Pylon and the rise of European fascism.

Zeitlin, Michael

One pair of eyes is not enough.

--Franz Kafka, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" (308)

Pylon is based on events Faulkner witnessed at the opening of the $4,000,000 Shushan Airport in New Orleans during Mardi Gras week, February 1934 ("Big Airport for South" XX8). (1) That he was shocked (electrified) by what he saw (in his sudden emergence from the historical nightmare of his stalled novel, A Dark House, into the harsh metallic light of the imminent future) we can tell as we follow the language. (2) The sensibility that produces it is traceable to the consciousness of the reporter who is sent out by the editor of a mass circulation newspaper to cover the air races at the new airport. As he wanders around the airport or through the city streets at night--New Valois, Franciana, an uncanny metropolitan labyrinth akin in so many respects to the surrealists' Paris--the novel's narrative language is commandeered by his "excited impressionism," his obsessive notation of the visible, an essential effect of which is to make visible what is being seen for the first time by anybody (Benjamin, "Return of the Flaneur" 262). (3) Though he is employed by the newspaper, he operates essentially as a subject without any official identity, an anonymous integer immersed in "the one hundred percent image space" of the metropolis (whether its old quarter or suburban airport extension [Benjamin, "Surrealism" 217]). Below I will explore the extent to which "the strength of his precise reaction" (Adorno 70) to an unfolding reality--its relation to a given consciousness--contributes to the novel's antifascist, analytical power, a power flowing from the embodied consciousness of "the inner man, the psyche, the individual" (Benjamin, "Surrealism" 217). Reading Pylon in this way depends on seeing New Valois as not only a real Southern regional space, but also as an imaginary world space, a site in which the essential patterns of an emerging global logic can be isolated and explored in miniature. Kristin Kyoko Fujie captures the sense in which I conceive of Faulkner's imaginary geography here: "Faulkner's 'true ground' or 'native soil' resides neither wholly within nor wholly without.... [I]t exists in between personal, regional, and national history, private fantasy and social reality, psychic projection and historical record" (123).

Given his location as an incomparable witness to the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s, Walter Benjamin presides over what follows: "As a German he [Benjamin, speaking of himself] has long been acquainted with the crisis of the intelligentsia, or, more precisely, with that of the humanistic concept of freedom" ("Surrealism" 207). Benjamin characterizes the emerging global political crisis in 1929 in the following terms:

Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in IG Farben and the peaceful perfecting of the air force. But what now? What next? ("Surrealism" 216-17) (4)

The answer begins with the solitary person who walks around the metropolitan landscape and observes it closely, delving beneath its surfaces to lay bare, at considerable psychic cost, its latent terrors and malignancy. "The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur" observes Benjamin, "are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug--ourselves--which we take in solitude" ("Surrealism" 216). (5) This quality of "profane illumination" (217) is also what makes Pylon--among Faulkner's most visual--so rich in augury and prophetic images, so "alive to reverberations of the future" (Andre Breton qtd. in Benjamin, "Work of Art" 131n31).

As the novel unfolds the reporter tries to get behind a scene dominated by the spectacular display of the machines, and thus he takes up with the air show's principal performers (as he thinks of them), an itinerant set of barnstormers joined together in a radically unconventional arrangement: one woman living openly with three men (two of whom she sleeps with) and one child of doubtful paternity. The reporter soon becomes obsessed with this erotic collective and tries to insinuate himself into its very center. (6) The reporter also comes to identify with their class struggle against Colonel Feinman and his group for a larger percentage of the gate receipts. (7) The other main outlines of the novel's cultural logic can be rapidly sketched. An immense paying crowd has come out to the airport to gaze at the new high-powered machines and the daredevils who compete for cash prizes in such events as aerial acrobatics, airplane racing, and parachute jumping. In the pause between events the reporter observes this crowd

   slowing and clotting before one of the temporary wooden refreshment
   booths which had sprung up about the borders of the airport
   property as the photographs of the pilots and machines had bloomed
   in the shopwindows downtown for some time before he began to
   realise that something besides the spectacle (still comparatively
   new) of outdoors drinking must be drawing them. (873-74) (8)

