runs through Skinny Legs. Ellen Cherry’s career as a painter has its source in the “eye game” she used to play as a child, staring out the back window on long car rides: “she began to see the world from a different perspective... sliding her focus to muffle or distort the normal associative effects of object and space, stripping them of common meaning or symbolic function...” (17). Her paintings are essentially landscapes whose elements have been drastically distorted and removed from context, in a manner not unlike Robbins’ wordplay in the wolfmother passages. Late in the book, she realizes that her personal perspective “had made her aware of another level of reality, a level, a layer that consensual reality veiled” (331).

Ellen Cherry’s artistic method is evidently based on Robbins’ own: asked by Mitchell how he creates images, he responds, “My writing pulls me in that [metaphoric] direction, but once there, I have to concentrate on evoking images. Usually, it comes from looking at what I want to describe. Either actually looking at it, or forming a picture in my mind. If I look long enough, associations reveal themselves”[53] In Cowgirls, the Chink expresses a similar notion of art: “Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow the style of their dance...” (333).

There is even a moment, near the end, in which Robbins turns his deconstructive attention to an explicit, seriously-intended analysis of his view on language:

...the front door was flung open by a security guard, and the word “koksaghyz” was coughed into the restaurant, followed by the word “megakaryoblast.”
That’s how they looked, Salome and her chaperon: like strange words on a road sign or a page that a reader could only wonder at but hardly define or pronounce. Many in the I & I [the restaurant] thumbed hastily through the pocket dictionaries of their life’s experience, searching for meanings to which they might relate. But would “koksaghyz” seem any less exotic once one learned it was a dandelion of Central Asia? And to be informed that “megakaryoblast” was simply an immature megakaryocyte was not much help at all. Better, perhaps, to take the word at face value, to let the senses deal with them, or the tip of the spine. The rational mind just got in the way.... (453-4)

It is not revolutionary that a word be made to stand for a character; such substitution forms the backbone of traditionally applied metaphor. What is unique about Robbins’ approach is that it is not primarily the word’s referent which stands for the character. The fact that Salome could be seen to resemble a dandelion, her chaperon an undifferentiated, amorphous sac of cytoplasm, is secondary; the narrator makes clear that the reader should pay attention to the word itself, that is, to the sign.

Robbins does not explain just how or why those words were “coughed” into the restaurant, in terms of the plot; he describes the scene that follows, Salome’s performance, in similarly surreal terms. In fact, this moment of linguistic deconstruction within the narrative serves itself as the plot element that introduces the Dance of the Seven Veils, the Dance of Ultimate Cognition, the dance by viewing which the veils of religion and society are finally stripped away. Robbins translates the dance into literature, as he does the mural Ellen Cherry paints on the wall of the I & I, the mural that convinces Salome to perform the dance, via the wolfmother wallpaper, the falling of each veil preceded by another scrap of language:

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The room where your oldest living ancestor, the monarch amoeba, hold court in the irrigation ditch at the foot of the bed. (455)

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. This is the room where the boys slept inside their blowguns to avoid being bitten by the bats, for whom the girls sewed tiny velvet suits. (458)

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The room swept by a broom made from language [my emphasis]. A room where the dust mice are as luminous as grapes. (459)

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The room where volcanoes filled the ashtrays with their fine cinders, and the keyhole itself was a fumerole. (460)

In the room of the wolfmother wallpaper, a woodpecker flies in through the transom and leaves three farts: one on a hot skillet, one in a bottle, and one between the strings of an autoharp. Room service. (463)

Beneath the floorboards of this room, schoolgirls operate a diamond mine. Every card of the table is the queen of diamonds. And the wallpaper howls at the moon. (464)

This is the room, all right, but the candles have burned down, the lamps are dry, and the blue neon has blown a fuse. The wallpaper might as well be stone. In the blackness there can be heard a low, perpetual rattling and a click, click, click, click. It is Jezebel’s bones. Or else the rolling of dice. (467)

Language, for Robbins, and perhaps art in general, is the means by which social conventions can be penetrated, perceptions of reality altered. In the last wolfmother passage, heralding the falling of the seventh veil and the end of the dance, the imagery has calmed down almost to the point of straight literalism: the seventh veil reveals the message that “everyone’s got to figure it out for themselves” (467); the rolling of dice stands for the random nature of individuality. When that truth is made clear, the dance, and likewise, Robbinsian language, will no longer be necessary. In the meantime, however, Robbins continues to preach: his approach to language is only a part — albeit the most important part — of his broader philosophy, of his style. He hopes that by helping his audience in forging new linguistic connections, he can enable them to realize new connections regarding society as well, and thus to reassess the way they conduct their lives in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

III. The Many-Bellied Beast: Society

Once there was a country called Fiction, bordered on one side by the mountains of Philosophy and on the other by a great bog called History. The people of Fiction had a great gift, the gift of telling stories which could amuse men. As long as they had no contact with the peoples of the neighboring territories, they were perfectly satisfied with their gift and wanted nothing. But progress, and improved communications, brought them into contact with the strange peoples who lived on their borders and beyond. These people were not storytellers like the Fiction people, but they had something called Ideas. And when the Fiction people learned about Ideas they yearned for them terribly and wanted to use them to give their stories more dignity. A story without Ideas, they came to think, was fit only for children. So the Fiction people agreed that they would begin trading with their neighbors to get some Ideas. –Robert Scholes[54]

It would be tempting, but ultimately insufficient, to look at Robbins in terms of a writer who is at heart a storyteller but who feels internally or externally pressured to imbue his stories with ontological and social critical significance; indeed, in an uncomplicated diametrical opposition, his novels could be considered to have style — limited in this traditional sense to linguistic technique — and an essentially distinct content, in the form of Historical and Philosophical Ideas. A number of critics have set up such a dichotomy to hedge their evaluations of Robbins’ work; for example, after three columns of somewhat bewildered praise for Roadside, Reed Whittemore warns, “Robbins is happy and assured when he is concocting further furbelows to his wild narrative, his story line, as he is not when he is trying to endow the story with theology and significance.”[55] Relative success and failure of Robbins’ “Ideas” in a given novel, however, does not imply that the “Ideas” may be conveniently disregarded in pursuit of a purely linguistic analysis.[56] Robbins’ philosophical inquiries — encompassing, among other things, politics, religion, and the nature of subjectivity — help clarify and justify his use of language; and their presenta­tion constitutes the second part of his stylistic project, here under consideration.[57]

In his interview with Balzar, Robbins comes as close as he ever does to summarizing his opinions on the ultimate “meaning” of life:

I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle — even though it cannot be solved — is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.[58]

This grand claim represents a spiritual ideal for Robbins, one on which he would like to rest his philosophy, but in reality his writings generally present a considerably narrower focus. Rather than contemplate Life in its grand, universal terms, he considers life in America in the late twentieth century, and devotes most of his mental effort to the problems facing American society and culture, and the directions in which they ought to be proceeding. Which is not to say he is a political writer; indeed, he comments in a 1980 self-interview, “...our primary problems aren’t political, they’re philosophical. Political solutions are at best secondary and temporary. They’re segments of a vicious circle. If we would solve our philosophical problems ... then the political problems would take care of themselves.”[59] Robbins is rather vague on just what the “philosophical” problems are, although he numbers greed among them; from the foci of his novels, however, they would seem to include religion and spirituality, or their cheapening under the corrupting influences of politics; gender relations, at a level, again, transcending the political; views of mortality and afterlife; and, most importantly, individual freedom and responsibility, themes which underscore all the others.

Robbins has claimed in a number of interviews that Roadside arose from an improvised plot he related to an editor from Doubleday — who had expected plans for a book of art criticism — about the people who find the body of Christ hidden in the Vatican.[60] It is apparent from the beginning of the novel that he is well aware of the implications for Christianity of such a disproof of the Resurrection: the narrator muses on “the agents of crisis who dictate the drafting of this report... the spiraling zeitgeist that underscores its urgency... the worldwide moral structure that may hang in the balance” (3). Despite the light tone of the book, Robbins took his subject very seriously in writing it. As with all his succeeding novels, he did considerable research; Ross notes he “read 17 books about Jesus and recalls that he became a ‘walking encyclopedia’ on early Christianity.”[61]

He sums up his conclusions in an epitaph written into the “report” by the narrator: “Jesus the mysterious powerhouse of the spirit, who having been betrayed once by a kiss and then by a religion, seemed destined to suffer less from his pagan opposites than from those kindred forces of righteousness who claimed to love him best” (314).[62] Modern Christianity he rejects as a distortion designed to keep people complacent, like “capitalism, Communism,... and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities” (28). Marx, after a stint in a professional think tank, concludes that “The Christian faith is dead. Dead. Expired. Kaput...” (161) — a prediction backed up by Plucky Purcell’s firsthand observations in Rome — and suggests that we are in the process of moving toward a new, undefined religion. In the meantime, Robbins crafts an elaborate, diabolical conspiracy between the Vatican, the FBI, the CIA, and the fictional Felicitate Order, a society of monks who double as spies and hitmen for the Catholic Church, all aimed at preserving the Church’s political and economic interests.

Robbins would not likely have been at home among early Christians either, however. Late in Roadside, he sets up a conversation between Jesus and Tarzan, the latter a figure Robbins recalls from childhood,[63] who in this scene stands for Pan, “represent[ing] the union between nature and culture, between spirit and flesh” (301)[64] as the figurehead of a nostalgic, utopian paganism. Tarzan expounds,

In the old days, folks were more concrete. I mean they didn’t have much truck with abstractions and spiritualism. They knew that when a body decomposed it made the crops grow.... From death came more life. We loved the earth because of the joy and good times and peace of mind to be had in loving it. We didn’t have to be ‘saved’ from it. We never plotted escapes to Heaven.
... we naturally enough based our religion on the transformations of nature.
... Your scroll there, your book of Genesis, says that in the beginning was the Word. The simplest savage could see that in the beginning was the orgasm.
...in the old days the female archetype was the central religious figure. Man had the power of creation, but it was in women that we observed the unfolding of the life cycle....
...your coming represented the triumph of God the Father over God the Mother, the victory of the Judaic God of spirit over the old God in flesh. Your birth-cry signaled the end of paganism, and the final separation of man from nature. From now on, culture will dominate nature, the phallus will dominate the womb, permanence will dominate change, and the fear of death will dominate everything.” (302-5)

These thoughts represent a fairly crude theology, based on a simplistic gender-based dichotomy and a presumption of some peaceful past time of nature worship universal at least in the Western world. The basics of this structure do not change over the course of the later writing, but as Robbins develops, he refines his theories and combines them with his individualist position.

He supports his division of Jesus from Christianity in part by emphasizing the Eastern origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which he feels make that tradition an inappropriate one for the West. After the discovery of the Corpse, Roadside’s narrator muses on the life of Jesus,

Approximately two thousand years ago, a pellet of wisdom dropped into the fetid, heavy, squirming, gasping, bloody, bug-eyed, breast-beating, anguished, wrathful, greasy and inflamed world of Jewish-Oriental culture as a pearl might drop into a pail of sweat...
His name was Yeshua ben Miriam, but history came to know him as Christ or Jesus...
His strength of character was incomparable, yet he was not the least bit original in his thought. In fact, he had only one real insight during his life (and even that one was commonplace in India and Tibet). When he came to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, he lit up like a Christmas tree and illuminated Western civilization for twenty centuries...
A prophet in the Jewish tradition, Jesus had little truck with Gentiles. (”I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:24) ... he would have been appalled by the suggestion of a Gentile religion being founded in his name. He never intended to sponsor a church, let alone an Inquisition.

Jesus: Hey, Dad
God: Yes, son?
Jesus: Western civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?
God: Certainly not, boy. And put it down this minute. You don’t know where it’s been. (297-8)

Robbins refines these ideas in Cowgirls; while that novel is concerned less with religion per se than with individualism and secular culture, he returns somewhat more analytically to the fundamental division between East and West, and the latter’s lost pagan heritage. The Chink, a deliberately misnomered refugee from the Japanese internment camps of World War II who, after a long stay with the Clock People, a group of unassimilated Native Americans waiting for a natural apocalypse, settled as a hermit in the Badlands of the Dakotas, explains to Sissy, native of South Richmond, VA,

Eastern spiritual currency is simply not negotiable in your Western culture. It would be like sending dollar bills to the pygmies.... The best use the pygmies could make of dollar bills would be to light fired with them. Throughout the Western world, I see people huddled around little fires, warming themselves with Buddhism and Taoism and Hinduism and Zen. And that’s the most they can ever do with those philosophies.... To turn to Oriental religious philosophies may temporarily illuminate experience for them, but ultimately it’s futile, because ... they’re lying about their heritage....
Christianity ... is an Eastern religion. There are some wondrous truths in its teachings, as there are in Buddhism and Hinduism, truths that are universal.... But Christianity came out of the East, its origins highly suspect, its dogma already grossly perverted by the time it set foot in the West. Do you think there was no supreme deity in the West prior to that Eastern alien Jehovah? There was. From earliest Neolithic days, the peoples of Britain and Europe — the Anglos and Saxons and Latins — had venerated a deity. The Horned One. The Old God. A bawdy goat-man who provided rich harvests and bouncy babies.... the lead­ers of the Christian conquest gave to Lucifer the physical traits — and some of the per­sonality — of the Old God. They cunningly turned your Old God into the Devil. (230-2)

This Old God is Pan again. Robbins’ claim for his universal veneration seems at best a stretch: he completely ignores the rest of the Greco-Roman pantheon, as well as the other mythologies of the myriad cultures which peopled early Europe. The significant dev­elopment from Tarzan’s speeches in Roadside, however, is that while Robbins still calls Old World paganism, even in an interview, “our true religious heritage,”[65] he now acknowledges that it is not in itself a valid, modern answer to Christianity. The Chink continues,

Technology shapes psyches as well as environments, and maybe the peoples of the West are too sophisticated, too permanently alienated from Nature to make extensive use of their pagan heritage. However, links can be established.... To make contact with your past, to re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development, is not the same as a romantic, sentimental retreat into simpler, rustic lifestyles. To attempt to be a backwoods homesteader in an electronic technology may be as misguided as attempting to be Hindu when one is Anglo-Saxon.... If nothing else, to discover where you’ve been may enable you to guess at where you’re going. (234)

Robbins says as much in his interview with Rogers: “I don’t believe in going back--I think that retreat into the past is both sentimental and dangerous. But I think we left something back there--the thread of identity, perhaps--which we might go back and pick up again.”[66]

The thread to which Robbins returns one more time is Pan, who finally makes an appearance of his own, as an important character in Jitterbug. In that book, however, Robbins emphasizes his worship as a religion from the past, an admirable one, to be sure, preferable in a number of ways to Christianity, but finally not useful in itself as the future of a post-Christian culture. No sooner has Pan made his appearance than he informs Alobar, the twice-deposed king whose thousand-year mission is escaping mortality, “I, too, am running from death.... Gods can die. We live only so long as people believe in us” (47). One of his nymphs, Lalo, later elaborates,

Thou mightst even say that men create their gods, as much as gods create men.... Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.[67]
If thou didst create gods, it was because thou needst them.... Now [about the 12th century CE], many art the men who think they no longer needeth Pan. They have created new gods, this Jesus Christ and his alleged papa, and let me assurest thee that Christ and his father, as important as they may be, are no substitutes for Pan. The need for Pan is still great in humanity, and thou ignoreth it at thy peril. (149)

Alobar meets Pan initially around the 10th century, when he has been dealt serious blows by Aristotle and Jesus; when the setting moves on to the 17th century and Descartes, he has become invisible, and ends up a ghost in the New World.

In one of the last sections of the book, Wiggs Dannyboy, the Irish anthropologist and longevitist, proposes his theory of human development, based on the evolution of the brain (in the description of which he remains essentially faithful to scientific fact), in which mankind has passed through a reptilian stage, symbolized by dragons, and a mammalian stage, personified in Pan, and is in the process of entering a floral stage, which has not yet been characterized. For Robbins, Beowulf and the other medieval dragonslayers are “aspects of our own unconscious minds... [dispatched] with their symbolic swords and lances to slay reptile consciousness” (325). Jesus (and Buddha in the East) served the same function with respect to mammalian consciousness, but by means of “message and example” rather than “sword and bow.” Dannyboy concludes,

It should be emphasized that neither Christ nor Buddha harbored the slightest antipathy toward Pan. They were merely fulfilling their mytho-evolutionary roles.
Christ and Buddha came into our psyches not to deliver us from evil but to deliver us from mammal consciousness....
Just as the grand old dragon of our reptilian past had to be pierced by the Hero’s sword to make way for Pan and his randy minions, so Pan himself has had to be rendered weak and ineffectual, has had to be shoved into the background of our ongoing psychic progression. (325-6)

This is clearly a long way from Jesus-meets-Tarzan in terms of refinement and depth of investigation into the roles religion has played in human culture, but the message is essentially consistent with the previous novels. What has changed is that Jesus and Pan are no longer presented as thesis and antithesis in an zero-sum-gain dialectic, but rather as equal contributors to human evolution.[68]

Therefore, it seems at first strange to find Robbins reverting in Skinny Legs to a view of religion as a diametrical struggle between irreconcilable paradigms — boiling down here to God (Yahweh) versus Goddess (Astarte) — reminiscent of the one suggested in Roadside. Starting with an examination of Jezebel, to whom the protagonist’s evangelist uncle and father compare her, he spends a good part of the book treating his audience to a crash course in revisionist Middle Eastern religious history; his arguments in this case, unfortunately, seem to have less basis than usual in reality.

As already noted with regard to Roadside, Robbins tends to do meticulous research before beginning a novel. Before writing Woodpecker, he did actually meditate on a Camel pack for days, the results of which be published in Esquire in July 1980; a book he evidently read about packaging design shows up in the novel in Leigh-Cheri’s hands (178). Randy Sue Coburn notes that in preparation for Jitterbug, Robbins toured Greek mythological sites with Robert Bly, including a cave where Pan was worshipped, and did a similar tour in Central America with the mythologist Joseph Campbell.[69] Also for Jitterbug, he did an extensive investigation into all aspects of the perfume industry.[70] In the case of Skinny Legs, however, he does not even hint at his sources; moreover, his assertion, early in the novel, that “the god referred to by the Bible as Baal had divine status primarily because he was husband to Astarte,” (49) which is critical to much of follows, is based entirely on what amounts to an incomplete etymological analysis. As Robbins points, out, baalwas an ancient Semitic word for “lord” or “husband”; it has retained its meaning in modern Hebrew (lib). The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, which is based on Biblical Hebrew, notes that “husband” is actually a secondary meaning to “lord, possessor, owner,” and is, in fact, not used in its noun to mean “husband” anywhere in the bible.[71] Astarte comes from the root asat (twi), meaning “something wrought, artificial,” or “thought, opinion.”[72] The Encyclopedia of Religionpoints out that both ba’alim (”‘baals’ or ‘lords’”) and ‘ashterot (”‘astartes’”) were also words used to denote foreign gods and goddesses in general.[73] The Encyclopedia notes further that Baal was himself a fertility and weather god among the Canaanites,[74] and that “It is commonplace in the literature to note that Astarte was a goddess of love and fertility, but aside from associations with Ishtar and Aphrodite, this role is not clear from the ancient sources. Rather, her forte may have been animal husbandry….”[75] This is an amusing irony given that Robbins often holds the domestication of animals to be the first moment of mankind’s decline from natural matriarchy into artificial, exploitative patriarchy.

