PETER PAN IN HELL *STEVE COOK* Associate Professor of English Westmont College It was unsettling. Trying to impose my thoughts and feelings for a conference on individualism in American life sponsored by Westmont College and The Institute for Christian Leadership. I kept calling up images of "Prufrock," and Peter Pan when he and his school mates lost the power to fly. It wasn't merely the angst endemic to pre-writing that was prompting such images; it was the prospect of being a party to yet another expression of the promise of greater being awaiting the individual via community. As a result of such pique I told a colleague that I ought to begin my paper with the epigraph to T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." While I had something Puckish in mind at the time I said it, I wasn't seriously entertaining it; after all, my college chaplain, and academic dean would be there. However, there was something strangely cathartic about confessing to my audience in the manner Eliot has Prufrock tacitly confess to his: "If I thought my remarks would be to one who could return to say anything that would make a difference, I would burn no more; but since, if what I hear is true, that no one has ever returned alive from this `depth," I speak to you without fear of infamy." (I didn't think it prudent to mention that the speaker, from Dante's Inferno, had been condemned to stand inside a burning flame forever for giving false counsel.) So, why am I risking imprudence--if not immolation? The more I thought about writing on individualism in American life, the more I realized I was emotionally and intellectually at a "depth" like that of the speaker in Eliot's epigraph. I was there and so I reasoned was my audience, especially if it meant merely another pro forma, rhetorically articulate but uncritical affirmation of the principle of community. Recently I was asked to affirm in a form letter recommending an applicant for a teaching position at an evangelical Protestant high school, whether or not the applicant "adhere(d) to the doctrine of American life." Baffled, I wondered what this doctrine was and what it would do to help build a Christian community. The only national behavior I could think of which had thickened into Republic and become doctrinaire was the uncritical worship of unqualified growth. It had resulted in what the narrator of Heart of Darkness describes as "the grabbing of what could be grabbed for the sake of what could be gotten, which, historically at least, meant taking it away from those who had a different complexion or slightly flatter noses." On the other hand, perhaps the institution was trying to determine if the applicant, if not willing to grab, was at least willing to be grabbed: i.e., assume the feudal position by accepting a substandard salary "in order to serve," or adopting a "wise passivity" when those they are called to love in and with the strength of Jesus are denied employment in order to sustain a religious tradition. Whatever was meant by "doctrine of American life," I do not know. What I do know is that too often, most manifestations of community are not too pretty if you examine them closely. As Joseph Conrad's Marlow says about civilization, "What redeems it is the idea only." Thus I find myself like Marlow, profoundly ambivalent, not as an individual but as a church, college, and country member, because of the gap between theory and praxis where the promise of community is involved. As a potentially viable moral system the practice of community seems to have all the efficacy of an amoeba in heat. I am uncomfortably aware that mine is what five social scientists in Habits of the Heart characterize as an American individualism which reflects "possibilities" ranging from solipsism to unrelieved cynicism to absolute nihilism. At the very least I appear to be at that "profound impasse," Habits poignantly outlines, bound up in "a way of life that is neither individually nor socially viable." I can recall no clearer reflection of that than in the unwitting irony of a comment a senior colleague made quietly to me just after I was recently granted tenure: "Now you can say anything you want!" So, brothers and sisters: what do I (do we) do with the ambivalent and helplessly romantic state into which Habits asserts American individualism has fallen? Of course: propose something more socially realistic, predicated on finding "a moral language that will transcend (such individualism." What Habits tacitly offers us in the end is the mediating power of "social science as a public philosophy," something which ostensibly would not...limit the ways in which (we) think...like the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding. What I find disturbing about Habits is the similarity between it and the reams of theoretical discourse in my own field. Such protracted expressions of theory, regardless of the veracity claimed for the respective methodologies involved, are suspiciously self-serving exercises in the needs of academic guilds to authenticate their own existence. The presumption of such theorists, literary or social, is colossal, and colossally depressing if they are where hope for the future lies. The advent of social science as public philosophy or of a new moral-social ecology simply layers over one set of interpretive conventions with another. Moreover the new "moral language" is no more inherently moral than any other whose starting point is an insistence on the idea of such an artifice as a reality in itself. I believe hope is grounded not "in a social scientific tradition that has insisted on the idea of society as a reality in itself," but in the individual as the primary condition of that society. In that belief I am allied with one point William Golding makes in his novel Lord of the Flies: the shape of a society depends on the ethical nature of the individual and not on the artifice of any political system, however seemingly logical or respectable. Without the individualism that suffers diminution in Habits as "dangerously romantic" and "limiting," we would have what the poet W. B. Yeats refers to as "...a paltry thing, a ragged coat upon a stick unless soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress." With the kind of mediating powers of equanimity claimed by the schooling possible in a "new social ecology," maybe the prospect of such an emaciated figure would become social history instead of social certainty. I fear, however, that such "schooling" would make of the individual, figuratively speaking, a Peter Pan in hell. As the narrator of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan says: Before they had attended school a week they realized what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me. It is sad to say that the power to fly gradually left them. Please spare me the silence of not flapping your wings to make your point. My point is that it is the very Romantic faith of the individual that provides a "language" in and with which individualism serves a less limiting purpose than Habits of the Heart allows. In Chaim Potok's The Chosen, Reuben's zionist father explains to him that the very orthodox faith which keeps him and his friend David apart, nevertheless sustains the historicity of the Jewish faith. In The Glass Menagerie, Laura remains a romantic recluse, but in doing so provides for Tennessee Williams no escape from reality, but rather "a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are." Yossarian, at the end of Joseph Heller's Catch 22, runs not from responsibility but "to it" as he says, having been helped to define his sense of what wasn't life by institutional absurdities. In these and so many other examples at the level of myth, one can see individualism reflected as a struggle, defining and redefining what it means to sustain a sense of the dignity, authority, and relevance of human life in the face of the often one-sided symbiotic relationship the very nature of community life demands. At least one clear understanding of the kind of constructively symbiotic role the individual can play in society comes from Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It is in Gatsby's past that Nick Carraway apprehends what appears to be the first principle of the individual in American life: "the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder." What redeems that "climb" from merely being a primer for the materially acquisitive is its character as a romantic-religious quest. Nick experiences greater being, not as a result of the mind-numbing conformity attendant to the pursuit of materialism, but because of the capacity to experience "the last and greatest of all human dreams," and come "face to face...with something commensurate to (a) capacity for wonder." Nick proselytizes that what gives Gatsby's "climb" the redemptive character it has is a "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life...an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness" which compels him to dream "a dream that couldn't be overdreamed"; it is an experience in which his mind "would...romp again like the mind of God" and in "the incarnation (be) complete." Such individualism may be too romantic for the social scientists of Habits and, to borrow a line from the poet Hart Crane, leave us only the limited victory of a "broken tower...to build up into the visible wings of silence." However, "broken" and hence limited such an individual "language" may be, it builds nonetheless, even if as T. S. Eliot says in Four Quartets it builds on "A condition of complete simplicity, Costing not less than everything." For me, being "dangerously romantic" foils limitation, and enables "the soul (to) clap its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress"; it moves the singer, however brokenly, toward the Hand that reaches for Adam's on the Sistine ceiling. It also marks the genesis of faith on which Dante, to whom the figure in Eliot's epigraph speaks, rises out of the Inferno.