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by William Bedford Clark?
(*** Some introductory material deleted ***)
Since the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade, virtually all legal restraints on abortion have been lifted by judicial fiat. In a secular society, what is legal is assumed to be moral. The attitudes behind the Court's decision, and those in turn nutured by it, are now finding fictional expression, and I believe that a look at two pertinent texts, Richard Brautigan's The Abortion (Simon and Schuster, 1971) and Philip Roth's The Professsor of Desire, (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977) is useful if we are to grasp the literary consequences of this radical shift in values.
Brautigan's novel, which bears the suggestive but cryptic subtitle An Historical Romance, is a kind of tearful-comedy along absurdist lines, precisely the kind of book that has made its author a cult-figure among many readers who came of age in the late '60s and early '70s. A curious blend of fantasy and disturbing realism, it recounts the adventures of a nameless, and all-but-faceless, narrator who works as the curator for a bizarre library, a Kafkaesque repository for unpublished and unread books. One night, a beautiful girl enters his life (and his bed), and soon afterward she becomes pregnant. An abortion is a foregone conclusion, and the couple sets off for Tijuana, where (this is prior to the Supreme Court's ruling) the operation is an important cottage industry of sorts, indeed one might almost say a tourist attraction. Their mission accomplished, they return to the States, but the protagonist-narrator loses his job at the library and they move to Berkeley, where he becomes, for reasons that remain altogether inexplicable, something of a "hero" to members of the counter-culture in and around the University.
Though the issue of abortion in Brautigan's novel involves no real soul-searching, nor apparent regrets, on the part of his characters, it would be a mistake, I think, to suggest that the author is treating the matter in a cavalier fashion. The scenes within the abortion clinic are the most densely realistic in the book, leading some readers to feel that Brautigan is writing from first-hand observation. The Mexican abortionist, not above engaging in a little price-gouging when he thinks he can get away with it, is basically a conscientious and hard-working man who applies himself to his trade to the point of exhaustion and must take a brief respite to refuel himself with a hastily-cooked steak and a bottle of beer. Periodically a young boy empties the product of the doctor's labors into the commode, as if it were so much fecal rather than fetal material. These images speak a language of their own and imply things that go beyond the dispassionate monotony of the narrative voice, and the flushing of the fetuses and almost ritualistic sterilization of the abortionist's instruments with flame suggests, even to the rather somnambulant mind of the protagonist, overtones of human sacrifice, of pre-Columbian rites of water, fire, and blood. Furthermore, as Terrence Malley shows, the entire episode is framed by images of generation and rebirth. The neighborhood in which the clinic is located is alive with children, who cast telling looks in the direction of the abortionistas, and the season is Easter. Even as the couple phones the clinic from the Woolworth's in downtown Tijuana, they are surrounded by tawdry Easter eggs, debased but unmistakable promises of new life.
It is true that in keeping with the logic of Brautigan's book—logic is not quite the right word but I use it for want of a better—the trip to the abortionist paradoxically precipitates a rebirth of the protagonist into the real world, leading as it does to his expulsion from the womblike insulation afforded him by his live-in position at the library, but there may well be irony here too, for he remains passive and infantile even in his vague role as "hero" in Berkeley. A nagging question remains in the reader's mind: Has this "hero" merely traded one kind of death-in-life for another? While Brautigan presents his characters in a sympathetic enough light—they merge as two likeable albeit shallow children—his own attitude toward their actions remains tentative and ambiguous. This ambiguity, a vital one in my estimation, stems from the fact that the novel lacks a definable moral center. The author is unwilling to condemn abortion outright, but neither is he wiling to avoid its reality—life is destroyed in the process. Brautigan does not dodge this issue, as do those today who take refuge in the euphemism of technical jargon and refer to abortion as "the termination of a pregnancy" or to the fetus as "the contents of the uterus." Instead, he wrestles, however inconclusively, wtih the painful dilemmas rising from a clash of old and new moralities. He is wiser than his characters, perhaps wiser than he knows, and as a result his novel has a measure of moral complexity that repays the efforts of the reader, Christian or otherwise, who is willing to approach it seriously.
(*** Material regarding Phillip Roth's The Professor of Desire deleted here ***)
Looking back over what I have said here, I realize that my remarks constitute more of an implicit jeremiad than a strict exercise in literary criticism. So be it, for I believe that the shift in the way certain contemporary writers treat abortion (or rather evade its full reality) is an important indication of how increasingly our literature is becoming less a response to the modern wasteland than a mere reflection of it. But I would be remiss if I neglected to note that there have been postmodern American writers who have indeed wrestled with the life-and-death implications of this issue with no trace of evasion. Anne Sexton's persona in her poem "The Abortion," for example, ultimately rejects a mendacious euphemism for the act with an honesty that even today jolts the complacency of readers who otherwise seem quite comfortable with Roe vs. Wade (See Lois Spatz's article in College English, 44: 674-684), and in his late poem "Fetus," Sexton's one-time mentor Robert Lowell likewise names things for what they are and reminds us that in denying the unborn their full measure of humanity we somehow diminish our own. It may be that the only adequate way in which to handle the pervasiveness of abortion in our society—a very conservative estimate puts the number of such "procedures" at 4,800 per day—is to evoke the nightmare images of surrealism. At least Harlan Ellison's short story "Croatoan" seems to suggest so, in a manner that combines the moral allegory of Hawthorne with the incisive fantasy of Kafka. These three writers suggest that the beginning of life does in fact partake of the miraculous and that we as human beings, are thus, a priori, very much worth caring about, an assumption upon which the health of literature may well depend.
Xavier Review? 4(1-2)
1984: 70-75
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