Robbins does not, at any rate, mean to set up Astarte in opposition to Baal; indeed, having made his linguistic leap, he substitutes the former for the latter at every appearance in the Bible. He reads Astarte as an aspect of “the Goddess, the Great Mother,...” etc., equivalent to Kali in India, Ostara in Saxony, Demeter and Aphrodite together in Greece, Isis in Egypt, and Freya in Scandanavia: “She was virgin, bride, mother, prostitute, witch, and hanging judge, all swirled into one” (50). There were in truth connections among Astarte, Isis, and Aphrodite, but only well after the era with which Robbins is concerned.[76] The others seem considerably less likely. Robbins, in truth, gives no serious consideration to the intricacies of ancient Middle Eastern mythology, let alone of the others with which he assumes it compatible; his reading amounts only to a convenient framework for a revival of his nostalgic Roadside stance: peaceful, nature-based Goddess versus warlike, “civilizing” Yahweh/monotheist tradition.

Later in the book, after a discussion of the current Jewish-Islamic situation in Jerusalem, Robbins makes his more direct assault on the latter tradition:

religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide....
We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.
Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlightenment and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore... kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together they drained the shady ponds [his earlier metaphor for “early religions”] and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.”...
Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics”...
Religion is nothing but institutional mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence.[77]
...not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul. (189-90)

Here, as elsewhere, Robbins makes essentially no effort to distinguish among the components of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition[78]; he discusses them all in essentially the same terms as he does Catholicism in Roadside, which is to say as a foil for the Goddess religion. He also seems to ignore the fact that the early Middle Eastern religions were actually highly structured, with significant economic and political privileges for the priests and priestesses.[79] The fact is, neither the “Old Religion” Robbins glorifies, nor the newer tradition he vilifies exist or ever existed as he presents them. Moreover, given the research that he surely did do for the novel, it seems unlikely that he means his theological rantings to be accepted impetuously.

Skinny Legs is divided into seven chapters, styled “veils”: at the conclusion of each of the first six, Robbins introduces a theme which has to some extent informed the chapter, but which, more importantly, constitutes one of seven veils in the Dance of Ultimate Cognition, which the modern-day Salome dances, not for Herod, but for the patrons of the I & I at the climax of the novel. He presents each conclusion — regarding “repression of the Goddess” (52); mankind’s arrogance at holding itself above plants, animals, and inanimate objects (88); allowance of political expediencies (133); the evils of organized religion (188-90; discussed above); the illusory influence of money (261); and emphasis on afterlife — directly as narrator, and in language which finds him at his least metaphoric and most didactic.

Robbins doubtless feels there is some truth in each of these monologues delivered to the reader, but the key to his real message is the seventh veil, which he only defines in the climactic scene, the final segment of Salome’s dance:

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn’t follow you home and park your car. [italics added] (468)

Thus, after Ellen Cherry, the waitress and protagonist on whom Robbins focuses in recording Salome’s effects on her audience, receives six “transmissions” of “information that she hadn’t realized that she possessed... as if they were somebody else’s thoughts, zapped by ray into her brain” (456), the seventh denies the authority of these very transmissions. After 466 pages of preaching, Robbins insists to the reader, in what amounts to another deconstruction of his role as philosophizing narrator:

Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves.
The government wouldn’t take care of it for you... You couldn’t learn it in college, colleges chose largely to ignore it. Churches, conversely, were falling all over themselves to save you the trouble of thinking about it.... Great books, paintings, and music were helpful, in an inspirational way; nature, even more so. Valuable clues were constantly dropping from the lips of philosophers, spiritual masters, gurus, shamans, gypsy circus girls, and wild-talking tramps in the street. But they were clues, only.
...each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal,... unique, direct,... relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely—but it was the bottom line. (467-8)

The narrator never defines, even vaguely, what “it” is, but the best approximation is probably “the meaning of meaning,” Amanda’s amorphous phrase in Roadside for the ultimate goal of mankind’s spiritual quest, that is, the achievement of a completely free, personal reality.[80]

The idea, here spelled out explicitly, that this quest is necessarily a solitary mission, finds its roots in Robbins’ earlier novels. His original anti-guru figure is Cowgirls‘ the Chink, a deliberately misnamed Japanese immigrant whose problem is that “he looked like the Little Man who had the Big Answers” (163). Having spent much of his adult life among the Clock People, a secret group of apocalyptic, anarchist Native Americans, he has since devoted much of his energy to bluntly discouraging the pilgrims who flock to his home on Siwash Ridge in search of enlightenment. He expounds to Sissy at some length on the perils of blindly following any leader, however apparently enlightened, for spiritual guidance:

In order to tolerate experience, a disciple embraces a master. This sort of reaction is understandable, but it’s neither very courageous nor very liberating....
And if your master truly loved you, he would tell you that....
You think I’m behaving like a cold-hearted ogre because I turn people away. Quite the contrary. I’m merely setting my pilgrims free before they become my disciples. That’s the best I can do.
...Everybody has got to figure out experience for himself.... I realize that most people require externalized, objective symbols to hang on to. That’s too bad. Because what they are looking for, whether they know it or not, is internalized and subjective. There are no group solutions! Each individual must work it out for himself....
Be your own master!
Be your own Jesus!...
Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself.
Be your own valentine! Free the heart! (227)

Thus in Jitterbug, Alobar has lengthy relationships with a Bohemian shaman, a Buddhist monk in Tibet, and even with Pan, a corporeal god, but never looks to any of them to provide him with a spiritual outline with which to define his life.[81] Indeed, his search for answers to the secrets of immortality leads him to pursue the Bandaloop doctors, whose presumed wisdom he pursues throughout his life, achieving eventual success only indirectly, and essentially without outside assistance. This individualism is absolutely essential to Robbins: it lies at the heart of the style — linguistic and philosophical — in which he crafts his characters, and of the approach he intents his audience to take in their cultivation of personal reality.

Robbins’ conception of individualism embraces both freedom and responsibility; it requires both a vivid imagination and a robust sense of an independent self. The Chink places a premium on “the freedom to play freely in the universe” (Cowgirls 227); this play is based on his construction of a personal reality. Freedom implies responsibility, however; refusing to act on one’s freedom, to abandon choice in favor of any “group solution,” no matter how well-intended, is to commit the only offense which can in Robbins’ ethos be considered immoral. Thus, after her third peyote vision, Dolores Del Ruby, previously the most radical and militant of the feminist ranchers in Cowgirls, announces,

The enemy of women is not men.
No, and the enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men....
The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.
There are authoritative blacks with dull minds, and they are the enemy. The leaders of capitalism and communism are the same people, and they are the enemy. There are dull-minded women who try to repress the human spirit, and they are the enemy just as much as the dull-minded men.
The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized. (342)[82]

Likewise, Bernard Wrangle, the self-proclaimed outlaw of Woodpecker whose discourse on outlawry takes individualism to its ultimately anarchist extreme, exhorts his girlfriend, Princess Leigh-Cheri — and through him Robbins his readers — to consider:

There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women, it’s not straights who limit gays, it’s not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. (117)[83]

What ultimately brings Robbins to choose the Camel pack for the novel’s central image is the inscription of the packaging; as Bernard explains, “CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance” (253).[84]

Robbins’ later novels, beginning with Jitterbug, retain a similar moral agenda with respect to individualism, but express it in language which is less formulaic, in a tone which is less sermonizing, than the first three books. This language underlies Robbins’ thoughts on individuality in Jitterbug; like his reflections on religion: Alobar expresses sentiments similar to Dolores’ or Bernard’s, but his diction is more positive and, perhaps, more poetic:

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life’s bittersweet route. (197)

Alobar, however, is one of Robbins’ more fallible heroes; while his thoughts roughly parallel Robbins’, they are offset by a caveat, voiced somewhat anachronistically, by Lalo, “…it wilt be this new idea of individuality that leadeth many future men astray, causing them to feel superior to Pan, and thus to the land, which they wilt set upon to rape and spoil” (150).[85]

Despite his frontal assaults against virtually all organized political and religious structures, Robbins has generated the most controversy by his portrayal of sex and gender, topics which, some­what ironically, pervade his novels but are rarely in their own rights the subjects of his phil­osophical discourse. The latter plays a particularly pivotal role in Cowgirls, the novel which is at the center of the controversy. Ross writes of it, “All the men in “Cowgirls” are jerks.”[86]While this is not strictly true — Dr. Dreyfus, the world’s first cubist plastic surgeon, earns the nar­rator’s approval, as does, of course, Dr. Robbins; and the Chink is arguably the novel’s spi­ritual center — there is certainly for the most part a heavy-handed favoring of the female charac­ters.[87] Aside from Ms. Adrian, a minor character, the only character presented in an unflat­ter­ing light is Dolores, chastised for her militant political mindset. She is presented as a force of mys­tery, however, and the reptiles — snakes and alligators — with whom she is assoc­iated, do not sug­gest evil or malice, but rather “a peculiar madness that men do not understand” (341). More­over, as noted above, she achieves enlightenment at the end. The men include Julian, Sissy’s husband, an asthmatic, assimilated Mohawk Indian who ends up an alcoholic outcast doing wat­er­color advertisements for the German company which produced Thalidomide; and the Coun­tess, the transsexual manufacturer of femin­ine deodorants and owner of the ranch, who, having suf­fered permanent brain damage under the blows of Sissy’s thumbs, spends the rest of his days un­der the care of Dr. Robbins; and the uniformly small-minded representatives of the govern­ment. Compared with these, whatever her ideological biases, Dolores is certainly another heroine.[88]

A number of reviewers — mostly male — complain about Robbins’ portrayal of women. Jeremy Treglown, for example, derides the cowgirls’-ranch setting as “flagrantly porno­graphic,” and complains that the book is,

what Sterne might have produced if he had been commissioned to revamp The Lord of the Rings with an eye to the higher porn market. This isn’t intended as a compliment.
For someone writing on the side of feminism Robbins has an uncanny knack for male chauvinist trash.... When I was last in Washington State, feminists I met were proud of the fact that they had a woman Governor. The snappy answer to that one is: ‘Yes, but you’ve got Tom Robbins too.’[89]

Whatever valid criticisms may be made with regard to Robbins’ women, particularly those in the early novels, Treglown’s is not among them, nor is Karbo’s equally unfounded description of Robbins’ writing as “cheerful misogyny.”[90]

Robbins is, in fact, the farthest thing from a misogynist, and most charges of his chauv­inism lack meaningful support. He tells Rogers, who calls him a “connoisseur of the female, in the nicest sense,” “I’m much closer to women than to men. It’s easier to be playful with women...” In fact, although he now has a close relationship with his only child, Fleetwood, he claims to have hoped very much for a girl, to the point of crying on learning his baby was male.[91]Watching him make a public appearance at a local bar, Greg Mitchell observes,

Women are buzzing around Robbins, as if drawn by a secret compatible scent... for the most part, this is not cult-star groupiedom but genuine simpatico. In contrast, Robbins seems cut off from the men; sociable enough to cover obligations but anxious to meet more women or hide out in his hollow tree, which ever comes first.

Robbins corroborates,

My closest friends are mostly women. Quite young in life I found that I could not be my real self in the company of males. Women have societal license to be sensitive; males haven’t. Although it’s changing, women will always be one step ahead of us on the road to the beyond...[92]

This is far from some sort of proto-politically correct lip service; Robbins’ glorification of the “feminine sensibility” runs throughout his books. As noted above, his Old Religion of idealized paganism, whether under a generalized Goddess or a universal Horned One (Pan, whom he also associates with “female values” [Jitterbug, 50]), finds is base in a benevolent matriarchy, which as a result of its “feminine” character is free of the problems of modern civilization. His advocacy of lunar consciousness over solar in Woodpecker and of nature over civilization in his first three novels is likewise constructed in terms of revisionist gendered terms which are predictable to the point of cliché.[93]

Robbins is careful not to conflate this feminist sensibility with any feminist movement; he considers this latter a political group solution as inappropriate as any other. This position has earned him the label of sexist from the Left since the 1970s, and in the summer of 1977, he wrote a lengthy article examining these accusations.[94] He begins in a familiar anti-political vein, “Politics has tainted sports: consider the last two Olympic Games. And now politics is zeroing in on sex.” He describes emceeing a benefit for a Seattle anti-nuclear coalition, over the course of which he made a few jokes along the lines of “I wish you lots of nookie and no nukes,” which he accurately describes as “Hardly a profound play on words, yet, lacking gender, impossible to be sexist.” After the show, he was accosted by a member of the coalition, “masculine, sincere and self-righteous; he was striving to be even in tone but exhaling bad vibes like a herpetological halitosis,” who said that he and “many others” were offended by Robbins’ sexism.[95]

Robbins terms him and these “others” “androids,”

Confused about what is sexual and what is sexist. Confused about what is the sweet heat of existence and what is dull and rigid dogma....
Hip yet straight, committed yet dispassionate, young yet old,... identified by the complete absence of playfulness with which they approach everything, including play... the androids have brought to feminism the same sour uprightness that they inflict of every issue.[96]

The “android” in Cowgirls, throughout most of the text, is Dolores, who suggests that “if women have any hopes of ceasing to be enslaved by men they’ve got to control and escape their biological roles, they’ve got to free themselves from motherhood” (177), and advocates a society of test tube babies and professional nurseries. Woodpecker features the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, a caricatured environmental colloquium which degenerates into another platform for radical feminists. They extend Dolores’ position, insisting “women would not begin to realize their personal or societal potential until artificial insemination and controlled out-of-body gestation became routine practice around the globe” (88). Joined by a number of men, they sing rousing choruses of “All Men are Rapists,” and otherwise exhibit what the narrator decries as

Tunnel vision... caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and com­pres­sors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.
That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister clichés of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to “protect the revolution.”…
Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is killed on the road. (86)[97]

Some, but not all, of the other cowgirls share Dolores’ views; others, led by Debbie, represent the opposite end of the feminist spectrum. Debbie remarks on one of Dolores’ rantings against the “paternalistic system,” suggesting that “it reeked of the same hostile sexism that the pardners [cowgirls] disliked in men” (309). Her position is that “it is up to women to show themselves better than men, to love men, set good examples for them and guide them tenderly toward the New Age.” Even the conciliatory Bonanza Jellybean (Jelly), however, says of her, “She’s a real dreamer, that Debbie-dear” (151). There are times, in fact, that “dreamer” may be a polite euphemism for “flake”; in what can only be explained as a flashback from her days in the League of the Acid Atom Avatar, she explains her distaste for tobacco:

When things really get too bad on the planet Earth..., then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls among us; but they can’t take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension. (199)

Amanda has similar moments in Roadside: are the characters were trying to decide what to do with their Corpse, she tells a sweet, utterly irrelevant story about butterflies, after which “she was probably daydreaming of clouds” (280). For Robbins this sense of play, this refusal to take seriously even the gravest issues, is a positive character trait; his problem with Debbie — to be sure, she earns the admiration of the narrator — is that in her dreams of women transforming men, she once again constructs her goals around the context of a group solution, unacceptable to Robbins, no matter how “lofty.”

Dolores and Debbie could be seen as representative of the two historical camps of the feminist movement: the latter standing for a New Age transformative optimism, echoing the first generation of New Women of the late 19th century, those who believed themselves the representatives of Virtue, Justice, and Progress; and the latter for militant separatism, recalling the second generation, many of them expatriates, who sought a separate sphere for feminine self-development.[98] Between these two lie Jelly and Sissy, Robbins’ ideal “spiritual feminists,” who seek, primarily, freedom of individual opportunity, regardless of gender. Their view on patriarchal society is encapsulated by the Chink’s exhortation on managing authority: it “is to be ridiculed, outwitted, and avoided. And it’s fairly easy to do all three” (351). Robbins further explains his idea of feminism as a spiritual movement in “Feminismo”; the analogy he draws between feminists and feminism recalls the one he makes between Christians and Christ in Roadside; it also anticipates what later becomes the fourth veil of religion in Skinny Legs:

In all fairness, the feminist movement was already up to its knees in sour owl droppings before the androids came aboard. A major cause was politics. What had begun as a liberation movement — which is to say, a spiritual movement, since true freedom can only come from within — swiftly lost ecstatic voltage when it was taken over by secular forces... Organized politics... corrupted it, compromised it, replaced white magic with black magic.

Throughout the rest of the article, Robbins essentially extracts into a rare non-fiction effort all of the musings on gender which occupied him in Cowgirls, published two years earlier:

But what happened to its innate sexuality? Several things. One is that as it devolved into a political movement, feminism started attracting damaged goods: unfortunate women whose psyches had been cracked by traumatic encounters with fathers, brother, or boy playmates — people who, lacking the inner resources to mend themselves, degenerated into angry avengers....
Another thing is that the aggressive, assertive, competitive, egoistic, and generally insensitive manner in which most men approach sex has so disappointed and frightened women that many of them have abandoned romance.... instead of trying to make men better, they have made themselves worse....
Androids discuss sex fairly frequently... in the most cold, clinical terms, without embarrassment and without the slightest respect for the mystery....
some might object that while it could be healthy for women to learn to laugh at themselves, I, as a man, have no right to join in the mirth. Bullshit! Or should I say cowshit? Cattleshit?[99] Each and every one of us has a stake in feminism and therefore has a right to administer to it with our laughter—and our tears. Feminism is for men just as much as it is for women.[100] And while it’s time to stop being intimidated by the bully-girls, we mustn’t throw out the feminism with the feminismo....
Between men and women there are important similarities. There are also important differences. Finally, the differences are the more significant, for it is the balance of opposites, the yin yang polarity that holds the universe together. It is these differences, in tension, that make life possible....
In 1978, the romantic is the outlaw. Well, this is one Bozo who’s honored to be on the side of romanticism.[101] I popped out of the womb by candlelight and when I utter my last gasp it will be scented with champagne....
So long as they remain faithful to the Mysterious Mother, the wild heart, and the moon, romantics needn’t give a warm squirt of Perrier water what they are called.[102]

Robbins’ self-proclaimed romanticism is actually a fundamentally conservative one. For all his characters’ sexual experimentation — including a good deal of lesbianism — and spiritual liberation, he is, as he tells Ross, basically a monogamist; he holds up Bonnie and Clyde among his role-models: “I believe in one man, one woman, together, taking risks, living on the edge.”[103] The denouement of Cowgirls has the formerly all-female ranch run by two of the cowgirls and their respective boyfriends; the once-militant Dolores concludes that “A woman without her opposite, or a man without his, can exist but cannot live. Existence may be beautiful, but never whole” (363). Sissy, it is suggested, ends up with Dr. Robbins, the narrator, just as Marx is Amanda’s last partner in Roadside.[104] This comes as something of a surprise from a book which features Jelly, a supposed moderator between Dolores and Debbie, musing, “I guess men need wives, all right. Just as women think that they need husbands” (146).

