Comparing the way Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer turn similar phenomena into symbolical grotesques tells us much about the use of this device of the sage in other related forms of contemporary nonfiction. In The Pump House Gang (1968) and other early writings, Wolfe constructs entire essays — he calls them "stories" in the first sentence of his introduction — upon a single grotesque phenomenon that he makes a Sign of the Times. "The Put-Together Girl," for instance, takes the form of a profile of Carol Doda, a dancer in a San Francisco nightspot who acquired a brief moment of notoriety by having her breasts injected with silicone until they ballooned into a technological parody of female secondary sexual characteristics. Wolfe begins his examination of what happens when one violates nature by describing Doda in a particularly appropriate setting, the stunted urban landscape that both provides the background for her daily life as a nightclub entertainer and also embodies the essential problems of which she is a living emblem.
Wolfe begins, therefore, on San Francisco's Broadway, a section of which contains the city's "skin-show nightclubs, boho caves . . . and 'colorful' bars with names like Burp Hollow. There is one tree on Broadway. It is about three inches in diameter, about 12 feet tall, and has 342 minute leaves on it and a tin anti-urine sleeve around the bottom. Carol Doda was standing under this tree as if it could hide her" while someone tries to get her a cab." She cannot stand out in the street and signal one herself, because "there is no telling what would happen or how many flaming nutballs would stop or — who the hell knows what? — because of 'them,' them being her breasts" (83).
Writing without the magisterial tone and diction of the Victorian sages, Wolfe adopts those of the people he is dissecting and alternates between a fairly formal analytic prose spiced by a few words or terms employed by his subjects and one learned from Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner that he uses to get inside their consciousness, often so he can at the end attack them the more savagely. Wolfe begins his wry consideration of a person who forces us to examine our notions of the limits and definitions of the natural and the human with a snapshot of bleak, starved nature. This ambiguous image of the puny tree clearly represents whatever natural exists in this part of Carol Doda's world: Someone cares enough about preserving a bit of nature to have placed a metal sleeve around the base of its trunk to protect it from dog urine, but that artifact around the base of this starved, pathetic exemplar of nature only emphasizes how little of the natural still exists — and that it is losing the battle for survival — in this world. As Wolfe makes us recognize by the close of "The Put-Together Girl," nature, which Doda has tried to reject, cannot protect her and threatens its revenges upon her. After thus presenting to us an emblematic picture of Carol Doda and her surroundings, Wolfe begins to explain what she has done, why she has done it, what benefits she has received, and what they have cost her — all of which facts together reveal her as someone representative of the modern world and hence as a warning about its dangers. He follows his initial mention of them, her breasts, by cataloguing the adverse effects they have had upon her life: Old Italian women walk by and call her a witch because of them, other women accuse her of being a prostitute because of them, and "grown men wearing rep ties and just emerging from long ... liquid lunches walk by her and grin and aim their fingers at her like needles or guns or something and say, 'Pop! Pop!' — because of them" (84). Even she has begun to think of her artificially enlarged breasts as if they are not a part of her but possessions, things she has acquired that now dominate her existence. They provide her with a living and notoriety, if not fame, but they become the major fact in her relationships with other people, men or women. They have cost her the old easy-going relationship she used to have with her audience when she was just a dancer at the Condor. She can no longer walk in the street or even sleep normally since lying on her stomach or side produces too much discomfort. In return, she has become something of a celebrity — one of San Francisco's resources, mocks Wolfe and she enjoys the fact that crowds line up outside the nightclub to see her. Every night, seven nights a week, she dances standing on a piano as it is lowered to an eagerly awaiting audience, and although she is virtually nude, almost no one notices that fact, they are so eagerly craning their heads and waiting for them. When the piano finally descends, the audience sees the perfect Put-Together Girl, a parodic embodiment of all American tendencies to make something of oneself.
The piano settles down, Carol Doda is on top of it dancing the Swim, the jerk, the Frug, the Jump, the Spasm, the — her face is up above there like a pure white mask, an Easter Egg yellow explosion of hair on top, a pair of eyes with lashes like two sets of military shoe brushes, ice-white lips, two arms writhing around, her whole ilial complex writhing around, but all just a sort of pinwheel rosette for them. Carol Doda's breasts are up there the way one imagines Electra's should have been, two incredible mammiform protrusions, no mere pliable mass of feminine tissues and fats there but living arterial sculpture — viscera spigot — great blown-up aureate morning-glories. (85)
Wolfe's description, which makes his repugnance clear, emphasizes that good old-fashioned animal sexuality has been neither the goal nor the result of Doda's silicone injections. However wrong, however unnatural we might find her transformation, it relates only distantly to sexuality and sexual pleasure. Indeed, her entire performance, nudity and all, contains little of the conventional striptease and remains conspicuously unerotic. As Wolfe points out, "it is not a strip tease, it is no kind of tease, it is an animated cartoon, like the old Tom & Jerry cartoons where Tom, the cat, sees the bulldog coming and about forty-four sets of round white eyes — boing — go springing out of his eye sockets." Her routine has none of the bumps and grinds of the old-time burlesque house, and she seems absolutely unconscious of sexuality as she unsmilingly dances "like any little high school bud from the garden apartment next door at the Saturday-night dance bumping away doing the Monkey under a strawberry Feather Duster coiffure while her mother looks on from the side with a pleasant smile on her face as if to say, Well, yes, Carmen is very social" (86). As Wolfe's sardonic analogy makes clear, he sees Carol Doda as typically American and typically modern in her conventional, unerotic use of the erotic.