"[T]hat something besides" must be the prospect of spectacular death, the immolation of man and machine. (9) The scene is narrated by "the voice of the amplifyer, apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman, ubiquitous and beyond weariness or fatigue," an official running commentary on what the crowd is seeing with its own eyes yet whose deepest implications (for its existence in modernity) it is unable to fully grasp (801). The essential secret of the mystifying spectacle is hiding in plain sight, foreknown and already promised--sonically and typographically--by the newspaper that publishes the airmeet's program: "Special Mardi Gras Evening Event. Rocket Plane. Lieut. Frank Burnham" (793). The crashing of the rocket plane and the burning of the pilot is the novel's prototypical traumatic event, the new expression of the age in its "passion for the Real" (Zizek 6). In accordance with the novel's uncanny "compulsion to repeat," this event recurs as a series of mediated repercussions (Freud 36):

   a gust of screaming newsboys ... swirled about him, screaming: in
   the reflected light of the passing torches the familiar black thick
   type and the raucous cries seemed to glare and merge faster than
   the mind could distinguish the sense through which each had been
   received: "Boinum boins!" FIRST FATALITY OF AIR "Read about it!
   Foist Moidigror foitality!" LIEUT. BURNHAM KILLED IN AIR CRASH
   "Boinum boins!" (811) (10)

This, then, is Faulkner's stunningly overdetermined figure for modernity: the phallic pylons, the revolving airplanes, the inevitable smashing of machines, the burning of the pilot's corpse, the crowd's mesmeric fascination, the front-page, boldface publicity. In the formulation of the great antifascist flyer, Lauro de Bosis, one cannot admire the new titanic forces and "deplore [their] excesses." The menacing new technological system here on display can only exist because of its excesses. "Its excesses are its logic" (qtd. in Mudge 3). (11)

The logos of the system Faulkner is analyzing is dominated by mechanized circular motion--from the rotating driveshaft of the engine, to the propeller, to the entire field itself as aerodrome (race course) for the encircling machines, to "the long sicklebar of the beacon [which] swept inward from the lake, to vanish at the instant when the yellow eye came broadside on": this is the eye of "the grim Spectator himself," the proscriptive panopticon (like that early Grimm spectator of Light in August--more about him below [P 948, 912]). (12) The essential patterns of intense circulation around a close circuit "lead you to an overwhelming question" whose answer must seem the fulfillment of a premonition (Eliot 3) (13): "the lightning speed of the projectile toward its explosion as the ultimate argument of reason" (Virilio 43-44).

The essential psychological effect of this spectacle is a quasi-spiritual paralysis of the volitional faculties. The crowd out at the airport, as in the streets of New Valois (where, as Michael Millgate notes, "the theme of that year's Mardi Gras parade [February 1934] was 'The Conquest of the Air'" [Millgate 145]), appears as a "static curbmass of amazed confettifaces," a "static human mass" (P 810, 813). Straining to catch a glimpse of the rapid machines above, the crowd is wrenched into awkward attitudes or pushed into cramped spaces:

   Then he saw Jiggs, the pony man, the manpony of the afternoon,
   recoiled now into the center of a small violent backwater of
   motionless backturned faces. (812)

   the gaped and upturned faces ... choked the gangway. (933)

   Then the voice was drowned in the roar, the snarl, as the
   aeroplanes turned the field pylon and, followed by the turning
   heads along the apron as if the faces were geared to the sound,
   diminished singly out and over the lake again. (934)

   Once inside, Jiggs paused, looking swiftly about, breasting now
   with very immobility the now comparatively thin tide which still
   set toward the apron and talking to itself with one another in
   voices forlorn, baffled, and amazed: "What is it now? What are they
   doing out there now?" (799)

The crowd is fascinated, intimidated, unconsciously mistrustful of the power that impels it to follow the elliptical movements "as if the faces were geared to the sound" (934; emphasis mine). Faulkner suggests in these formulations that the mass is being assimilated into and organized by the new universal logic, its mentality and responses undergoing a kind of recalibration in accordance with the new imperatives of the permanent technological revolution.