Mitchell notes that a number of lesbians considered the ending of the novel to be a copout, but, rather than criticize Robbins, assumed it was added at the publisher’s insistence.[105] A closer inspection reveals, however, that experimentation notwithstanding, there is evidence throughout Cowgirls that Robbins does not in fact accept lesbianism as a sexual orientation per se, devoid of socio-political significance. Dr. Robbins-as-psychiatrist informs his boss, “I’m more inclined to believe that it’s a cultural phenomenon, a healthy rejection of the paternalistic power structure...” (243); likewise, after her first encounter with Sissy, Jelly tells her, “...at least half the cowgirls on the ranch have been in each other’s pants by now. There’s not a queer among ’em, either. It’s just a nice, natural thing to do” (158). Robbins explains this ultimate rejection of bona fide lesbianism in his interview with Mitchell:

I had a girlfriend who was bisexual and I was there—I watched women make love; I’ve been in bed with women making love. So I did field work.... I suppose that, truthfully, I was titillated until I understood it on a deeper level. But after a great deal of introspection, I just came to the conclusion that while it’s not wrong, on any level, homosexuality is a diversion. For a lot of women, it may be, at this point, a necessary diversion, but mother consciousness means nothing without father consciousness.[106]

Robbins never makes clear on what grounds he rejects the fact of sexual orientation — whether a result of nature or nurture is irrelevant — that runs deeper than his cowgirls’ “nice, natural thing.” His views on the subject have changed over time, however: in Jitterbug, Priscilla’s best friend and fellow waitress is Ricki, a genuine and self-secure lesbian whose sexual advances at Priscilla, and Priscilla’s uncertain response, are the source of real tension between the two throughout the book.[107]

Despite Cowgirls’ evaluation of lesbianism, however, the feminist response to the novel, as Balzar points out, was for the most part an enthusiastically positive one. A number of women assumed Robbins was actually a woman writing under an assumed name, the novel is taught in a number of women’s studies courses at the University of Washington, and Robbins is (or at least was as of 1990) the only male author represented in the Feminist Book Store in Minneapolis.[108]Even in 1994, Maya Angelou introduced Robbins on the City Arts radio broadcast, explicitly describing Cowgirls as “a feminist novel.”[109]

All this is not meant to suggest that Robbins is absolutely innocent of sexism or gender stereotyping; it could well be argued that he loves women too much, that because of his inability to see them in the same critical light under which he holds men, he tends to mold them — particularly the protagonists — to an idealized, somewhat generalized image: physically somewhat waifish, with a tendency toward blue eyes; white, and generally Southern; artistic or creative in some field; independent yet vulnerable; spiritually strong but un- or misdirected.[110] The cowgirls, for example, are mostly in their ’teens or early twenties, and are universally described throughout the book as adorable: even as she is dying, the narrator calls Jelly “the cutest cowgirl in the world” (345), and, asleep in the bunkhouse, the cowgirls “made sleepy little noises, like the love cries of angel food cakes” (249). In his endorsing review of the novel, William Cloonan writes,

An important moment in the novel occurs when the cowgirls switch their herd from cows to goats. In pastoral literature this change usually heralds a transition from fantasy to reality. Robbins appears to be waggishly playing with this tradition because, when goat replace cows, right-on feminism suddenly encounters the return of the repressed. The girls’ language, hitherto pure, tough cowpoke lingo, begins to resemble dialogues from a Beachboy movie. About the same old goat, Kym sighs, “It’s cute... way cuter than a cow, “and Gloria announces, “it is so loving.”...
It would be a mistake to assume that in Cowgirls Robbins is seriously attacking Women’s Liberation or any other ideological commitment. Rather, he is exploiting the humor implicit in any militancy and thereby suggesting that however important a movement’s goals, no writer can pass up the chance to make fun of a sacred cow.[111]

Despite his irreverence, there is certainly a degree of objectification in Robbins’ description of his women. On reaching maturity, Sissy is introduced in extremely physical terms; Robbins goes so far, after a paragraph, as to give her measurements: “...she stood five-nine in her socks, weighed 125 pounds, and taped 33-24-34” (43). He makes it clear that his other heroines are likewise physically beautiful; in fact, they all share Sissy’s slender build, with the exception of Kudra in Jitterbug, whose more voluptuous body “manifested the Indian ideal of the woman built for physical satisfaction” (98). Objectification should not be mistaken, however, for chauvinism or misogyny. Rather, it seems to be at least part of the cause— and most likely, rounding out an objectionable, not to say vicious, circle, of the effect — of his continuous infatuation with his female characters.[112]

In the majority of the novels, the characters all follow a basic path of character development: a young woman who is unenlightened but intelligent, sexually active but undeveloped meets an (anti-)guru[113] who awakens her physically and spiritually, rapidly earns her love, and leaves her fulfilled, independent, and in what seems to be a perpetual state of sexual excitement. This model describes Sissy and the Chink in Cowgirls, Leigh-Cheri and Bernard in Woodpecker, Gwen and Larry in Frog Pajamas, and, to a lesser extent, Priscilla and Dannyboy in Jitterbug Perfume. There are minor variations, principally regarding the ultimate fate of these pairs as romantic couples, but the outline is certainly similar enough to be considered formulaic. The fact that this formula always has a woman spiritually and sexually awoken by a man[114] — shades, perhaps of that locus classicus of traditional gender roles, Snow White — illustrates the fact that while he may empathize with his women, Robbins certainly does not identify with them. As he tells Oldenburg, “[The female perspective] allows me to stop outside of myself. It gives me a freshness of perspective. Were my principal character to be male, I couldn’t help but identify.... it’s not a matter of sexual obsession. It’s more personal and private than that.”[115] It could be argued that Robbins’ empathy with the protagonists runs deep, that it is he who is in search of spiritual guidance through his writing. While this may be true, the tone he adopts when philosophizing, even from the narratorial point-of-view, combined with his relationship to his readers (which will be discussed in the next chapter) leave little doubt that he sees himself first and foremost as the masculine (anti-)guru, the dispenser, not the recipient, of wisdom.

Robbins does admit that his first three protagonists are not intended to be credible as full-blooded characters (though, of course, neither are most of their male counterparts):

Amanda in Another Roadside Attraction is an archetype. Sissy Hankshaw in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a mythological figure. I think she also functions on the human level, but all the heroines of the great myths did as well. In Still Life With Woodpecker, the heroine is literally a fairy-tale princess, but in the last three books, they’ve been a little more vulnerable, and I guess more realistic[116];

indeed, Jitterbug’s Priscilla Skinny Legs’ Ellen Cherry are certainly more fully developed, albeit essentially indistinguishable from each other. Both members of the Daughters of the Daily Special — an organization of waitresses, appearing in both books, which raises funds to help its members complete their education or other projects — they are the examples of what could be called Robbins’ “genius waitress” phase. A year after Skinny Legs was published, Robbins composed a one-page “ode to women who serve,” singing the praises “of hidden know­ledge, buried ambition and secret sonnets scribbled on cocktail napkins.... and eyes turned from ancient Greece to ancient grease; of burns and pinches and savvy and spunk.” The gen­ius waitress (”not to be confused with the aspiring-actress waitress... so different from her sister in tempera­ment and I.Q.”) is well-educated in “Sanskrit, ethno­astro­nomy, Icelandic musicology or some­thing equally in demand in the contemporary market place.” Of course “...in the private bedroom she is the blue gourmet. Five stars and counting! Afterward, you can discuss chaos theory or the triple aspects of the mother goddess in universal art forms — while you massage her feet”[117]; here, as it must in any Robbinsian fantasy, sex enters the picture.

Would sex enter the picture in a silk robe, or would it be as nude as a platter of cold cuts? Would sex enter the picture from the left or the right? Would it ring first, or would it just slide in slyly, too quick and slippery to be denied; or, would sex barge in forcibly, red-faced and green-bereted, pushing all other things aside? (Jitterbug, 261)

Sex enters the picture on the third page of Roadside. Amanda encounters a band of gypsies and asks them,

“Will you not reveal to me something of the nature of my true being?”
“What will you do for us in return?” the gypsies asked.
Amanda lowered her long lashes and smiled sweetly. “I will suck you off,” she said.
It was agreed. After she had thoroughly pleased the four men and two girls, the gypsies told Amanda, “You are by nature a very curious woman,” and sent her on her way. (5)

This particular parable is something of a cliché, but it illustrates Amanda’s essentially pragmatic approach to sex. A few pages later, the narrator reports, “‘I believe in birth, copulation and death,’ she answered. ‘.... I was born nineteen years ago. Someday I shall die. Today, I think I’ll cop­ulate.’ And indeed she did” (8). To say that for Amanda sex is merelycopulation would be to underestimate sorely its significance in her life, but in selecting the word “copulation” — as was noted in the last chapter, Robbins does not believe in synonyms; his choice of words is always in­tentional — she unconsciously underscores the essential lack of emotion she attaches to sex. The consummation of her wedding night with Ziller suggests a minimum of passion, and when she goes to bed with Marx and with Purcell, she receives plenty of physical pleasure, but her pur­pose is primarily to relieve them of overwhelming psychological pressure. Roadside’s Tarzan knows that “in the begin­ning was the orgasm” (304), and indeed, even in the first novel, orgasm can overcome any mental or spiritual obstacles.

Having discovered that there was a sexual world beyond her asthmatic husband — specifically, having discovered, in the course of a single day, Jelly and the Chink — Sissy muses, “It is important to believe in love.... But is it possible to believe in lust?” (Cowgirls 237). While unlike Amanda she at least acknowledges love, her relationships definitely seem to reflect what approaches a religion of lust, defining her relationships with Julian, Jelly, the Chink, Dolores, and — or so he hopes — Dr. Robbins, in terms of friendship, perhaps of love, certainly of sexual passion. By Woodpecker, Robbins begins to expound on the importance of love as well as lust, and to muse on the spiritual potential of sex as the ultimate “soul-food”:

Yes, one must prepare for a fuck—the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power….[118] Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings use cupfuls.... to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one’s palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition.... there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-month affairs in Paris—but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened... (107-8)

This purity reaches its highest realization in Jitterbug between Alobar and Kudra, unquestionably Robbins’ closest couple in terms of romance and love. Alobar, who could arguably share with Priscilla the title “protagonist,” and Kudra form a genuine sexual and spiritual partnership, beginning at essentially the same point developmentally, and traveling through the centuries constantly learning from each other: he convinces her, a perfumist, of the importance of aroma to sex, she introduces him to the Kama Sutra, and they exchange ideas on religion and immortality. Ellen Cherry and Boomer in Skinny Legs approach a similar relation­ship, but its development is impeded by the fact that they are separated for most of the novel.

Although in Jitterbug Priscilla and Wiggs’ relationship conforms to the guru-disciple developmental formula described above, the book does break new ground in its attitude toward sex in that it revives and emphasizes the idea of redemption through orgasm. Recently fired from her job — interestingly, this results indirectly from the unresolvable sexual tensions between her and Ricki — her apartment vandalized, the perfume bottle on which she was placing her future hopes missing, all it takes is “forty hours of slumber and a spine-shuddering orgasm,” courtesy of a visit from Wiggs, and she is “purring like a Rolls-Royce that has learned it isn’t going to be sold to an Arab, after all” (273). This moment proves to be Priscilla’s turning point, after which the book proceeds to the happiest of possible endings, the various plot-lines tied up as neatly — and improbably — as a Dickensian novel’s.

Robbins develops this theme to its extreme in his most recent book. In Frog Pajamas, sex, first with Larry and later with Belford, becomes for Gwen an absolutely transcendental experience, carrying her from the “worst day of [her] life” into a new independence and self-confidence. After she experiences her first orgasm with Belford, the narrator explains,

In the breathy aftermath of this show-stopping extravaganza, you feel less satisfied than vindicated, less vindicated than liberated....
Any fear you harbored that Larry Diamond had a hold on you, had put you in some psychosexual trance, completely dissipated in the surf of your orgasm... For now,... having shot the wildest imaginable rapids in a raft launched by the barely competent Belford Dunn, you feel liberated from obligation, from dependency, from awe; feel free from Diamond’s potential influence or domination; feel in charge of your own destiny, not a penny less. (347-8)

The tangible circumstances of Gwen’s life have not changed substantially since her weekend began; what has changed is her mental relationship to those circumstances, that is, her style. Hall writes of Cowgirls, “Robbins’ metaphysics work, in part because they’re never far from flesh and comedy. Sex is both philosophy and play. Sweet, inventive, and messy, it blossoms up unexpected­ly in the midst of conversation,”[119] which is to say, it constitutes an essential feature of Robbins­ian style. With a return to Lacan, this element of style may be located within the term, “jouis­sance,” “something always in excess” of the structures which constrain the subject’s percep­tion.[120] The ultimate panacea, then, the physical manifestation of the spiritual energy with which Robbins infuses his novels, the orgasm is the single tool best suited to altering perceptions of reality.

The one relationship Robbins cannot have with his reader, however, is of course a physical one. He therefore describes sex in sensuous detail and fills his novels with sexually charged language; he suggests that an aspiring writer “spend 30 minutes a day looking at dirty pictures. Or thinking about sex. The purpose of this is to get yourself sexually excited, which builds tremendous amounts of energy, and then carry that into your work. Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness.”[121] This displaced sexual energy can thus be put to the process of writing Robbinsian language, or — this is the relevance to the reader — it can aid in the development of Robbinsian perception.

In an attempt to codify the essential association between sex and spirituality, another element of his style, he tells Ross, “I’m searching for the American tantra—the erotic and poetic, magical, exhilarating”[122]; five years later he elaborates to Strelow,

With the exception of Tantric Hinduism, every religious system in the modern world has denied and suppressed sensuality. Yet sensual energy is the most powerful energy we as individuals possess. Tantric saints had the genius and the guts to exploit that energy for spiritual purposes. Food, drink, drugs, music, art, poetry, and especially sex, are used in Tantra in a religious manner. Tantrikas perfect the techniques of sensual pleasure and use the energy released as fuel for their God-bound vehicle, their rocket ride to enlightenment.

He continues, relating tantra to American pop culture:

Saul Bellow has been sneering in public at those writers who, in his words, “have suc­cumbed to pop reality.” I suppose I am one of them. I have not the slightest objection to being linked to “pop reality”...
Pop culture, in somewhat the same way [as Tantric Hinduism], may be exploited for ser­i­ous purposes. Pop reality has great energy, humor, vitality and charm. When it comes to liberating the human spirit, sensitizing experience and enlarging the soul, pop reality has one hell of a lot more literary potential than Bellow’s earnest moralizing, all stuffy and dour.[123]

This statement calls into question the common appellation of Robbins as a writer of the “counterculture,” insofar as “counterculture” generally is taken to be synonymous with the radical youth culture of the 1960s, aligned against what they saw as their parents’ materialism. In reality, however, Robbins defies such easy categorization. His works draw as much from the mainstream popular as from any marginal counter­culture; it is therefore impossible to identify the cultureto which his opposition is implied by “counterculture.” He can be seen, then, maintaining a distinction between culture and social institutions, the former characterized by the “great energy, humor, vitality, and charm” of “pop reality” — these are qualities which apply as well to the spiritual, though not the political, aspects of the counterculture — and the latter by dogmatic structures imposed on the culture.

To invoke culture is to remain essentially within the realm of the linguistic, but the “wee potatoes” of a social agenda necessitate a descent into politics: as the Chink tells Sissy near the end of Cowgirls, “don’t go out trying to sell your beliefs to the System. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself” (352). This scheme is surely an over-simplified one, but it is important to Robbins, because imagining a cultural sphere removed from a societal one allows him, in developing his style as a tool to strip away society’s veils, to draw extensively on culture, both counter- and popular. As discussed above, his metaphors, as well as his philosophy, depend on their context within the fabric of the popular culture, but it is the legacy he gained from the sixties that enables him to make new connections, to assemble the Words and Ideas into the new relationships which ultimately characterize his style.

IV. “Pop” Reality and (Counter?)Culture

...But Renoir’s nudes, in their rosy opulence, are as much of an antiwar statement as Goya’s dismembered bodies. To say ‘yes’ to life is to say ‘no’ to war, evil, atrocity, and it amazes me that intelligent people are unable to figure that out. It is as if joy, happiness, is frivolous. My attitude toward life is playful. I’m a playful person, a playful writer, although my playfulness is deadly serious.

­–Tom Robbins[124]

In his interview with Mitchell, shortly after Cowgirls was published, Robbins restates the end of the Chink’s individualist speech, “I’ve tried in my work to pass along what bits of wisdom I seem to have accumulated on my quest. One of those is: ‘You’ve got to do it yourself. Be your own culture-hero.’”[125] There is an important difference be­tween this statement and the Chink’s original: in replacing “Jesus” with “culture-hero,” Robbins emphasizes his concern for his relationship to the culture or cultures about and for whom he writes. Although these relationships cannot in themselves be considered components of his style, they do underlie and inform it; in reading Robbins and under­stand­ing his development, it is essential to examine the complex bonds which tie him to the reality and mythology of the 1960s, and to his audience, both perceived and real.

Robbins’ first five novels are thoroughly pervaded by his particular memory of the spirit of the sixties. Woodpecker, the first book separated from that decade by more than a decade, is the most gravely stricken with temporal nostalgia: it begins, after the prelude, “In the last quarter of the twentieth century...” (3), a phrase which becomes the central identifier for Robbins’ com­plaints about the Zeitgeist in which the book was written. By Jitterbug, he could treat the popular mythology surrounding the decade with a degree of whimsy: when, beginning his life story, Wiggs tells Priscilla, “I’ll start with the sixties,” she replies, “Fine. You were probably more int­er­est­ing then. I understand everybody was” (245). Three pages later, however, Wiggs concludes,

Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age.... Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc., they were superior to them.... the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential... a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. (248)

It should be noted that unlike most of Robbins’ characters, Wiggs, the “self-styled psychedelic prophet, or ‘electronic shaman’” (Jitterbug 206), is, as Whitmer notes,[126] partly modeled on a real person, Timothy Leary, and therefore does not express opinions quite as close to Robbins’ as do most of his characters. Leary is a friend of Robbins’, but his conception of the sixties was much more based on the idea of a widespread, generational movement, antipathetic to Robbins’ sense of individuality. Still, there coexists in Wiggs a healthy portion of Robbins’ own philosophy as well; despite his collectivist view of the sixties, he concludes, “illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition” (Jitterbug248).