In revealing the short distance that separates the high school bud, an ordinary adolescent, from this Put-Together Girl, Wolfe in Carlylean fashion provides a voice for contemporary phenomena, and like Carlyle, he invents an unidentified representative speaker. This voice tells us that Carol Doda's doctor has a long waiting list of women, "not showgirls," who want silicone injections: "Well, why," the voice asks, "should any woman wait — wait for what? — when the difference between dreariness and appeal is just a few centimeters of solid tissue here, a line stretched out there, a little body packing in the old thigh, under the wattles there — or perfect breasts? The philosophy of 'You have only one life to live, why not live it as a blonde?' — that is merely the given" (89). Claiming that even "conservative" New York hardly has left any older women with undyed hair, this California voice asks why people still speak of "'the natural order'? Such an old European idea — one means, well, the wheel violated the natural order, for god's sake; hot and cold running water violated it; wall ovens, spice bars, Reddi-Tap keg beer and Diz-Pos Alls fracture the natural order — what are a few cubic centimeters of silicone?" (89-90). A possible invitation to a visit by deformity or death, it turns out, says Wolfe, but the voice takes no account of such dangers.
This voice, which defends silicone injections as the typical action of a typical American woman, in one sense is the idealized voice and consciousness of Doda herself, but I believe it is better understood as the voice of Modem America, which elevates artificiality above the natural without recognizing its cost. What makes Wolfe's parodic defense of such extensions of technology into our lives devastatingly effective is that he so thoroughly captures all the usual arguments for self-improvement. But what makes it resonate so disturbingly is that however much its colloquialisms and slovenly thinking undercut this defense, it embodies the fundamental assumptions, albeit in vulgarized form, of America and indeed all modern Western industrial democracies. We have the assumption, prevalent in advanced thought since the French Revolution, that nature and the natural set no limits for human beings — only evil societies do that — and therefore we can be anything we wish. The modern faith in technology, which implements such assumptions, has produced antibiotics and wall ovens, modem sanitation and silicone-injected breasts. And although we might be tempted to respond that Wolfe's voice of the age has made a basic error by thus glibly claiming that the wheel, plumbing, and silicone-enhanced breasts are all technological improvements that violate natural order, we find distinguishing among them on these grounds difficult, and Wolfe does not assist us.
Although he does not help us answer these crucial questions about where the proper limits between nature and technological artifice lie, he does, in the manner of the sage, reveal further meaning in "The Put-Together Girl." First, Wolfe makes clear that the germ of this particular technological distortion of the ;human body lies in male attitudes toward women's bodies. Second, he shows that women's willingness to conform to men's attitudes arises, not out of sexual needs, but out of the universal need to acquire stature for oneself. After having the voice defend silicone injections as just another example of modern technological improvement, Wolfe includes a paragraph of straightforward exposition that sets forth some of the obvious physical dangers of these injections, and he points out that women in California and Nevada are nonetheless willing to risk cancer or other as yet unknown illnesses themselves, and they are also willing to risk the health of their teenage daughters "because they aren't developing fast enough to ... compete; well, Carmen is social. And actually it's such a simple thing in a man's world where men have such simple ideas" (90; ellipsis in original). Carol Doda, then, exists in Tom Wolfe's essay as a symptom and a warning — a Sign of the Times — of modem man's pathetic attempts to create importance for himself in the absence of natural and other standards. The specific occasion of the warning is a young woman who has had her breasts enlarged with injections of a silicone compound to make something of herself, and like so many of us, implies Wolfe, she has made something artificial and unnatural of herself. She embodies the dangers of modem technology, the absurd relations between men and women, and the results of a universal drive for status and significance, one that Wolfe apparently finds more influential in a well-fed modem society than those of hunger or sexuality.
Like Carlyle, Wolfe takes apparently trivial contemporary phenomena as his subject and reveals that they provide unexpected ways into a nation's state of mind and soul. Furthermore, like the orthodox sage, he expends considerable energy mocking contemporary destructions of language and explaining what some key words mean, though often from his subject's and not his own point of view. As we shall see in chapter 4, he also acts like those sages who purport to be Masters of Experience, promising to give accounts of phenomena from the inside and thus providing experiential truths otherwise unobtainable to us. At the same time, he is an expert at creating credibility for the seer's voice that dominates his many excursions into the weird and wacky world of the sixties and seventies. Nonetheless, in "The Put-Together Girl" and similar writings Wolfe is not writing as a sage in the manner of Carlyle and Thoreau because his works lack two chief requirements of the genre: Writing as a brilliant satirist, he has no positive program and no final, solacing vision; and furthermore, because he does not have such a positive program, he does not employ the full prophetic pattern. His brilliantly mordant pieces begin by picking up some bit of grotesque contemporary trivia which he then interprets, and although his interpretations contain implicit judgments and warnings for his audience, he neither attacks it directly nor offers a closing visionary promise. Such modifications, extensions, and attenuations of a literary form always mark the later stages of genre development.
Last modified 19 March 2008