In A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, Stanley G. Payne gives a compelling summary of such modern productive forces:

   large-scale electrification and the modern revolution in
   communication and transportation, with the expansion of telegraph,
   telephone, and cable lines, of high-speed oceanic vessels, and ...
   the introduction of the automobile, followed by the airplane ...
   [This was] the first age of the masses, the emergence of a mass
   society being paralleled by commercial mass consumption and
   industrial mass production. This had major implications for the
   acceleration of a more modern form of politics and resulted in a
   new mass culture fed by mass media, featuring the introduction of
   the cinema and the dawning of a new "visual age." Important aspects
   were the growth of mass leisure for the first time in history and
   the beginning of large-scale spectator sports. (23-24)

From the first, aerial exhibitions drew vast crowds, the economic implications of which were quickly grasped by the promoters. At Reims, on August 22-29, 1909, "Five hundred thousand people paid attendance, two hundred and fifty thousand on the last day alone. Hundreds of thousands more watched from the surrounding hills. The stockholders of the Compagnie Generale de l'Aerolocomotion made a clean profit of close to 800,000 francs, over twenty times their initial investment" (Wohl, Passion 109). But Reims also marked a new, global pattern of "nationalist antagonisms, imperialist rivalries, and mutual suspicion and anxiety" (258). If, as Wohl observes, "Even the greatest doubters would be convinced that aviation was revolutionizing the concepts we had of the world, of its inter-relationships and its distances" (Walter J. Boyne qtd. in Spectacle 72), in France, "the increasingly militarized and conflict-ridden atmosphere" at the turn of the century was based unmistakably on "the increasing probability of war with Germany" (Passion 15, 17). With Bleriot's flight across the Channel in 1909, as with Count Zeppelin's 240-mile flight in his rigid airship in July 1908, or Santos-Dumont's flight around the Eiffel Tower in 1906, the British too gave expression to a characteristic fear: "England is no longer an island. There will be no sleeping safely behind the wooden walls of old England with the Channel our safety moat. It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes" (Lord Northcliffe qtd. in Wohl, Passion 42). "The air around London and other large cities will be darkened by the flight of aeroplanes ... [sic] They are not mere dreamers who hold that the time is at hand when air power will be an even more important thing than sea power" (Daily Mail qtd. in Wohl, Passion 42). (14)

Naturally, fear of war and aerial invasion did nothing to dampen the fascination of the crowd; perhaps it even obscured the immediate danger of the aerial exhibition to the people on the ground. Wohl's account of the following scene may serve as vignette of this dark irony: "In May 1911, at the moment of the departure of the contestants in the Paris-Madrid race, one of the machines went out of control and killed the French Minister of War, while severely injuring the Prime Minster and the leading patron of French aviation, Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe" (Passion 133). As Don DeLillo (speaking of the assassination of JFK) has taught us to understand, "It had to happen this way. The moment belongs to the twentieth century, which means it had to be captured on film" (300): "moving picture shots of the accident were on view in Paris's cinemas the same afternoon" (Wohl, Passion 276). (15) In Benjamin's memorable words, it was as if mankind's "self-alienation ha[d] reached the point where it [could] experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure" ("Work of Art" 122).