There is no question, however, that the sixties were important years to Robbins, which of course raises the vital question of what exactly Robbins means by “the sixties.” The phrase carries virtually as many meanings in both individual and cultural memories as there are writers who use it; this is not a case of Robbinsian style, in which Robbins wishes the reader to pass the final judgment. His memory of the sixties is a very particular one: he exalts in the spiritual and sexual liberation of that moment in American history, and, characteristically, essentially ignores the concurrent social and political upheavals.

Wiggs’ description nicely summarizes Robbins’ interest in the period. It is useful to examine it in comparison with another attempt at definition, in order to illustrate the vivid contrast between Robbins and those who focus on the decade’s ethos of political activism. In the introduction to their volume entitled The 60s Without Apology, the editors (a Social Text collective) write,

The “60s” is merely the name we give to a disruption of late-capitalist ideological and political hegemony, to a disruption of the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, of the end of history.[127]

While the introduction later mentions the cultural manifestations of the sixties, its Hegelian/Marxist perspective could hardly be farther from Robbins’. Frederic Jameson, in one of the book’s essays, categorizes the “most characteristic expressions of a properly first world 60s” as “countercultural... drugs and rock” and “political... a student new left and a mass antiwar movement.”[128] Although this division is somewhat artificial, and Jameson focuses primarily on the latter in his discussion, his invocation of the term “countercultural” serves as an entry into Robbins’ sense of the sixties, at least insofar as “countercultural” implies “not political.”

Jameson does not define what he means by “countercultural”; the implied meaning presumably refers to the Woodstock-era rebellion against the materialism of the fifties, but as Thomas Whissen points out, “counterculture” suggests a more complex relationship to “mainstream” or “popular” culture than simple rejection. He uses as an example Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, whose readers saw the American culture in which it was published as authoritarian, militaristic, and hero-worshipping: the book

played this perception against a counterculture steeped in the myths of individuality and passive resistance.... Likewise ... Slaughterhouse-Five was anathema to any who had fought the Germans in World War II, but to the generation of the sixties, Americans, too, had been war criminals....
We call such a reaction countercultural because it flies in the face of contemporary cultural practices. In a curious way, however, such a reaction is also reactionary in that it rejects contemporary cultural practices as a violation of the tradition from which they have strayed. The common heritage once shared by all is now ignored by most.[129]

This explanation certainly serves as a model for reading Robbins’ idealization of the West’s abandoned pagan past, as well as his view of the decline of the American government: “There hasn’t been an intellectual in a position of leadership in this country since Thomas Jefferson. Since Andrew Jackson, in fact, the government has been entirely in the hands of hillbillies and yokels and urban thugs.”[130]

While he generally holds up the rise of urban, patriarchal societies as the cause of the first loss of heritage, he never speculates on the second, more recent one.[131] Many fea­tures of Robbins’ concern with this cultural loss can be considered in light of the work of Christopher Lasch, an important spokesman for American culture in the wake of the sixties. In his The Culture of Narcissism.,[132] Lasch writes from a less Hegelian and Marxist perspec­tive than Jameson, but one still firmly situated on the political Left,[133] identifying the decline of American culture as the result of the bankruptcy and corruption of late-stage classical liberal individualism: “the culture of competitive individualism, ...in its decad­ence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”[134]

He enumerates the features of the new narcissist, the “‘psychological man’ of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism”: he is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety; far from inflicting his certainties on others, he seeks meaning in his own life; freed from past superstitions, he is unsure of his own existence; abandoning dogmas of racial purity, he is superficially tolerant, but having lost the security of group loyalty, rivals others for the favors of a paternalistic state; his sexual attitudes are permissive but have brought him no sexual peace; competitive in demand for approval, he distrusts competition, even in its early capitalist and athletic manifestations, because he unconsciously associates it with an urge to destroy; he praises respect for rules, but secretly does not believe they apply to him; he is acquisitive, but with the aim of instant gratification, not future provision. In fact — and this is perhaps the most important point — he has no interest in the future because he has lost interest in the past:

...the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life. A society that has made ‘nostalgia’ a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in an important way better than life today.... people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present.…
The fashionable sneer that now automatically greets every loving recollection of the past attempts to exploit the prejudices of a pseudoprogressive society on behalf of the status quo.... many radical movements in the past have drawn strength and sustenance from the myth or memory of a golden age in the still more distant past.[135]... loving memories constitute an indispensable psychological resource in maturity, and ... those who cannot fall back on the memory of loving relations in the past suffer terrible torments as a result.[136]

Many of Robbins’ ideas on the past and on individualism may be read within and against those of Lasch, using a shared vocabulary, even with reference to the Marxist proposition that the view of the future must ultimately be seen via the past. Robbins’ philosophical relationship to Lasch is similar to his linguistic relationship to Beckett; as he shares with Beckett a basic premise about the nontransparency of language, he apparently holds a view of modern man’s changes from the past which agrees with Lasch’s. However, just as he responds to the new linguistics affirmatively, not pessimistically, he likewise sees the “narcissistic” development in Western culture in terms not of a morally bankrupt bourgeoisie, but rather as heralding the emergence of the “floral” paradigm.[137]

Going down the list of “narcissistic features”: Robbins indeed rejects guilt as a manipulative tool of Catholicism, but neither do his characters reflect any profound anxiety; what haunts them are more likely to be shadows cast by the socio-political veils. Robbins and his characters are not really guilty of “inflicting [their] certainties on others”; as illustrated above, while they do preach at times, their positions of moral authority tend to be deconstructed, either by themselves or by the narrator. To the extent that the protagonists do search for meaning in life, it is on the deeper level of “meaning of meaning,” not a search for relief from meaninglessness. Robbins does not equate religion with superstition; his problem with the latter lies only in its manipula­tion to political ends, as in his views of the corruption of Christ by Christianity. Perhaps via his refusal to reject all spirituality along with organized religion, Robbins escapes the existential angst to which Lasch refers in the third element of narcissism: joie de vivre assumes the certainty of l’existence. Race plays a relatively small role in Robbins’ work, but he seems to be consistently tolerant, and there is no reason to suppose that his tolerance is merely superficial; at any rate, the very idea of “group loyalty” is odious to him, as are any attentions from the paternalistic (not to mention patriarchal) state.

Perhaps the sharpest contrast with Lasch lies in the issue of sex: as discussed above, permissive sexuality, when coupled with love, brings not only peace, but salvation. Indeed, Robbins distrusts competition, but only because it strengthens veils; destruction is not an issue in his novels. His portrayal of the furor over the Superbowl in Skinny Legssuggests an ambivalent view of competitive sports, but he does not extend that view to athletics in general.[138] He does not, of course, even pretend to respect for rules; the Woodpecker and Roadside’s Plucky Purcell, in particular, insist they do not apply to them, and actively advocate outlawry as a path to enlightenment. Robbins’ characters, with Gwen in Frog Pajamas being the obvious exception, do not seem concerned with material objects beyond a basic comfort level — money is the fifth veil in Skinny Legs — but they do strive for present, if not instant, gratification: living for the future, particularly for an afterlife is the sixth veil.

Nor, however, can one live in the past: the narrator writes of Pan in Jitterbug, he “had begun to live in his memories, an unhealthy symptom in anyone, suggesting as it does that life has peaked. Every daydream that involves the past sports in its hatband a ticket to the grave” (135). Likewise, the only time in the novel that Alobar allows himself to dwell on the past is that of the nadir of his relationship with Kudra and of his deepest depression (163). These are not “fashionable sneer[s]” at “loving memory,” however: Robbins clearly recognizes the importance for the West of its past, particularly of its pre-Christian roots, as evinced by complaints about urban modernity throughout the early novels, and especially by the Chink’s conversations with Sissy in Cowgirls. The Chink’s exhortations, “make contact with your past... re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development” (234) is essentially compatible with Lasch’s, “I see the past as a political and psychological treasury from which we draw the reserves... that we need to cope with the future.”[139]

There are two important differences, however, both of which become clear in light of another quote from Jitterbug, this time in the mouth of Wiggs Dannyboy: “Cycles take the meaning out o’ life, just as they do in art.... certain individuals have always managed to break out o’ the artistic and social cycles—that’s why I love and respect your individual more than I love and respect humanity at large” (284). Robbins would reject the idea of a morally bankrupt society resulting from ignorance of the past; for him relevant moral agents are always individuals; society is at best amoral if not inherently immoral in its enforced conformity. The other difference lies in the use to which Robbins puts the past: progress will not result from the revival, or even recollection, of the values of a past golden age, but from their synchretization with the present. In this his historical outlook is in fact strictly Hegelian: if, as in Cowgirls, the West’s pagan past is a thesis against which Judeo-Christian patriarchy provides an antithesis, the future must be a synthesis of the two, not a simple rejection of the latter. Robbins’ explanation for the troubled zeitgeist of the late twentieth century is, in fact, that the decline of the hegemony America’s traditional religious structures has left society grasping somewhat desperately in search of a new synthesis. This interim vacuum forms the basis for the apocalyptic undertones pervading Robbins’ novels, and ultimately provides a platform for his optimism.

Thus in Roadside, Marx proclaims, “A major religion was dead or dying and another was materializing in its stead. The consequences of a religious changeover at this particularly volatile moment in our cultural history are immense” (164). He never manages to characterize the new materializing religion, however; the closest he comes — and no one else in the text manages to do better — is quoting a minor character, Nearly Normal Jimmy, who described Amanda as a “religion-unto-herself” (140). In the meantime, the vast religio-political conspiracy between the Vatican and various agencies of the United States government strives brutally to maintain the status quo. The same government causes the tragic climax of Cowgirls, chases Wrangle and spies on Leigh-Cheri throughout Woodpecker, and conducts secret biological immortality experiments in Jitterbug; in each it acts as an inertial force in the way of what Robbins sees as mankind’s destiny.

In Cowgirls, the sense of impending Armageddon is strongest, enhanced by the leitmotif of “the international situation — desperate, as usual.” Though this phrase suggests a nuclear apocalypse — the book was written when the Cold War still involved a degree of brinksmanship — the Chink points out that a natural catastrophe could serve as well; he muses on the isolated groups and individuals who would survive, and pictures them reviving a relationship with nature which seems closest to Lasch in terms of abject glorification of the past. In Jitterbug, as noted above, Wiggs proposes that mankind is in a transition period between mammalian and floral consciousness. In like manner, Skinny Legs, which, informed anew by the international tensions contemporary with its writing, is filled with images of the war-torn Middle East, and of Doomsday cults proclaiming the end of the world,[140] the inner voice of revelation which tears down the veils during Salome’s dance concludes to Ellen Cherry, based on an interesting, if somewhat overstated metaphor:

Of all the places on the planet, [the Middle East] is the most feverish, hot, pain-racked, tense, dilated, bloody, traumatized, stretched to the point of ripping. Remind you of something? The “trouble” in the Middle East is nothing but natal contractions. The world is in labor, and the Middle East, quite obviously, is the vagina out of which, if it doesn’t abort, the new order of humanity must be born.... don’t despair over the Middle East: something great, something wondrous, something completely unimaginable is there aborning. (474)

Wiggs uses a similar metaphor, though based on a different locus, in explaining his position on the sixties, which he concludes:

the American womb eventually would bear fruit. The United States was the logical location of the next enlightened civilization. And since the sixties phenomena had at least prepared the soil—many of the individuals who had successfully mutated during the sixties were carrying on, out of view of the public eye—the next flowering was probably no more than a decade or two away.

Even though, in social terms, the sixties had failed, in evolutionary terms they were a landmark, a milestone... (Jitterbug, 248)[141]

For Wiggs, as for Robbins, this evolution was sustained in large part by drugs, particularly psychedelics. Robbins believes his experiences facilitated his perception of the new relationships among objects in everyday reality. He often recounts his first experiment in interviews; he tells Mitchell,

I had heard that there were mushrooms that could enhance your poetic, magical powers. You could see jeweled castles in the air and talk to God; Jesus would sit on your lap and tell you Bible stories, only the endings were different than the King James version. I wanted those mushrooms! Instead, under controlled circumstances, a pharmacologist at the University of Washington would give me 300 micrograms of Sandoz acid—the purest, cleanest acid you can imagine.[142]

In 1963, LSD was perfectly legal, and, as he recalls to Whitmer (and, in almost the same words to Kingsbury), “It was the most profound experience of my life, and it suddenly gave me a new culture. It was like being a Southern Baptist one day and a Russian Jew the next, so you don’t relate to Southern Baptists anymore. I went looking for my people.”[143] These he found in Greenwich Village, after having “called in well” at his job in Seattle, just as “Dr. Robbins” does in Cowgirls.

The experience informs the entire structure of Roadside, as well as Robbins’ overall stylistic project. He tells McCaffery and Gregory that Roadside was carefully structured around a non-linear, psychedelic model; that is,

its structure radiates in many directions at once, rather that progressing gradually up an inclined plane, like most novels, from minor climax to minor climax to major climax. There are lots of little flashes of illumination strung together like beads. Some of these flashes illuminate the plot; others merely illuminate the reader.

He continues,

psychedelics left me less rigid, intellectually and emotionally. Certain barriers just melted away... The borderlines between so-called reality and so-called fantasy, between dream and wakefulness, animate and inanimate were no longer as distinct... Also, there’s a fairly narrow boundary between the silly and the profound... and it seems to me that on that frontier is the most risky and significant place an artist or philosopher can station himself. Maybe my psychedelic experiences prepared me to straddle that boundary more comfortably than most. Or maybe you’d say that, as a writer, I’m a borderline case.[144]

He makes a number of these arguments — again in almost identical language — in his interview with Whitmer the same year, but is careful to make one additional point: “Drugs did not make me more creative.... What they did was free me to make connections that one doesn’t normally make. A more multidimensional relation to reality.” This is, of course, the effect he tries to produce in his readers by means of the language and philosophy of his style.

In emphasizing that he does not credit them with his creativity, Robbins treats psychedelics as a spiritual resource akin to Eastern philosophy: a supplement to, not a replacement for, independent, personal thought.[145] Perhaps it is in fact this spiritualiza­tion of psychedelia that enables him to use them independently, if not to say analytically; Mitchell notes that his first impression of Robbins is his “eyes, like blue dots on a fresh flashbulb, the silent testimony of one psychedelic pilgrim who refused to become an acid casualty.”[146] Waugh is somewhat less charitable in describing the “acid casualties”:

No doubt California is full of real goofs, such as one can see in the hippy encampments in the West of England: dirty, half-witted people with their mouths hanging open and dead fishlike eyes, able to communicate with each other only in grunts and with the outside world not at all.[147]

This is a far cry from Robbins’ depiction of the Zillers’ wedding ceremony and festival, the spontaneous “Sacramento celebration of the Indo-Tibetan Circus & Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band” (37), which earns four pages of evocative, romantic, certainly non-linear description. It is likely, therefore, that acid’s potential for irresponsible abuse inspired him to tell Whitmer that the psychedelic revolution should not have been so democratized and egalitarian, that it should only have involved “an enlightened minority, like the Eleusinian Mysteries in the Golden Age of Greece, where one was condemned to death if he revealed the secrets”[148]; the revolution had been corrupted by “sloganeering and extensive media coverage” and by “a throng of mutant imitators... out just to be part of the party, rather than seeking enlightenment.”[149]

Not that he feels, however, that psychedelics should be regulated or banned; Balzar writes,

These are not the days [1990] for friendly jabbering about drug use, at least in public. But Robbins plunges in, his mind recoiling from the authoritarian edict that there is no healthy difference between drugs and drug abuse. And how about a misguided government that subsidized killer-tobacco but outlaws psychedelics? ‘That is chemically insane.’[150]

Indeed, Robbins is careful, particularly in the early novels, to distinguish between “soft” and “hard” drugs. While in Roadside, Amanda’s marijuana breads have earned her a reputation as “the Betty Crocker of the underground” (11) and Purcell deals in hashish, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms, Purcell

does not deal in hard narcotics or amphetamines. He does not tolerate those who do. When he meets pushers of smack and speed... he attempts to convince them that it is a vile and murderous act to peddle chemicals which can ultimately only destroy their imbibers. If his pleas fail, he batters heads and breaks bones. (66)

Likewise in Cowgirls, Dolores achieves enlightenment by way of peyote, but LuAnn, another cowgirl, is tormented by nightmares of her boyfriend’s heroine overdose.

In Woodpecker, then, Robbins seems inexcusably hypocritical in his rousing endorsement of cocaine: not only does Bernard frequently indulge, but he pressures Leigh-Cheri to join him, “Come on. This stuff’s so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. ‘A toot, Brutus,’ is what he said. Come on, try it.”[151] Cocaine makes a more minor appearance in Jitterbug, shared occasionally between Priscilla and Ricki, but most of the drug spotlight returns to psychedelics, which Wiggs advocates wholeheartedly:

Sure and they destroyed some [brain] cells, no doubt about it, but ’twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o’ fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin’. (252)

Indeed, by 1985, Robbins tells People magazine, “I still regard LSD as right up there with the microscope and the telescope as an instrument of exploration. Cocaine, on the other hand, is an ugly, insidious drug that tears holes in your aura.”[152] Skinny Legs is apparently drug-free — except for a narratorial note during the falling of the second veil that “the expeditious and postverbal insights provided by psychotropic vegetation might well be [humanity’s] only insight” (458), but in Frog Pajamas, psychedelics return in force. Now, in what is apparently an adaptation of Terence McKenna’s The Archaic Revival[153], a non-fiction text for which Robbins wrote the preface, psilocybic mushrooms, along with the hallucinogenic bufotoxins secreted by certain frogs, are made to serve as possible links to a hypothetical intelligent race of amphibian aliens from the Sirius star system.

To a number of critics, particularly, it seems, those writing for the New York Times, drugs constitute a shibboleth against a sober audience. Karbo’s review of Frog Pajamas is a particularly sharp example; Ross makes a similar statement in explaining his preference for Cowgirls over Roadside: “[Cowgirls] is more evocative of time and place, permitting those of us who do our reading undoped to make a bit more sense of all the wild happenings.”[154] Robbins’ writing, however, should be accessible to any creative reader. Robbins uses psychedelics to help forge connections among his words and ideas, but once in place they should be appreciable, if not comprehensible, to the most purely substance-free reader. A hallucinating reader may be able to find obscure literal meaning in “wolfmother wallpaper,” but the relationship and importance of the wallpaper to the novel can be fully understood in complete sobriety.

Psychedelia alone, at any rate, do not define counterculture. Rogers justifies his calling Roadside “the quintessential counterculture novel” by treating “culture” primarily in material terms: “while ARA contains counterculture trappings galore—drugs, food, music, fashions, vocabulary—it takes each out to the edge of the mythology that, for one brief moment in the Sixties, looked almost possible.”[155] Ross, taking quite a different view, suggests that “the whole point of Robbins’s success may be that the counterculture is either dead or homogenized beyond recognition.”[156] In a review of Jitterbug in the National Review, a publication which is politically about as far removed as possible from Rogers’ Rolling Stone, he interprets Wiggs Dannyboy’s comments on the failure of the sixties in social terms, but their success in evolutionary terms to mean

The kid culture of drugs, sex, socialism, and rock ’n’ roll has begun to yield to a more mature civilization in which people realize that drug abuse and sexual promiscuity can be hazardous to their health, socialism can be harmful to their pocketbooks, and Scarlatti sounds better played on the harpsichord than on some terrifyingly loud electric guitar.[157]

This is a rather gross distortion of Wiggs’ speech. Robbins never advocates socialism in any form — see, for one more example, Purcell’s “Communism is out to Communize the world and Capitalism is out to Capitalize the world. Let them fight it out among themselves. I’ve got my own life to live and I can’t be bothered” (199) — nor does “rock ’n’ roll” play much of a role in his books; indeed, he confesses to being “a closet Neil Diamond fan.”[158] Moreover, not only is sex still important in Jitterbug in terms of spiritual liberation, but, far from “hazardous to ... health,” it is one of the four keys to physical immortality.

The fact that the same body of work can produce such disparate views of the sixties and the decade’s counterculture — from Rogers’ wistful nostalgia to Ross’ disparaging moralizing — casts more doubt on any construction of Robbins as counterculturalist. In fact, looking beyond the individual biases of these two critics, it seems the notions of “counter” and “popular” culture are in general terms impossible to distinguish clearly, or at least difficult enough that Robbins sees no need to make the distinction. He sees both as aspects of the same American culture, both of which provide him with ideas and metaphors, but neither of which is in and of itself a sufficient context for his style. His books are replete with references to mass media figures from entertainment, sports, and the arts, and his statement on “pop reality” in the Strelow interview indicates emphatically that his attitude to popular culture is in no way a contrary one. The epigraphs to each novel are a mix of high- and low-brow quotations: for example, the Bible and Lowell Thomas in Roadside, William Blake and Roy Rogers in Cowgirls, and Franz Kafka and R.E.M. in Skinny Legs. Besides, in what way is Roadside“countercultural” when it has sold 600,000 copies, or Cowgirls when it has sold 1.3 million, as they did by late 1980?[159]

Indeed, Ross suggested as early as 1978 that the “ballyhoo” surrounding the release of Cowgirls [160]“wiped away any doubt that the cult has become a bandwagon.”[161] He nonetheless attempts to confine Robbins’ audience to that of the “paperback literati,” including Brautigan, Pirsig, Castenda, and Pynchon:

All these writers are engaged in composing moral fantasies, in which humanity renounces its usual attitudes and prances about in all kinds of exotic disguises. This is very different from the work, of, say James Joyce, whose experiments were never intended to accomplish more than a fresh penetration of reality.
The novelist assumes magician’s airs, whipping up outlandish characters, naughty little ideas and linguistic tricks which leave the folks in the audience gaping. He becomes fit to be classed with Freudian faith healers, transactional analysts and candidates for public office who renounce the title, “politician.” His appeal, like theirs, is strongest among those people whose education has failed to subdue their anxieties, and who are left searching for the truth in the marketplace of mountebanks.[162]

In this conclusion to his article, Ross betrays, as noted previously, a deeply conservative bias; his reference to Joyce, in particular, indicates a neo-modernist advocacy of “high” — and preferably at least a generation older — culture over the popular culture of postmodernism; it also, by extension, adds support to a construction of Robbins as a writer primarily of the popular culture. It has been a common error of book reviewers, as recently as Karbo, to see Robbins’ audience in terms only of disaffected college students, members of a cult audience. What is remarkable is that they have continued to present this view, despite evidence to the contrary, for the past twenty years.

In the most scathing response to Ross’ article, Nat Wander writes,

Who reads Tom Robbins, Mr. Ross? I do... A working anthropologist who teaches in the City University of New York system and turns a decent dollar at consulting work as well. Yes, I read Tom Robbins, and Saul Bellow, Leon Uris, and, would you believe it, James Joyce, too.
...Can’t I admire [Robbins’ characters] for taking their pleasure, and their enlightenment, where they chance? Don’t I? Where Mr. Ross sees only chaos, some of us see the facile truth that everything is connected to everything else. Puerile as that is, it’s a better description of the universe than any being offered by the church, the state, or General Motors. In fact, if one accepts that facile truth, one is obligated to undertake extreme acts of personal responsibility.
...Book are for reading, Mr. Ross, not for cherishing as fetishes.[163]

Indeed, after Roadside’s slow spread by way of shared paperback copies, and Cowgirls’ marketing primarily as a paperback edition, the publishing strategy for each of Robbins’ successive books points to a progressively mainstream readership. Woodpecker was issued simultaneously in hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market paperback editions (a first in the publishing industry),[164] and since Jitterbug, have been traditionally released, first in hardcover, then in paperback.[165]

In his 1980 column, Dutton reports on a book-signing for Woodpecker at Cody’s Books, near the University of California campus in Berkeley, “Some Robbins watchers say that his fan club is comprised primarily of former 1960’s students. ‘But the people who lined up here to see him were mostly college students or people in their 20’s who don’t really remember the 60’s,’ said [owner of Cody’s, Andy] Ross.” Ross said the turnout for the signing was the largest Cody’s had ever had.[166] Ten years later, Maureen Harrington reports on a signing in Denver for Skinny Legs: “The crowd was a bookseller’s dream: Nearly all 18 to 34 years old, dressed in Lands End casual, and most carrying at least three books — a lot of them hardbacks. Everyone was squeaky clean, well-behaved, and understood the value of a good haircut.”[167] Finally, while he grumbles in a 1990 comment to Steinberg that his audience is composed of the aging baby boomers who read Roadside when it came out, plus 16- to 18-year-olds — “I lost the group in between because I am no longer considered subversive”[168] — he comments on the book tour for Skinny Legs, in his 1994 radio interview, “the audiences at my book signings have probably been sixty to seventy percent early-twenties and teenagers.”[169] Lest he be mistaken, however, for a writer entirely of the mainstream, he recalls that a bookstore owner told him that his books, along with those of Jack Kerouac and Terence McKenna, were the most-often stolen from the store, about which he comments, “It is a tribute; I’m proud to be in that company... I don’t encourage theft, but if that’s the only way you can read, why not?”[170]

If, then, Robbins cannot be considered to be a counterculturalist, he is certainly an anti-establishmentarian. He rails principally against political systems, and politicized religious structures, but the only culture against which he aligns himself is that of conformity, which includes the hippies of the sixties who were “just out to be part of the party” — Jelly tells Sissy “I never got anything outta the hippies but bad dope, clichés and the clap” (Cowgirls 128) — as much as it includes “the dull-minded ... who try to repress the human spirit” (Cowgirls 342). Isolating this central message from the midst of the proliferation of Ideas which characterize Robbins’ philosophical style, however, requires active participation on the part of the reader, an effort many readers are not willing to make, particularly those who look to Robbins’ works for direct “enlightenment.”

This devoted cadre of fans, who constitute a shrinking, but still extant, minority of Robbins’ audience, respond to him as did the early readers of Roadside. Rogers writes,

Robbins is a cult writer.... It means, for starters, at least four long letters each day from fans, many of whom aver that Robbins’ writing has changed their lives. “It’s a little embarrassing, and kind of scary,” he says, “and you don’t know what to say in return. Do you know if Updike gets letters like that?... I just hope I can stay ahead of them. I want to be permanently corruptive and subversive, but it’s really hard.”[171]

Whissen’s text, Classic Cult Fiction, does an excellent job in historicizing Roadside,[172] and tracing the origins of Robbins’ cult status, particularly among the youth of the mid-seventies. Whissen writes,

No book expresses the post-sixties sensibility [my emphasis] better than Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction. In the aftermath of the trial of the Chicago Seven, the invasion of Cambodia, and the shootings at Kent State University, the mood of the counterculturalists had changed dramatically. Whereas moral indignation had previously inspired bitter satire, a feeling of utter frustration now resulted in absurdism. Lampooning laced with gallows humor became the tone of protest, and Robbins appeared fortuitously to become its leading voice.

To understand Robbins’s appeal, one must first understand the shift in the nature of protest itself that took place in the early seventies. While there was still a great deal of bitterness about the war in Vietnam and much dissatisfaction with social and political conditions in the United States, the momentum of dissent slowed considerably after the incident at Kent State. It was almost as if the gunfire in Dallas in 1963 and the gunfire at Kent State in 1970 were parentheses between which the sixties as we remember them occurred.[173] After 1970 the situation looked so utterly hopeless that protesters simply threw up their hands and adopted an attitude of pessimistic contempt leavened with the laughter of despair.

Such a souring attitude was predictable given the self-centeredness and sense of alienation common to the young at the time. Add to this the natural restlessness of youth and the tendency to oversimplify, and it is easy to understand how quickly young dissident could lose patience with a system that would not gratify their wishes upon demand. In anger and frustration, the disenchanted turned their backs on the system and retreated into their own world to sulk and sneer. And one good way to sneer was to read Tom Robbins, for Robbins, with deliberate ingenuousness, quite offhandedly said all those things calculated to infuriate parents and thus endear him to their rebellious children.[174]

It seems somewhat unfair to accuse Robbins of deliberate calculation in exploiting the sixties’ generation gap. However, he is certainly plagued with mixed feelings about his status as a cult figure. On the one hand, he is exhilarated:

“It’s important for me to be indigestible, to be permanently corruptive and subversive. The mail I get isn’t ‘Wow, your book was a good read,’ but ‘this book has affected my life, it has given me the courage to do what I want to do.’ It’s having a liberating effect. I think that most novelists are writing about problems and I’m writing about solutions.”
Robbins is proud, flushed, impassioned for the first time. He’s seen the light and thinks his word-magic, plugged into the secrets of the earth and the mysteries of the mind, is cutting through human befuddlement like a beacon through fog.[175]

However much he deserves this pride, for Robbins to suggest that, “most novelists are writing about problems and I’m writing about solutions,” is disingenuous at best. Even were a reader to accept the details of his philosophy entirely at face value, the problems he presents tend to defy any concrete solutions: the only possible response to Sissy’s sob, “Is everything getting worse?” is the Chink’s response, “Yes... But everything is also getting better” (Cowgirls 350).[176] That is, the only solution is joy in spite of everything; as Robbins tells Ross, “My characters suffer, they die, they look the beast of totalitarianism straight in the cops, and still opt for joy. I think this is what is appealing to people.”[177]

The only actual solution he provides, then, is style: his characters’ “styles of existence” and his own literary and philosophical style. In each of the novels, the protagonist achieves her (his in the case of Alobar, and possibly that of Marx) deliverance from the veils of society not by doing anything — except, perhaps, indulging in frequent sex raised to a cathartic, spiritual level — but by reshaping her personal construction of reality, a process facilita­ted by a Robbinsesque (anti-)guru who has already accomplished such a rear­range­ment. As illustrated above, via his language and philosophy, Robbins encourages his reader to solve his own “philosophical problems” via similar reconstructions of reality. It is conceivable that this is all Robbins means by claiming that he writes about solutions, but a casual reading of the quote would seem to invite blind acceptance of even the novels’ wildest philosophical proposals.

Indeed, it is easy for a reader looking to Robbins for direct “enlightenment” to disregard his play and deconstruction, and to find in Jitterbug, for example, an endorsement of Pan-worship, or in Woodpecker a justification for terrorism — in other words, the seventh veil, “the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you” (468), is the hardest to rend, and a reader could easily stop with Robbins’ readings of the first six veils, overlooking his admonishment that “The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best” (468). As Whissen argues,

a cult book becomes a cult book not because of what it really says but because of what its enthusiasts think it says.... Cult readers do an awful lot of ‘reading into’ the books they revere, finding in them whatever they want to find and simply ignoring anything that contradicts their expectations.[178]

Thus, while he is thrilled with the effect he has on his readers, he resists being looked to as a guru, particularly given his the view on spiritual independence which he presents in his works; he complains to Mitchell, “You wouldn’t believe the people who tracked me down last summer; evidently they haven’t all caught on.”[179]

In contrast to such cult followers, Robbins presents his archetypal individuals, Roadside’s Amanda and John Paul Ziller. In describing them via Marx, Robbins comes as close as he ever does to describing his view of the 1960s counterculture; even Amanda is impressed with his analysis:

I believe that you people, among other things, are obsessed with recovering a lost model of existence, a total life-style in which there are no boundaries between object and subject, between natural and supernatural, between waking and dreaming.... a ritualistic, mythic level of living... The object of your rituals, I believe, is to break free of the conventions that have chained man to certain cliché images and predictable responses, that have narrowed pitifully—in your opinion, at least—the range of his experience. (191)

In a way Robbins is predicting his stylistic project with this passage, as well as his position within the historical category of postmodernism. His work is surely characterized by the fragmentation of the subject in language, by the slipperiness of the signifier, and by the death of the author, all considered by Jameson and others to be primary features of the postmodern moment. Jameson’s description of the “culture of the simulacrum,” moreover, a society of “trompe l’oeil copies without originals”,[180] seems to have echoes in Robbins’ discourse on “androids.” At the same time, however, Robbins resists other features of postmodernism, in his persistent attention to self-discovery and -transcendence, and in his Romantic nostalgia for a utopian pagan past.[181]

The area in which Robbins is unquestionably a postmodernist, however, is in his approach to language, described above. In his works, object can function as subject — most obviously in the animate object-pilgrims of Skinny Legs — and sign as referent. This blurring of assumed cultural relationships leads, according to Amanda, at least, to liberation:

Those folks who are concerned with freedom, real freedom—not the freedom to say “shit” in public or to criticize their leaders or to worship God in the church of their choice, but the freedom to be free of languages and leader and gods—well, they must use style to alter content. If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can re-create ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. (208)

Her speech is a descriptive model for Robbins’ writing: he assembles masses of words and ideas and offers them, divorced from traditional referents or philosophical structures — in a way not unlike “bits of color and electricity and light” — for his readers to use as they see fit, provided of course that they make their own connections.

V. See You in Timbuktu

Tom Robbins thrived back in those days—in the afterglow of the 1960s. In four original novels he captured the lingering essence of that epoch—before Vietnam was a movie, before sex could kill you, and when they still talked about drugs as recreation.

Robbins bit into the soft, sweet part of the 1960s-era Oreo cookie—its curiosity and gentleness and spirituality and expressiveness, and yes, dare we say today, its love.

...he never changed to fit the changing times. And for awhile, the sharp edges and breathless paces of the 1980s threatened to leave him behind as a nostalgic artifact. –John Balzar[182]

In his 1984 Fiction International essay, Robbins writes, “Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul and light up the brain.”[183] He has maintained a steady optimism with respect to this adventure, weathering the changing sensibilities of the seventies and eighties, as is clear from Wiggs’ prediction in Jitterbug that “the next flowering was probably no more than a decade or two away” (248); from his (Robbins’) suggestion that “the new order of humanity... something great, something wondrous” (Skinny Legs 474) will result from the Middle East conflicts; from his statement to McCaffery and Gregory, “I predict a period of accelerated growth in the evolution of human consciousness. But if there is a new Messiah, he won’t walk down from some Asian mountaintop, he — or she — will climb out of a hot tub in California.”[184] This optimism has drawn considerable comment from reviewers, both positive and negative: House, for example, writes of Jitterbug:

While the world has changed substantially since 1971,... his odd corner of it has remained intact, caught in the amber of 1960s romanticism. It is a place where people brake for unicorns and where Frodo lives on forever amid a harem of nubile hobbits.... Reading Mr. Robbins, you could almost believe not everyone went back to business school after Woodstock....
like Alobar he [Robbins] has stopped showing signs of aging.... he has clung to his values and attitudes of a peculiar slice of American history, and the nostalgic kick that his work gives--that of ‘The Big Chill’--is wearing off.[185]

Lemon’s conclusions regarding Skinny Legs are similar, if more forgiving:

Robbins’s philosophy is straight from the late sixties. Do your own thing and let your neighbors do theirs; love people and the world in general; do right but avoid self-righteousness; trust yourself but don’t get egotistical; laugh at rather than destroy what you dislike and, especially, laugh at yourself. The message is familiar, now even trite. But Robbins delivers it with such gusto, such sheer joy in the language and in his creatures, that it seems, for the moment, new.[186]

While these reviews are not entirely devoid of validity, they greatly simplify Robbins’ philosophy, essentially classifying him as a relic of the counterculture. With Frog Pajamas, however, Robbins seems finally to be showing signs of frustration at the failed manifestation, or at least the extended delay, of the “next flowering.” Egan interviewed Robbins while this sixth novel was in progress, and wrote of it, “As usual, plot is of secondary important. What he strives for is the perfect sentence.”[187] Secondary or not, however, the plot, even more convoluted than ever, and leaving an excess of unresolved loose ends, consumes a greater share than usual of the narrator’s and the reader’s attentions. Its basic structure is essentially a rewrite of Woodpecker: Gwen Mati, the independent but spiritually misguided heroine, meets and falls in love with Larry Diamond, another “metaphysical outlaw” patterned roughly on the Woodpecker, who acts as her sexual and spiritual guru while vehemently denying that he does in fact play that role.[188]

For the first time, Robbins experiments with characters who are not attractive, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but he cannot seem to stop fixating on the differences he has given them: Gwen is a half-Filipina stockbroker who frets constantly over her ethnic background; and Q-Jo Huffington, the 300-pound psychic who is Gwen’s best friend, cannot make an appearance without bearing a reference to her weight from the narrator. By Robbins’ own admission, however, the characterization in the novel continues the trend towards a more traditional realism; he says of Gwen,

The female protagonists in all my books are— they tend to be strong and spunky, independent women, fairly witty, and very much in charge of their sexual powers. Gwendolyn is no exception, except that Gwendolyn is also dishonest, manipulative, unethical: she’s not a very nice person. But I’ve found her the most interesting female character I’ve ever worked with, because she’s more complex, and, really, more human: the fact that she is so materialistic, so greedy, that she has so many faults, makes her more human.... I knew she was a bad person, but I wanted the reader to be routing for her nonetheless.[189]

Like­wise, Larry differs from the Woodpecker, even from the Chink, in that his physical flaw­less­ness is marred by an advanced cancer. He shares with them, however, their joie de vivre: despite his ailment he insists to Gwen sincerely — though his choice of words is somewhat less than convincing — “I’m merry and bright” (187).