In Faulkner's view of "the closepeopled land" beneath the aerial spectacle, the crowd remains motionless and transfixed: only its awe and its longing seem to rise up (936). As Mussolini observed in November 1923, "Not everyone can fly ... [sic] Flying must remain the privilege of an aristocracy; but everyone must want to fly, everyone must regard flying with longing" (qtd. in Wohl, Spectacle 49). At the exhibition of airplanes at Brescia in September 1909, Kafka is part of the crowd that watches the great Louis Bleriot above:

   Devotedly everybody looks up to him, there is no room in anybody's
   heart for anyone else. And everybody looks with outstretched neck
   at the monoplane, as it falls, is seized by Bleriot, and even
   climbs. What is happening? Here, above us, there is a man twenty
   meters above the earth, imprisoned in a wooden box, and pitting his
   strength against an invisible danger which he has taken on of his
   own free will. But we are standing below, thrust right back out of
   the way, without existence, and looking at this man. (306)

Kafka observes the essential features of the emerging dialectic between the flyers and the groundlings, noting the huge logistical challenge of transporting and feeding such a large mass of people; the military and police presence to control the crowds; the tone of hostility and menace emanating from the organizing committee of the exhibition; the ostentatious fashion show of the aristocracy in the expensive balconies; the masses of hungry standees. The greatest irony is inherent in the contrast between the exhibition of speed and flight by the incomparable heroes and the cramped immobility of the proletarian mass. As the show comes to an end with the last light of the day, "We are lucky enough to get a carriage; the coachman squats down in front of us--there is no box--and, having at last become independent existences once more, we set off" (308). (16)

In similar fashion, Faulkner notes how the architectural layout of Feinman Airport controls and inhibits the movement of the crowd. As in an anxiety dream, Jiggs and the reporter, finding themselves caught up short by sudden barriers to their progress, must double back along an elaborate and "tedious" succession of pathways: "[Jiggs] too had no ticket and so though he could pass from the apron into the rotundra as often as he pleased, he could not pass from the rotundra to the apron save by going around through the hangar" (800). The labyrinthine spatial logic extends to the city streets at night as the reporter and his companions thread "their way between the blatting and honking, the whining and clashing of gears, the glare of backbouncing and crossing headlight beams" (972).

Perhaps what is being represented in such scenes is "the disappearance of a habitat that until then had been considered common: the disappearance of civilian space, of the common man's right to space" (Virilio 99). As Benjamin observes, "The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same process" ("Work of Art" 120). Jimmy Collins gave a harrowing vision of this process of proletarianization during the Depression in the US in Test Pilot (1935), a book that Faulkner reviewed in 1935:

   Early on the morning I was to start work at the Ford factory I got
   on a street car and started for the plant. I had on work clothes
   and my badge. Long lines of workers sat on either side of me.
   Across the aisle another long line sat facing me. They sat with
   hunched shoulders and vacant faces, dinner pails on their laps,
   eyes staring lifelessly at nothing. The car lurched and jolted
   along, and their bodies lurched and jolted listlessly like corpses
   in it. A sense of unspeakable horror seized me. I had forgotten the
   rubber factories. Now I remembered them again, but I didn't
   remember anything as horrible as this. These men impressed me as
   things, not men, horribly identical things, degraded, hopeless,
   lifeless units of some grotesque machines. I felt my identity and
   my self-respect oozing out of me. I couldn't become part of that. I
   couldn't. Not even for a short time. Not even long enough to get
   into the airplane factory and then to become pilot. Not even for
   that. I wouldn't. Not for anything. Life was too short. Even cadet
   status in the army was better. I got off the car at the factory. I
   watched the men file into the factory. I shuddered across the
   street. I caught the next car back to town. It was like getting
   away from a prison I had almost been put into. I went out to
   Selfridge Field and enlisted as a cadet. (4-5) (17)

Eventually a recruiter offers him a job "demonstrating one of our new airplanes for the navy":

"What kind of a demonstration?" I asked warily. (15)

"A dive demonstration.... It's a bomber fighter, a second model, first-production job, a single-seater biplane with a seven-hundred-horsepower engine.... So, if you are still free, white, and twenty-one" (17-18).