The relative conventionality of the plot and characterization is somewhat offset by the narrator, who addresses Gwen in the second person throughout the text. While all the action is therefore seen through her eyes, however — this is the first Robbins novel centered so exclusively on one character — the narrator remains a distinct voice. He speaks to her in the manner in which Dr. Robbins exhorts Sissy in sections of Cowgirls, or the narrator of Jitterbug addresses Pan — that is, in a voice which echoes those of previous Robbins narrators. It is his perceptions of reality, not hers, that pervade the language of the book, though he employs fewer metaphors than usual, and is in general more sober in tone. There are naturally exceptions — which, incidentally, constitute evidence of the narrator’s dominance of the novel’s point of view — for example,

You kick off your shoes and flop onto the bed—landing, of course, among millions of mites. Had you any inkling that your bedding was alive with arthropodic crablets, chomping away on the flakes of your dead skin, you would be so disgusted you would probably choose to lie on the floor.... The ultimate witnesses, the most intimate voyeurs, these mites. What books they might author, what tales they could tell! Imaging the memoirs of a multitude of minuscule malcolm lowrys, expatriates in a martex mexico, soused on dandruff tequila, living and writing under the volcano of love...” (214),

(he continues the aside in this vein for another page and a half). The narrator thus sustains Robbins’ linguistic style, albeit in a somewhat muted form; from time to time he also furthers Robbins’ philosophical project, but this half of Robbins’ style finds its preservation for the most part in the voice of the Larry as the new (anti-)guru, who divides his attention between his deconstruction of the socio-economic structure of the West and his vision of humanity’s future.

In his 1980 self-interview, Robbins claims that greed is one of society’s greatest “philosophical problems,” that “It’s destroying America”[190]; and the fifth veil in Skinny Legs is that of commerce:

Reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so-called econ­omic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably disclosed that there was... plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called “money.” It was akin the a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn’t bake a cake because she didn’t have any ounces (463).

Larry returns to and develops this theory, expounding on unemployment:

in our social history, jobs are an aberration, a flash in the pan. People have always worked, but they have only held jobs... for a very short time. And now, with the proliferation of cybernetics and robotics and automation... jobs are on the way out again....
Nowadays, the state uses jobs, or rather the illusion of jobs, as a mechanism for control” (195-6);

on the homeless:

except for the legitimately, congenitally insane, each and every one of them is where they are because of choices they made. Dumb choices.... individuals have to accept responsibility for their own bad choices.... Maybe it boils down to the premium we want to place on liberty. It’s numero uno in Uncle Larry’s book, far out in front of food and shelter (280-1);[191]

and on the ultimate nature of money:

Money may be our greatest spiritual teacher. More edifying than a stadium full of swamis. Nothing can knock a pilgrim off the path as fast as money. That’s the job of a spiritual teacher, you know.... Until we can stay on the path without ever being knocked—or tempted—off... our transformative journey can be little more than fits and starts. When it comes to illuminating the inner structure of consciousness and highlighting its weaknesses and flaws, nothing, not even love, casts as bright a beam as money. The things we’re willing to do to obtain it, to protect it, to express our guilt over having it, are incomparably revealing. There’s a thin line between charity and greed: at bottom, they’re both expressions of insecurity and manifestations of ego. (285-6)

What all this boils down to is a stronger defense of individualism — now pushed to the point of libertarianism — than that which appeared in the earlier novels. Far removed from “the meaning of meaning,” liberty is a commodity against which food and shelter are traded. This translates in interviews into unusually vehement attacks on the American political atmosphere, which he preferred in earlier comments to dismiss. He tells Egan,

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism. Today, the religious right and the academic left seem to be in some kind of competition to brutalize the gene pool. As agents of homogenization, both sides are committed to institutionalized mediocrity. They want to re-create the world in their image, and re-create society to fit the contours of their fears.[192]

In like manner, he asks in the City Arts interview,

What separates human beings from the so-called lower animals, the lower primates? There’s humor, a sense of humor; imagination; there’s rebelliousness, the spark of rebelliousness that no other creatures really have; there’s spirituality; and there’s eroticism, as opposed to the mindless mating of porcupines or earthworms.... So, in a way, it’s definitive to our species; and the degree to which a person lacks those five things is the degree to which they are perhaps a little less than human. So what does that tell you? Look at the religious right, look at the leaders of the religious right, and look at the leaders of political correctness, and you will see that they lack all five of those qualities!

These thoughts, clearly, are a long way from Plucky Purcell’s “Communism is out to Communize the world and Capitalism is out to Capitalize the world. Let them fight it out among themselves. I’ve got my own life to live and I can’t be bothered” (Roadside 199).

If Robbins then appears in Frog Pajamas to be unusally frustrated, he passes his frustra­tion on to his readers: for the first time, it is apparently no longer possible for the characters to develop spiritually within even geographically mainstream society, or indeed, anywhere in America. The trend has previously been that of enlightened perception achieved in increasingly complex, urban settings: the characters move from the forests of the Northwest in Roadside, to a Western ranch in Cowgirls, to Seattle and New Orleans in Woodpecker and Jitterbug, and finally, in Skinny Legs, to New York City, which was presented in the earlier novels as the locus of the patriarchal, materialistic system, furthest removed from spirituality.[193] The most static of the novels in terms of setting as well as point of view, Frog Pajamas takes place wholly in Seattle, but Larry’s spiritual and philosophical progress mandates his journeys to Timbuktu: his resort, in effect, to the sort of Orientalism lightly mocked in Roadside and Cowgirls.

The only alternative to Timbuktu requires accepting Larry’s suggestion that humanity’s salvation lies with the Nommo, alternately presented as man-sized amphibians from the Sirius star system who landed on Earth two thousand years ago, built the pyramids, and edu­cated the West African Bozo tribe in astronomy;[194] an advanced civilization who made telepathic contact with the Bozo when the latter’s minds had been rendered receptive by ritualistic use of psilocybic mushrooms; or the “overmind,” the deep-subconscious of the human species, that suggests humanity’s aquatic past and dolphin-like future (302-16). Even ignoring their transcendent level of fantasy[195], each of these scenarios, as well as the reversion to the myth of the spiritual Orient, is highly problematic with respect to both the linguistic and philosophical aspects Robbins’ style.

Perhaps the scenarios’ greatest stylistic problem lies in their fundamentally external nature. If the fate of mankind or, more importantly, of any individual, lies in the hands of aliens, in the maturation of a collective unconscious, or even in the hallucinogenic potential of psilocybin mushrooms and tree frog bufotoxins, then it is not up to each individual to “figure it out” themselves, internally. In other words, the most important and the most subtle, the seventh veil is reestablished. Evidently remembering this inconsistency, Robbins gives Larry a brief disclaimer after his fourteen-page expostulation:

I hope you’re not going to start thinking of me as your guru.... At this stage of the game, it’s every man for himself. Every woman, too. The Nommo can’t save us, either. They may be from Sirius, they may be an extrusion of the overmind, they may be both at the same time. But they aren’t going to ride to our rescue, any more than Jesus is or Marx or any cavalry charge yet devised by the sanctimonious pimps who shill for our assorted and voracious ideologies. Mistrust them all, sweetheart. (320)

It is not merely the small scale of this warning that gives it a disingenuous ring, however, but also its tone, its language. Along with his “outlaw” perspective, Larry has inherited from Bernard a relatively belligerent persona, and a comparative paucity of metaphor in his speech. This leaves him sounding, like the Woodpecker, like any Robbinsian voice attempting to philosophize in the absence of style, evangelical and hollow.

When Woodpecker was published, critics rushed to proclaim Robbins’ decline; even those who professed to have enjoyed the first two novels suggested, essentially, that his style had grown stale, which in fact, on a number of levels, it had. If the late seventies were indeed a “severe period for lovers” (Woodpecker 3), it is possible that, despite the Woodpecker’s mandate, “[d]on’t let yourself be victimized by the age you live in” (Woodpecker 116), Robbins is finding the early nineties a difficult time for the humor and playfulness which are essential to the successful maintenance of his style. He suggests in his interview of Debra Winger that

While it’s no secret that rehabilitation, recovery, and self-denial are the hallmarks of the American Nineties, I’d like to believe that we’ve neither succumbed to trendy asceticism nor been morn again as pea pod puritans. I prefer to think we’re cavorting with Bugs Bunny instead of Jose Cuervo because we’re temporarily functioning somewhat below the summit of our physiological potential.[196]

This last line could, of course, be read as an admission of aging, of the failure of a particular “style of existence” to maintain him physically, and perhaps emotionally, as it did Alobar. However, the fact that Jitterbug proved Woodpecker’s doomsayers wrong on most accounts is evidence enough that Robbins’ future is difficult to predict, perhaps impossibly so. Simply by addressing such social issues as homelessness, political correctness, and multiculturalism, he has with Frog Pajamas and recent interviews entered the realm of socio-politics which he has hitherto viewed with considerable disdain. Depending on one’s relationship to Robbins’ previous work, this development could be seen alternately as a “sell-out” of a philosophical ideal, or as a sign of maturity, a realization that since it is taking longer than expected for society to solve its “philoso­ph­i­cal” problems, the political ones may in the meantime benefit from examination in their own right.

With regard to style, Robbins’ direction is if anything more enigmatic. Frog Pajamas minimizes the active relationship with the audience that characterizes the earlier work: it is entirely devoid of deconstruction on a textual level, and what few conceits there are limit themselves to descriptions of the Northwest rain which are at times elegant, but which tend to repeat the intent and effect of similar passages in the earlier books. It seems this is intentional: Robbins tells Strickland, “I’ve quit doing things like [devoting Chapter 100 of Cowgirls to a conceit on champagne] because it was getting to be too much of a device.... it was starting to become like a shtick.... After a while it just gets cute.”[197] If relatively free of linguistic “shtick,” however, Frog Pajamas is replete with philosophical. The wild conclusions Larry offers regarding the Nommo leave little room for the reader to make his own connections; what’s more, without the dynamic language behind it, the philoso­phy, already ponderous, disallows the active reading which is inspired by Roadside or Skinny Legs. In the Epilogue to Woodpecker, Robbins writes of romance, “When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple” (274). He seems to have forgotten, at least momentarily, that the same holds true of his relationship to his readers, and of his readers’ relationships to the reality presented in his books: the novels thrive when and only when the relationship is a bilateral one.

Robbins style works on two levels with respect to his audience. On the first, more obvious, he uses his linguistic and philosophical vocabulary, imagery, and delivery in order to help his readers rend the societal veils blocking the perspective they would gain from the realization of a personal reality. On this deconstructive level, involving the stripping of the first six veils, a reader may take Robbins and the style of his characters’ existence fairly literally, but personal reality may only be realized behind the seventh. The reader must assume an active role once the seventh veil is removed, and here, on this second level, Robbins can only facilitate; he cannot direct. While he may well end Frog Pajamas, “See you in Timbuktu!“ (386), if Timbuktu is taken here to connote not a decrepit African city but rather a symbolic extra-societal locus, he cannot actually direct the reader there; for Larry to hand Gwen tickets and an itinerary denies her the essential process of self-discovery.

Here again, Jameson’s theories on postmodernism are useful, if somewhat problematic. Jameson writes that a crucial feature of the postmodern moment is the death of the subject, defined both as “subject” in terms of ego, and as Subject, or auteur of an entire philosophical system, the last of whom was, according to Jameson, Sartre.[198] For Robbins the latter death is the more important: no one has the philosophical or linguistic authority to limit another’s construction of his own personal reality. However, while he embraces the idea of the death of the Subject, Robbins stands in opposition to the postmodernists with regard to the subject: it is vital for Robbins that the individual retain a strong sense of identity, informed by whatever personal systems he constructs, but informed first and foremost by his style.

In a conversation with Marx, Amanda suggests,

Maybe I’m attracted to style because the notion of content is a very difficult notion for me to comprehend. When you subtract from an object the qualities it possesses, what do you have left? ... This lump of dough on the table has the properties of being soft, pliable, white, moist, smooth and cool to the touch. But what is it exactly, what is the thing—the content—that possesses those qualities? It can’t be defined. I’m afraid that the notion of content has to be replaced by the notion of style. (207)

The fact is, the content that possesses style can be defined: Stephen Dedalus would have called it quoditas, or “whatness.” Joycean aesthetic theory has no place in Robbins’ postmodernist world, however, where quoditas is entirely dependent on one’s perception and subsequent description of it. Robbins rejects societal categorization — the objectivity of trifling “content” — in favor of the “freedom to play freely in the universe,” to play within a wholly subjective style. By debunking the notion of content in favor of that of style, he emphasizes the obligation of an individual always to perceive actively, from the standpoint of his or her personal style. This obligation is a vital one in that by sacrificing one’s individuality in favor of any group solution, any socially-imposed perception — whether it be religious, political, or economic — a person sacrifices a portion of his humanity, becomes something more akin to an android. Robbins’ solutions to existence, then, in such a society of androids, a society in which a clear perspective of reality requires perennial rending of that society’s veils, are brought into being by the elements of his style.

~ With tremendous gratitude to Prof. Barbara Will

Works Cited

Works by Robbins (chronological)

“The Pacific Northwest Today.” with Peter Selz. Art in America. 56: Nov 1968. pp 98-101

Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.

“Is Feminismo Destroying Feminism?” Seattle Weekly. Jun 21, 1978. pp 12-5.

Still Life With Woodpecker. New York: Bantam Books, 1980.

“Why I Live Where I Live.” Esquire. Oct 1980. pp 82-4.

Jitterbug Perfume. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

“A writer’s first obligation...” Fiction International. 15:1, 1984. p 24.

Skinny Legs and All. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.

“The Genius Waitress: an ode to women who serve.” Playboy. Dec 1991. p 144.

“Confessions of a Reluctant Sex Goddess.” Esquire. Feb 1993. p 72.

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.

Analyses, Features, Interviews

Balzar, John. “Writer Tom Robbins: A Man of La Conner.” Los Angeles Times. Apr 6, 1990. p E1.

City Arts of San Francisco. radio broadcast, 1994.

Coburn, Randy Sue. “Will read Tom Robbins please stand up?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nov 14, 1984. pp B1,8.

Dougherty, Steven with Nancy Faber. “Cowgirls may get the blues, but not Tom Robbins...” People Weekly. Apr 1, 1985. pp 123-5.

Dutton, Thomas. “Behind the Best Sellers.” New York Times Book Review. Oct 19, 1980. p 58.

Egan, Timothy. “Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe.” New York Times. Dec 30, 1993. p C1,9.

Frazer, Thomas J. Tom Robbins, A Playful Prophet. A.B. Thesis, Dartmouth College, 1982.

Harrington, Maureen. “Tom Robbins favors his fans.” The Denver Post. Apr 10, 1990. p E1.

McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory. Alive and Writing. Chicago: U. of Illinois Press, 1987.

Mitchell, Greg. “...And Cowgirls Jumped Over the Moon.” Crawdaddy. Aug 1977. pp 29-33.

Oldenburg, Ann. “Women, words, and Tom Robbins.” USA Today. Oct 4, 1994. p C3.

Robbins, Tom. “A Mix of Mahatma Gandhi & W. C. Fields.” San Francisco Chronicle Review. Sep 28, 1980. p 11.

Rogers, Michael. “Taking Tom Robbins Seriously.” Rolling Stone. Nov 17, 1977. pp 66-71.

Ross, Mitchell. “Prine of the Paperback Literati.” New York Times Magazine. Feb 12, 1978. pp 16-17+.

Siegel, Mark R. Tom Robbins. Western Writers Series, eds. Wayne Chatterton and James Maguire. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1980.

“Signing to Oblige.” Washington Post Book World. Dec 25, 1994. p 15.

Strelow, Michael. “Dialogue with Tom Robbins.” Northwest Review. 20, 1982. pp. 97-102.

Strickland, Bill. i: “Joy in Spite of Everything.” Writer’s Digest.. Feb 1988, pp 30-3+.

ii:”Joy in Spite of Everything (cont).” Writer’s Digest.. Mar 1988, pp 32-6.

Townsend, Julie Elaine. Tom Robbins as Fabulator. M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, 1993.

Wander, Nat. “Paperback School of Literature (letter).” New York Times Magazine. Mar 19, 1978. p 110.

Whissen, Thomas. Classic Cult Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Whitmer, Peter O. Aquarius Revisited. New York: MacMillan, 1987.

“Wishing for Milton’s Power and Tolstoy’s Zaniness.” New York Times Book Review. Dec 8, 1985. pp 46-7.

Book Reviews

Another Roadside Attraction

Centing, Richard. “Another Roadside Attraction (review).” Library Journal. May 15, 1971. p 1729.

“Another Roadside Attraction (review).” Publishers Weekly. Feb 22, 1971. p 139.

“Another Roadside Attraction (paperback review).” Publishers Weekly. Jun 19, 1972. p 61.

Waugh, Auberon. “Butterfly Nut.” The Spectator. Mar 24, 1973. pp 365-6.

Whittemore, Reed. “Rain Forest and Old Plantation.” New Republic. Jun 26, 1971. pp 29-30

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Cloonan, William. “Tom Robbins’ Culture: The Brain Takes Its Lumps.” New Boston Review. III;3, Dec 1977. pp 5-6.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (review).” Southern Exposure. Win 1977. pp 104-5.

Testerman, Tim. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (review).” Denver Quarterly. VII: Aut 1976. pp 147-50.

Treglown, Jeremy. “Such Style.” New Statesman. Aug 12, 1977. pp 219-20.

Wilson, Raymond J. “A Synthesis of Modernism.” Prairie Schooner. Spr 1977. pp 99-100.

Still Life With Woodpecker

Hannah, Barry. “Tom Robbins and Other Outrages.” Washington Post Book World. Sep 28, 1980. p 5.

McConnell, Frank. “Should we trust a cuddly novelist?” Commonweal. Mar 13, 1981. pp 153-4.

Piercy, Marge. “Tom Robbins with a bad case of the cutes.” Chicago Tribune Book World. Sep 14, 1980. p 7:3.

Jitterbug Perfume

House, John. “They Brake for Unicorns.” New York Times Book Review. Dec 9, 1984. p 11.

“Jitterbug Perfume (review).” Frying Pan. Feb 1985. pp 30-5.

Ross, Mitchell. “The Beet Goes On.” National Review. Jun 28, 1985. pp 44-5.

Skinny Legs and All

Lemon, Lee. “Skinny Legs and All (review).” Prairie Schooner. Wtr 1990. p 129-30.

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Elbling, Peter. “Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song.” Los Angeles Times Book Review. Sep 25, 1994. p 3,11.

Karbo, Karen. “The Ocean’s Zither.” New York Times Book Review. Oct 30, 1994. p 27.

Wittenstein, Stuart. “Woo-woo Philosophizing (letter).” New York Times Book Review.” Oct 27, 1994. p 39.

Other Sources

American Heritage Electronic Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Ben-Zvi, Linda. Samuel Beckett. Twayne’s English Authors Series, ed. Kinley Roby. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986

Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft., 3d ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992.

Davidson, Benjamin. The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1981.

Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. trans. William Weaver. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.

Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: MacMillan, 1987.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Last Temptation of Christ. trans. Peter A. Bien. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

Klinkowitz, Jerome.The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1978.

Middleton, Darren. “Nikos Kazantzakis and Process Theology: Thinking Theologically in a Relational World.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies. 12:1, MAy 1994. pp 57-74.

Mitchell, Juliet and Jaqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. London: MacMillan, 1975.

Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Preniger, Alex and TVF Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Sayres, Sonya, et al, eds.. The 60s Without Apology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985.

Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. New York: Methuen, 1984.

---

[1]The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. p 125.

[2]The American Heritage Electronic Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

[3]Writing Degree Zero. trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. pp 10-11.

[4]Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Bantam, 1971. p 12. Hereafter cited within the text as Roadside. Robbins’ other novels, in order of publication, are Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Still Life With Woodpecker (1980), Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Skinny Legs and All (1991), and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994). All are published New York: Bantam, and will hereafter be cited within the text as, respectively, Cowgirls, Woodpecker, Jitterbug, Skinny Legs, and Frog Pajamas.

[5]From a letter to Axel Kaun, qtd. Linda Ben-Zvi. Samuel Beckett. Twayne’s English Authors Series, ed. Kinley E. Roby. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986. p 30.

[6]c.f. Christopher Norris’ statement, “Deconstruction is ... an activity of thought which cannot be consistently acted on — that way madness lies...,” from his introduction to Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York: Methuen, 1982. p xii.

[7]This has been the response of a large portion of Robbins’ audience, however. Robbins’ status as a “cult” novelist, and his complex relationship with his more devoted readers will be discussed separately.

[8]“Taking Tom Robbins Seriously.” Rolling Stone. Nov 17, 1977. p 66.

[9]“Butterfly Nut.” The Spectator. Mqr 24, 1973. p 366.

[10]“Another Roadside Attraction (review).” Publisher’s Weekly. Feb 22, 1971. p 139.

[11]Richard Centing. “Another Roadside Attraction (review).” Library Journal. May 15, 1971. p 1729.

[12]Centing, p 1729.

[13]“Another Roadside Attraction (review).” Publisher’s Weekly. Jun 19, 1972. p 61.

[14]Karbo, p 27.

[15]Stuart Wittenstein. “Woo-woo Philosophizing (letter).” New York Times Book Review. Nov 27, 1994. p 39.

[16]Indeed, his disparaging remarks about universities and critics appear with a frequency which begins to suggest not indifference but rather a hint of sour grapes.

[17]Barthes, pp 9-10.

[18]Tom Robbins. “A writer’s first obligation...” Fiction International 15:1, 1984. p 24.

[19]Mark R. Siegel. Tom Robbins. Western Writers Series, eds. Wayne Chatterton, James H. Maguire. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1980. p 7.

[20]qtd. Strelow, p 97.

[21]qtd. Strelow, p 97.

[22]c.f., for example, “West Coast Report.” Art in America. Nov 1968. pp 98-101.

[23]“Women, words and Tom Robbins.” USA Today. Oct 4, 1994. p C3.

[24]qtd. Bill Strickland. “Joy in Spite of Everything.” Writer’s Digest. Feb 1988. p 33. This is a two part interview. This, the first, will be cited hereafter as Strickland i; the second part, published in Mar 1988, will be cited as Strickland ii.

[25]Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New Accents, ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: Methuen, 1982. pp 101-2.

[26]Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 3d ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. p 269.

[27]qtd. Strickland i:32.

[28]Defined by the Princeton Handbook as “The misapplication of a word, especially in a strained or mixed metaphor or in an implied metaphor. It need not be a ridiculous misapplication... but may be a deliberate wresting of a term from its normal and proper significance” (45).

[29]qtd. Strickland i, p 33. Thus, he insists in Jitterbug, “There are no such things as synonyms” (206), and continues in Skinny Legs, via Can O’ Beans, “The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion” (72).

[30]“Confessions of a reluctant sex goddess.” Esquire, Feb 1993. p 72.

[31]Roadside also compares an afternoon sky to “a brain. Moist. Gray. Convoluted” (93).

[32]Burroway, p 274.

[33]Alex Preniger and TVF Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. p 45.

[34]Burroway, p 271.

[35]Besides, it does not seem unreasonable to examine Robbins’ finer conceits as, in fact, prose poems within the text. This makes particular sense in the context of the influences modernism and postmodernism have had on Robbins: is a Steinian Tender Button an example of poetry or prose?Indeed, Robbins told one interviewer, “On those days when I feel particularly pretentious, I figure I am...part prose poet.” -qtd Balzar 2. A San Francisco Chronicle review of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America suggested “Perhaps when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans,’ just as we now write novels. The man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful and right” [reprinted before text of the novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967]. This reviewer may be right; Brautigan’s vignettes are about the same length as Robbins’ conceits, and often written in a similar tone, but they lack what according to the Princeton Encyclopedia’s definition—and according to intuition—makes the conceit such a successful device in the hands of a linguistic mastercraftsman, poet or otherwise: an integration with the overall text, with the themes, and even, against all logical expectations, with the plot.

[36]In Roadside, he has the narrator reveal himself as one of the main characters two-thirds of the way through the book, and concludes it in first person; in Cowgirls, he actually writes himself in as a minor character who is privy to most of the plot. In the later works, he becomes more comfortable with simply using his position as omniscient narrator as a position from which to inject occasional commentaries or tangential observations. One other sidenote on the typewriter is that it is apparently based on reality: Robbins tells Strickland that he did, in fact, paint red the Remington on which he wrote the novel, and that rather than simply pull its plug at the end, he “ended up beating it to pieces with a 2 x 4 and throwing it in a garbage can” (ii: 33).

[37]Burroway, pp 62-3.

[38]Notably absent from this discussion is the most recent book, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. That book seems to be an experimental one for Robbins. The style — linguistic and philosophical — is more conventional in a number of ways, perhaps more radical in others. It will be treated for the most part in the final chapter; for now it is relevant only that conceit — and metaphor in general — does not play nearly as large a role in it as it does in the previous books.

[39]Elizabeth Wright. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. New York: Methuen, 1984. p 109.

[40]Jaqueline Rose. “Introduction - II” in Juliet Mitchell and Jaqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. London: Macmillan, 1975. p 41.

[41]Norris, 24.

[42]qtd. Strelow, p 101. Thus foregrounding the irony of Marx’s aside, “To those readers who may be also annoyed because this report is somewhat remiss in linear progression and does not scurry at a snappy pace from secondary climax to secondary climax to secondary climax to major climax as is customary in our best books, the writers is less apologetic. He is dealing with real events, which do not always unfold as neatly as even our more objective periodicals would have us believe, and he feels no obligation to entertain you with cheap literary tricks” (Roadside 171). The suggestion that plot, rather than metaphor, is a “cheap literary trick” is a typically Robbinsian reversal of cultural assumptions. Of course, Robbins also identifies Finnegan’s Wake as “certainly the most realistic novel ever written” (City Arts). He likewise insists that “Jackson Pollack [is] a realistic painter and Andrew Wyeth an abstract painter... Wyeth’s paintings are two-dimentional reductions of the three-dimensional world. Thus they’re abstract3ed from the external world. They are pictures of things. Pollack’s paintings don’t refer to things, they are things: independent, instrinsic, internal, holistic, real“ (McCaffery and Gregory 229).

[43]An amusing side note: in a pre-Christmas feature, the New York Times Book Review asked 21 writers, “If Santa Claus were the muse, what would you ask for?” Most responded, expressing varying degrees of modesty, with predictable requests for vocabulary, receptive audiences, perfect poems, elements of past writers’ powers, and so forth. A few were a more inventive, and Robbins, whose response was last, suggested, “Now don’t laugh, Santa, but I really think you ought to bring me a bag of golf clubs. True, I’ve never swung a metal stick in anger, and I’ve often made fun of those who do, but everyone keeps telling me that I need some normality in my life, and I have a feeling that golfing might provide it. Why, I might even join a country club. Or would they, like a lot of book reviewers, discriminate against me because I’m an extraterrestrial?” [”Wishing for Milton’s Power and Tolstoy’s Zaniness.” New York Times Book Review. Dec 8, 1985. pp 46-7.]

[44]Robbins actually first uses the device in Roadside: “Another Roadside Attraction is also a Sagittarian. But don’t jump to any conclusions” (180), and two other times in Cowgirls: “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues could find a parable in that [a bizarre anecdote about the Asian water mongoose’s feeding methods], if it wanted to — but that might be too far-fetched” (270); and “To Richard Condon, a dozen purple asters and a pound of goat cheese from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues“ (212).

[45]qtd. Strickland, ii:33.

[46]The predictable relationship between these two results in a repeated plot formula which will be discussed in the next chapter, along with the implications of the gendering of their relationship.

[47]City Arts of San Francisco, 1994.

[48]Much of Robbins’ earlier writing, particularly the Zillers’ suggestions about the nature of matter and energy in Roadside, or the Chink’s theories of time in Cowgirls, are derived from similar haphazard adaptations of modern theoretical physics. For a thorough analysis of this phenomenon in these two novels, see Robert Nadeau’s “Physics and Cosmology in the Fiction of Tom Robbins.” Critique. 20:1, 1978. pp 63-74.

[49]They also seem to be, incidentally, based in large part on John Paul and Amanda Ziller. Shell is nurturing and sympathetic; Stick aloof and somewhat over-mystical. Just as Ziller’s contribution to the discussion over the fate of the Corpse amounts to “an African (or was it Indian?) proverb which, in its atavistic convolutions, made so little sense I [Marx] cannot remember it” (Roadside 312), so the Stick, faced with a decision over a gravely wounded Can o’ Beans, “add[s] something amazing irrelevant about the moons of Saturn” (Skinny Legs 87).

[50]Tom Robbins. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. New York: Bantam, 1994. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as Frog Pajamas.

[51]qtd. Strickland, ii:31.

[52]qtd. Strickland, ii:33.

[53]qtd. Strickland i:32.

[54]Robert Scholes. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979. p 49.

[55]“Rain Forest and Old Plantation.” The New Republic. Jun 26, 1971. p 29.

[56]In fairness to Scholes, I have taken first third of what called his “pretty feeble fable... the shortest and clearest way to my view of the relations of allegory and realism to fiction” (50-1) essentially out of context. The text in which it appears does suggest a number of useful approaches to reading Robbins, although Robbins does not appear in Scholes’ work. Townsend’s thesis focuses on such approaches, though her analysis is somewhat lacking in depth of reading.

[57]It should be reemphasized, though, that the philosophy is ultimately secondary to the language. When, as in Woodpecker, language loses its position as first priority, the philosophy becomes an impediment to the reader’s apprehension of the style, rather than the facilitator it is meant to be: as Barry Hannah begins his review of the book, “This book is clogged with a lot of Thought.” [”Tom Robbins and Other Outrages.” Washington Post Book World. Sep 28, 1980. p 5.]

[58]qtd. Balzar, p 2.

[59]Tom Robbins. “A Mix of Mahatma Gandhi & W. C. Fields.” San Francisco Chronicle Review. Sep 28, 1980. p 11. A “self-interview” is an unusual form, with much potential to descend into vapidity, as is evident from the title alone. What it ensures, however, is that the issues Robbins raises in it are ones that are particularly important to him — or at least very much on his mind at that moment — and that his statements have been carefully reviewed and revised before publication, again, something of particular concern to him.

[60]for example, Mitchell, p 30.

[61]p 66. One of these 17, Jesus by Charles Guignebert, finds its way into the novel, itself, as a reference Marx Marvelous uses in deciding his opinion on what to do with the “Corpse” (274-5).

[62]This view is not without literary precedent. Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, for instance, presents a manipulative Paul: “I don’t give a hoot about what’s true and what’s false, or whether I saw him or didn’t see him, or whether he was crucified or wasn’t crucified. I create the truth, create it out of obstinacy and longing and faith. I don’t struggle to find it—I build it.... I shall become your apostle whether you like it or not. I shall construct you and your life and your teachings and your crucifixion and resurrection just as I wish.” [trans. P. A. Bien. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. p 477-8]. Umberto Eco offers an even more cynical suggestion by way of a half-facetious proposal in Foucault’s Pendulum: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one’s free to take it and run with it. At the end, they’ll see who’s done the best job.... Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what’s happening, it’s too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worries emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends to know plenty.” [trans. William Weaver. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988. p 161.]

[63]“For years I had attended Sunday school. I also was subjected to a lot of Southern Baptist training at home. So I knew that Jesus was supposed to be ‘the big man,’ my hero. But then I saw my first Tarzan movie, and after that Jesus just didn’t cut the mustard. I continued to like Jesus, and I still admire the myth — he’s still a sort of hero of mine. In ARA I have a dialogue between Tarzan and Jesus which was an attempt to resolve, I suppose, all those conflicts in my early years when Jesus and Tarzan were com­pet­ing — Jesus quite unsuccessfully, as it turned out — for being my main man.” (qtd. McCaffery 233)

[64]A union, incidentally, albeit a much less happy one, which Kazantzakis attributes to Jesus. (See the Prologue to The Last Temptation of Christ, pp 1-2.)

[65]qtd. Mitchell, p 33.

[66]qtd. Rogers, p 69.

[67]Whether by coincidence or influence, this view of religion is similar — albeit considerably simplified — to that of Kazantzakis; see Darren J. N. Middleton. “Nikos Kazantzakis and Process Theology: Thinking Theologically in a Relational World.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies. 12:1, May 1994. pp 57-74.

[68]It should also be emphasized that here, as in Roadside, Robbins takes care to separate Jesus from Christianity; the “pulpits of churches, mosques, and synagogues, where deathist dogmas of judgment, punishment, self-denial, martyrdom, and afterlife supremacy are preached” (325) fall, along with the Pentagon and the Kremlin, under the rubric of “reptilian forces.”

[69]Randy Sue Coburn. “Will real Robbins please stand up?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nov 11, 1984. p 8-B. This article was widely republished under various titles.

[70]“Jitterbug Perfume (book review).” Frying Pan. Feb 1985. p 31.

[71]Benjamin Davidson. The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1981. p 102.

[72]Davidson, p 618.

[73]William J. Fulco. “Astarte.” Encyclopedia of Religion. ed Mircea Eliade. New York: Macmillan, 1987. vol I, p 471.

[74]William J. Fulco. “Baal.” Encyclopedia of Religion. ed Mircea Eliade. New York: Macmillan, 1987. vol II, p 31.

[75]Fulco, “Astarte,” p 471.

[76]Fulco, “Astarte,” p 471.

[77]Robbins made this last point about religion almost verbatim three years earlier, shortly before he started Skinny Legs. (McCaffery, p 233).

[78]For another example, to offset the “three outlawed Islamic cults” who claim responsibility for bombing the rest­aur­ant jointly run by a Jew and an Arab, he adds “three militant Zionist groups” and “a fundamentalist Christian gang known as the Little Matches of Jesus” (140-1), all making the same claim. The first have at least some basis in reality; the latter do not. However militant, Zionist groups are not terrorist organizations; moreover, they would hardly be concerned with a New York restaurant; there is likewise little factual basis for Christian terrorism in America.

[79]He also ignores their rituals involving human sacrifices. In this, at least, Pan seems a better model; while there were occasional excesses in the Greek fertility and nature cults, they never approached that sort of practice.

[80]The penultimate line of Woodpecker, likewise, is “Everything is a part of it” (276).

[81]It is indicative, incidentally, of Robbins’ view of nostalgic paganism — sympathetic but not sanctioning— that while Alobar and Kudra cared for Pan, neither of them ever treated him as a divine figure; they certainly never worshipped him.

[82]Allowing oneself to be standardized can have even more sinister consequences; as Abu comments in Skinny Legs, “Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver” (338).

[83]Although he is essentially echoing Dolores at her most conciliatory, Wrangle here speaks in a tone which is aggressive, bordering on belligerent. This tone pervades much of his speech, as well as the narrator’s, throughout the novel; even Dolores, a relatively minor figure in Cowgirls, fully characterized as a stereotypical militant femin­ist, is not as heavy handed. Both the earlier and later books convey similar ideas much more subtly; lack of subtlety is in fact one of Woodpecker’s most serious flaws. House writes, “Where ‘Cowgirls’ went in for humorous digs, ‘Still Life’ went humorously for the throat.... The message was still there, but it had become the harangue of a way­ward-genius bomber.... It was clever, accessible, and obvious, but it betrayed more cleverness than insight” (11).

[84]A cigarette pack may nonetheless appear to be a somewhat frivolous symbol on which to base a novel, but not if it is considered in view of Robbins’ larger consideration of objecthood. Bernard precedes his explanation of the packaging, “You’ve found a key to wisdom in the Camel pack. It’s certainly one of the more portentous of our sacred objects. But there’s lots of others. Personally, I find the kitchen match particularly rich in symbolism, and Dippidty-Do hair-set gel is an open invitation to participate in the Tantric aspects of the divine” (253).

[85]A twelfth-century nymph discussing the concept of individuality is something like George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, set during the Hundred Years War, predicting nationalism and Protestantism. It is not necessarily a flaw of the narrative, but it does tend to destroy what little medieval atmosphere the scenes with Alobar and Kudra possess in the first place. This is not surprising; history for Robbins, as will be discussed below, is useful only in terms of lessons for the present and future. Alobar needs to spend time in the middle ages simply because he cannot live a thousand years in the late 20th century, but he is in reality a thoroughly modern character.

[86]Ross, p 76.

[87]In general, too, the flat pseudo-villains discussed above tend to be overwhelmingly male, throughout Robbins’ novels.

[88]An interesting side-note: Robbins swears that when he began Cowgirls, the novel starred a man named Junior, deciding after a hundred pages, “Something was wrong, so I sent him to Denmark and gave him a sex change operation” (qtd. Balzar 2) He makes this claim in his City Artsinterview as well.

[89]“Such Style.” New Statesman. Aug 12, 1977. p 219.

[90]Karbo, p 27.

[91]Rogers, p 70.

[92]Mitchell, p 32.

[93]Take, for example, an aside from Cowgirls at the start of Chapter 71: “Prairie. Isn’t that a pretty word? Rolls off the tongue like a fat little moon. Prairie must be one of the prettiest words in the English language. No matter that it’s French. It’s derived from the Latin word for “meadow” plus a feminine suffix. A prairie, then, is a female meadow. It is larger and wilder than a masculine meadow (which the dictionary defines as “pasture” or “hayfield”), more coarse, more oceanic and enduring, supporting a greater variety of life” (221). Thus Robbins not only finds the Goddess in the sensual, untamed, fertile prairie, but sets her explicitly against the “pasture” or “hayfield,” stripped of its natural beauty by agriculture, feminine Nature subverted by masculine exploitation.

[94]Originally printed as “Is feminismo destroying feminism?: A look at my sexism” in The Seattle Weekly, Jun 21, 1978, pp 12-15, and widely syndicated in a number of newspapers over the course of the summer.

[95]“Feminismo,” p 12.

[96]“Feminismo,” p 12.

[97]The Chink offers another example of androidism with respect to the sixties’ revival of interest in nature: “to worship the natural at the exclusion of the unnatural is to practice Organic Fascism... And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.... To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon is sophistry; it’s smug sophistical skunkshit” (Cowgirls 224).

[98]Caroll Smith-Rosenberg. “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936.” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York : A.A. Knopf, 1985. pp 245-96.

[99]For all his bravado here, Robbins is apparently sensitive to politicized gender concerns, at least where they involve language. He adds an Author’s Note to Cowgirls, starting, “Throughout this book I have used third person pronouns and collective nouns in the masculine gender. To those readers who may be offended by this, I apologize sincerely. Unfortunately, there are at this time no alternatives that do not either create confusion or impede the flow of language; which is to say, there are no acceptable alternatives. Here’s hoping that when and if I publish again, there will be” (xi). Incidentally, I agree with Robbins wholeheartedly in this respect, and I take his statement to apply to this paper as well.

[100]He addressed this point earlier in the year in his interview with Ross, “The [feminist] movement as a whole, I think, is maybe the most important social movement to occur in a thousand years. I think many of the women involved in it don’t understand it. How can I, a male, say that a woman doesn’t understand the feminist movement? Well, I can never know what it’s like to be a woman at the gut level, but I’ve probably read more about the origins of femininity, about matriarchal societies, than most of the women involved in the feminist movement. I have a historical and philosophical perspective on it” (76). Robbins does not indicate just what his sources are, nor does he explain the nature of his “historical and philosophical perspective,” but he clearly points to what he imagines to be an early, purer manifestation of feminism untarnished by political implications. To extent to which such a feminism existed is debatable — the archæologic and anthropologic evidence for matriarchal societies is debatable, and it could be argued that the modern feminist movement was political from its inception — but a number of his arguments regarding “group solutions” are well presented.

[101]At this point, incidentally, Robbins begins to sound remarkably like the Woodpecker; he had recently begun work on the third novel when he wrote the article, and the narrator of that novel occasionally uses “android” to describe the self-righteous victims of “tunnel vision.”

[102]“Feminismo,” pp 13-5.

[103]qtd. Ross, p 76.

[104]Robbins-as-narrator does have a tendency, especially in the early novels, to fall in love with his female protagonists, at least in part because of the romance he writes into their lives; Whitmer aptly concludes, “Tom Robbins is a heroine addict” (240).

[105]Mitchell, p 23.

[106]qtd. Mitchell pp 22-3.

[107]There is never, however, even a shadow of male homosexuality anywhere in Robbins’ writing.

[108]Balzar, p 2. This anecdotal evidence is a clear disproof of Testerman’s prediction of a feminist reaction diametrically opposed to Robbins’ anti-political stance: “feminists and lesbians, I suspect, will be angered by the book. Highly committed people, people who live every day sensitive to injustice, find it difficult to have a sense of humor about themselves. In their view, literature about women should be serious. Is should serve the cause by attacking abuses, proposing reforms, suggesting healthy attitudes. It should be political.... A male writer trying to please these readers is like an American at the Olympics diving to please the Russian judge....” (149-50) Testerman’s view is of course itself a rather dated analysis of the political feminism, but his views in reality are probably not too far from Robbins’ at that time.

[109]Should there be any doubt about her feminism, in the New York Times’ Santa Claus-as-muse article (in which Robbins asked for golf clubs), Angelou addresses herself to “Ms. Claus,” and devotes most of her request to an expression of admiration for her female predecessors and contemporaries.

[110]The women of Frog Pajamas — Q-Jo Huffington, a 300-pound psychic, and Gwen Mati, an avaricious Filipino stockbroker — represent a marked shift away from this formula.

[111]“Tom Robbins’ Culture: The Brain Takes Its Lumps.” New Boston Review. III:3, Dec 1977. p 6.

[112]Frank McConnell points out, incidentally, that Robbins’ development as a narrator — his gradual withdrawal as a character — can in fact be seen in terms of this infatuation: “In Another Roadside Attraction the implied and wished-for mating [between Marx and Amanda] actually takes place; in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues it [between Dr. Robbins and Sissy] may or may not occur after the last sentence in the book; in Still Life With Woodpecker it can never occur, just because the writer of fiction has finally admitted that he is a writer of fiction, that there is no way through his electric typewriter... to the wonderfully sexy heroine he and the typewriter invent” [Should we trust a cuddly novelist?” Commonweal. Mar 13, 1981. p 154.]. Minor criticisms of this construction might be: first, that Dr. Robbins gives himself a better chance with Sissy than “may or may not,” for as the narrator of the novel, he is presumably recounting from more than a day away from the action, and already knows the result; his tone and rhetorical questions imply success. Second — this is truly a minor point — whether fairly or not, Robbins would certainly deny the Remington any credit whatsoever in the crafting of Leigh-Cheri.

[113]It should be noted that while the Robbinsesque philosophers who populate the novels refuse to be viewed as gurus to the general public, they play essentially that very role to their young female protégés, all their bluster against spiritual dictation notwithstanding.

[114]An obvious excpetion is Roadside, which has Marx and Amanda playing reversed roles. Interestingly, despite her invocation, like other Robbinsian (anti-)gurus, of utopian matriarchal societies, Amanda makes a comment fairly early on which is as opposed to gender classification as Robbins ever is: she says condescendingly to Marx, referring to his pseudo-scientific need to classify and categorize: “It’s what you would call a feminine reaction. You wouldn’t appreciate it even if I explained it” (149).

[115]Oldenburg, p C3.

[116]City Arts of San Francisco.

[117]“The Genius Waitress.” Playboy. Dec 1994, p 144.

[118]Perhaps recalling Hemingway, Robbins drawn another style-based parallel between sex and bullfighting in Jitterbug: “A bartender’s beauty is in his moves. Like a lover’s, like a matador’s. The finished product means little: a spent orgasm, a dead bull. Satiation and stringy beef” (110).

[119]Hall, p 105.

[120]Rose, p 137.

[121]qtd. Strickland ii, p 36.

[122]qtd. Ross, p 76.

[123]qtd. Strelow, p 102.

[124]qtd. Ross, p 77. He gives a similar speech, incidentally, to Ellen Cherry in Skinny Legs.

[125]qtd. Mitchell, p 30.

[126]Whitmer, p 247. House suggests, further, that Wiggs’ musings on the evolution of human consciousness recollect “Mr. Leary’s versions of the ages of man” (11).

[127]Sonya Sayres, et. al., eds. The 60s Without Apology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. p 2.

[128]“Periodizing the 60s.” in Sonya Sayres, et. al., eds. The 60s Without Apology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. p 180.

[129]Classic Cult Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. p xiii.

[130]qtd. Rogers, p 67.

[131]Presumably, it is the early leaders’ philosophical backgrounds and contributions that exempt them from Robbins’ interdict against politics. His view of their absolute intellectual superiority may be somewhat romanticized, but Robbins is hardy alone in his discontent at the caliber of most modern political figures.

[132]New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1978.

[133]Robbins’ position on the spectrum is debatable. He draws from both the Right and the Left, but perhaps most importantly, he would resist any attempts to classify him in terms of the spectrum. Indeed, his politics seems to be essentially centrist, but centrist constructed only in opposition to the extremes. Marge Piercy, writing on Woodpecker, offers, “The philosophy is Ayn Rand with more up to date sex roles.... essentially right-wing anarchism” [”Tom Robbins with a bad case of the cutes.” Chicago Tribune Book World. Sep 14, 1980. p 7:3.]. The analogy to Ayn Rand seems accurate, assuming the reference is to Rand’s original individualism, not to the politically-charged “objectivism” which arose from her work; to call Robbins “right-wing,” is certainly unfair. Beyond his ideas of individual responsibility, he shares little with the political or moral Right in this country. No doubt the animosity is bilateral; it seems unlikely that his views on psychedelics, money, sex, and religion would be welcome in current Republican —or, for that matter, Democratic — circles.

[134]Lasch, p xv.

[135]Lasch’s association with radical movements of glorifying the past ignores the fact that the same idea of a lost “golden age” can be put to quite the opposite use: the Oxford Movement in Victorian England, for example, responded to the social unrest of the era with calls for a return to the values of a romanticized medieval period. Likewise, the American Right today evades objective evaluation of many social problems by blaming them on the decline of ill-defined “family values.”

[136]Lasch, pp xvi-xvii.

[137]Though again, as with deconstruction, he would never formalize his philosophy in these terms.

[138]Indeed, he is an avid volleyball player, and recommends handball or other physical activities to aspiring writers, “something physical to keep you in your physical body.” (Strickland, II:p 36).

[139]p xviii.

[140]Interestingly, in this case the Government works against the forces of apocalypse: the FBI counters the Third Temple Platoon and an un-named but obviously identifiable (as are all Robbins’ presidential and vice-presidential cameos) Dan Quayle convinces Buddy not to act. (Of course, lest he be mistaken for a leader, Robbins also has Quayle drinking Miller Lite and urinating in the bushes of a D.C.-suburb McDonald’s.)

[141]Robbins makes similar comments to Whitmer, who concludes, “In Robbins’s view, the 1960s were an abortion evolutionary leap” (247), the abortion of which was caused by its politicization: “...what happened in the Sixties was only secondarily political. First and foremost it was a spiritual phenomenon.... ¶ The magic of the Sixties, the triumph of the Sixties, began to dissipate when we took our eyes off the spiritual ball and shifted our focus to the political fallout from our spiritual advances. ¶ Next time, I want us to get it right” (qtd. 247).

[142]qtd. Mitchell, p 30.

[143]qtd. Whitmer, p 242.

[144]qtd. McCaffery, p 231.

[145]He makes this connection particularly explicit in Roadside: Amanda asks Nearly Normal Jimmy, “do you think it an accident, a mere coincidence, that LSD became available to the public, was thrust into the consciousness of the West, at precisely the time of the invasion [and closure to the West] of Tibet?” (55).

[146]Mitchell, p 29.

[147]Waugh, p 366. Robbins, too, writing now in the mid-seventies suggests that drugs can be as at least as deadening as conformity: “Many of [the cowgirls’] peers have surrendered: jumped back with broken spirits into the competitive System or withdrawn into a private mushbowl — ‘spaced out,’ they call it, though ‘ambulatory catatonia’ might be a more accurate description” (Cowgirls 229).

[148]qtd. Whitmer, p 247.

[149]Whitmer, p 247.

[150]Balzar, p 2.

[151]This does not seem to be a case of Robbins investing his hero with a trait of which he disapproves: in discussing the “discovery” and subsequent decline of LaConner, the small Washington town to which he eventually returned, he writes, “On the heels of developers came cocaine dealers who thought we bumpkins wouldn’t know the difference if they cut our whiff with laundry detergent. I sneezed all the way to Burlington” [”Why I Live Where I Live.” Esquire, Oct 1980. p 82.].

[152]Steven Dougherty. “Cowgirls may get the blues, but not Tom Robbins, who pours it on in Jitterbug Perfume.” People. Apr 1, 1985. p 123.

[153]Terence McKenna. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

[154]Ross, p 72. Ross’ article, like Karbo’s review, incidentally, elicited a number of disdainful responses, published in the Mar 19, 1978 issue of the New York Times Magazine, p 110.

[155]Rogers, p 66.

[156]Ross, p 77.

[157]Mitchell Ross. “The Beet Goes On.” National Review, Jun 28, 1985. p 45.

[158]qtd. Mitchell, p 33.

[159]Timothy Dutton. “Behind the best sellers.” New York Times Book Review. Oct 19, 1980. p 58.

[160]see, for example, Paul S. Nathan. “Border Crossing.” Publishers Weekly. Apr 4, 1977. p 52. Sibyl Steinberg notes that Cowgirls was the first novel ever to be bought first by a paperback publishing house (Bantam), which then sold off the paperback rights (to Houghton Mifflin). “Tom Robbins.” Publishers Weekly. May 25, 1990. p 41.

[161]Ross, p 16.

[162]Ross, p 86.

[163]“Paperback School of Literature (letters)”. New York Times Magazine. Mar 19, 1978. p 110.

[164]“Bantam Will Test 3-Way Publishing.” New York Times. Feb 4, 1980. p C16.

[165]Coburn, p 8-B.

[166]Dutton, p 58.

[167]“Tom Robbins favors his fans.” Denver Post. Apr 10, 1990. p E1. Robbins’ book-signings are not always exactly conventional, however. A few years ago, one Nicholas Palmer wrote a book entitled Fuck Yes: A Guide to the Happy Acceptance of Everything, under the pseudonym Wing Fu Fing, M.D.. The book’s philosophy, and elements of its language, are reminiscent of — if inferior to — Robbins’, and a rumor began to circulate widely that the book was Robbins’. (That the pseudonym could recall Cowgirls’ the Chink probably fed the rumor.) A number of fans gave Robbins copies to sign, which he did without comment. Palmer is now suing him under the Lantham Act, which forbids false statements in connection with the sale of goods. The lawsuit seems dubious; as a spokesman for Robbins told the Washington Post: “He signs almost anything [his fans] thrust in front of him. On his last tour, Tom also signed Barbara Bush’s memoir and two copies of the Bible. He didn’t write those, either.” [”Signing to Oblige.” Washington Post Book World. Dec 25, 1994. p 15.

[168]qtd. Steinberg, p 42.

[169]City Arts of San Francisco.

[170]City Arts of San Francisco.

[171]Rogers, p 67. Robbins makes a similar comment to Strelow: “The establishment critics hate [Henry] Miller. They deny his magnificence because he is an active threat to their values, both personal and literary. I would like to think that I might be capable of presenting a similar threat. To be eternally subversive, that should be my goal” (qtd. Strelow 101-2).

[172]Which is indeed vital to an understanding of Robbins’ audience: Whissen notes, “What the critic must look into first is the climate of the times in which the book appeared and caught on, and that look must take into account not only the sociological, political, and economic environment but especially the cultural milieu--in short, the Zeitgeist, in order to figure out what factors contributed to the ease with which so many minds became spontaneously receptive to particular influences at that particular time” (xii).

[173]There seems, incidentally, to be a need among writers on the sixties to encapsulate the era inside fixed dates. Wiggs, for example, offers 1964 to 1971 (Jitterbug, 248), and Jameson suggests the decolonization movements of the late fifties through 1972-74 (pp 180-3).

[174]Whissen, pp 14-5.

[175]Mitchell, p 33.

[176]Whissen corroborates, “As dogmatic systems of imposed belief and behavior give way to liberal philosophies based on questioning and individual responsibility, cult books are necessary waystations along the road to discovery and enlightenment. Their strength lies not so much in their answers but in the questions they raise or keep alive” (xxxviii).

[177]qtd. Ross, p 77, an echo of a statement he made to Mitchell (33). Ross replies, “I think Robbins is reading his fan mail too literally. I also think he gives his characters credit for doing things that they do not do. To say that squabbling with the Federal authorities over Christ’s body... or with the Interior Department over whooping cranes is ‘looking the beast of totalitarianism straight in the chops’ is the mistake caricature for character.” While he is right in suggesting that these conflicts are caricatures — this is particularly true with respect to Robbins’ crafting of the government agents — he ignores their symbolic value, which, however playfully or irreverently presented, is what makes them significant.

[178]Whissen, p xii.

[179]qtd. Mitchell, p 30.

[180]Jameson, p 194.

[181]Indeed, should there be any doubt about the problems inherent in trying to categorize Robbins — or in distinguishing between modern and postmodern — while Whitmer dubs Robbins the “Post-Modern Intellectual Outlaw” (246), Raymond Wilson refers confidently to Cowgirls as “A Synthesis of Modernism.” [Prairie Schooner. 51:1, Spr 1977. p 99].

[182]Balzar, p 2.

[183]“A writer’s first obligation...,” p 24.

[184]qtd. McCaffery and Gregory, p 239.

[185]House, p 11.

[186]Lemon, p 130.

[187]Egan, p C1.

[188]Indeed, Peter Elbling suggests an ever older model: “‘Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas’ is really an old-fashioned romance novel in which a sexually repressed heroine has her body and mind blown by a charming outlaw” [”Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song.” Los Angeles Times Book Review. Sep 25, 1994. p 3.]

[189]City Arts of San Francisco.

[190]“A Mix of Mahatma Ghandi...,” p 11.

[191]In his City Arts radio interview, Robbins is quick to point out that this is Larry’s view, not necessarily his, and that it coexists in the novel with Gwen’s fear-driven resentment of the homeless and Belford’s — the “dorky boyfriend” who is essentially Cowgirls’ Julian revived with better intentions and a better physique — Belford’s “lib­eral guilt”-driven compassion for them. His bias is abundantly clear, however, in the eloquence with which each character is allowed to present his or her view, and even in Robbins’ description of each in the interview.

[192]qtd. Egan, p C9. Larry expresses similar sentiments, “Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation” (Frog Pajamas 158).

[193]As Cloonan writes of Robbins’ attitude in the first two, “The roads traveled in these books lead to no inner core of being, to no great psychological complexities. And only rarely to New York. New York is the urban wasteland par excellence: cold, sterile, and filled with liberal intellectuals who persist, against all evidence to the contrary, in finding the intricacies of their psyches to be of more than passing interest. The real trip is Westward...” (5).

[194]The extraterrestrial theme is apparently another throwback to Woodpecker, in which Bernard proposes a master race of Redbeards from the planet Argon (a somewhat banal reference, presumably, to Superman’s Krypton), who build up ancient human civilizations via “pyramid power.” Likewise, his descriptions of the “visiting faculty at the University of Timbuktu” recall Woodpecker’s Outlaw U.

[195]Which should be read, incidentally, not as an indication of an overactive — or psychedelia-inspired — imagination, but rather as further evidence of Robbins’ incorporation of ethnic mythologies (his attraction to which he bestows on Amanda in Roadside; see, for example, p. 168) and popular culture in his novels: benevolent aliens from the Sirian system are in fact part of the American UFO folklore as well as that of the Dogon in Africa, just as many of the ideas regarding enlightenment via psychedelics are derived from McKenna. What is interesting with regard to the level of fantasy is that in writing this book, for the first time, Robbins felt compelled to include an Author’s Note at the end of the text, pointing the reader to additional sources regarding the “Bozo-Dogon-Sirius connection.”

[196]“Confessions...,” p 72.

[197]qtd. Strickland i, 33.

[198]Jameson, p 194.