The Faustian illusion of choice notwithstanding, "the obligation to serve the war machine" is thus fulfilled (Virilio 104). Collin's book is an insider's report on the American aviation arms race in response to the threat of fascism emanating from Europe.

But what of fascism in the United States itself? Robert Brinkmeyer situates his study of white Southern writers in relation to "the cultural forces shaping the South in the context of the world situation" from 1930-50, specifically "the ghostly presence of European Fascism lurking on the cultural horizon" (2). Ted Atkinson notes the presence in the 1930s of "a steady stream of articles and books from some of the nation's foremost intellectuals reflecting] on the potential rise of a dictator figure playing on fear itself in order to manipulate a desperate populace and to accomplish the rise of fascism in America" (115). Jean Follansbee notes the "growing national unease about the increasing military power of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy" while summarizing the essential matter thus: "Fascism didn't happen here, but in 1936, when William Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom!, Americans didn't know that yet" (68, 67).

Payne observes that "The only theoretical precondition for fascism which existed in the Unites States [in this period] was ethnoracial tension" but despite the presence of the Black Legion and the Ku Klux Klan, or the scientific respect granted in some circles to a uniquely American set of racialist and eugenicist doctrines, there was nothing in America to compare with Hitler's plans for "a revolutionary racial restructuring" of the globe (the ultimate sphere of lebensraum [350, 209]). Two American Mussolinis are often mentioned in relation to an indigenous American fascism, Father Charles E. Coughlin, the radio priest (yet another case of the man behind the microphone or amplifyer) and Huey Long (who sometimes used sound trucks to broadcast his message). As Payne writes,

   Huey Long--feared in some circles as the American Duce--was the
   most important in a long line of southern demagogues and in 1934-35
   the most important politician in the country after Franklin
   Roosevelt, but he was a southern populist who sought to promote a
   kind of egalitarianism, and his Share Our Wealth clubs never
   developed into a political movement. (350)

As seriously as these figures were taken by large numbers of people, there was something widely recognized as absurd, crazed, and buffoonish in their manner (a quality definitively captured in Chaplin's The Great Dictator [1940]). Here is Faulkner's portrait of Doc Hines (Joe Christmas's grandfather) in Light in August:

   That this white man who very nearly depended on the bounty and
   charity of negroes for sustenance was going singlehanded into
   remote negro churches and interrupting the service to enter the
   pulpit and in his harsh, dead voice and at times with violent
   obscenity, preach to them humility before all skins lighter than
   theirs, preaching the superiority of the white race, himself his
   own exhibit A, in fanatic and unconscious paradox. (343-44) (18)

Hines's racist counterpart in Light in August is Percy Grimm, Captain in the Mississippi National Guard, a character Faulkner presciently invented before he knew of the existence of Nazi storm troopers (FU 41). (19)

But the roots of Percy Grimm are also traceable to Fascist Italy. Brinkmeyer notes that of the group he is studying that includes Porter, Warren, Wolfe, and Hellman, "All but Faulkner and McCullers ... traveled to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy during the 1930s" (23). Yet Faulkner had made a trip to Italy in 1925, and a key episode from that experience made its way into both "Divorce in Naples" and Elmer: the arrest of William Spratling for "a crime against the royal family of Italy ... [where he] placed a coin on the floor and stamped on the king's face" (Spratling 15). (20) Taking over this experience as his own, Faulkner has Elmer arrested by "two gendarmes in swallow-tail coats and broad short hats--Napoleons" (Elm 423)--as worn by the Carabinieri, Mussolini's fascist police force. Of "Divorce in Naples," Massimo Bacigalupo stresses in a fascinating article that "Faulkner's insistence on the 'political' nature of George's arrest is significant if we remember that this was Mussolini's Italy, in which the police forces played a large role and 'disrespectful' foreigners would be easily suspect" (323-24). Indeed Bacigalupo puts us on the trail of the Fascist on a Bicycle as we first encounter him in Hemingway's "Che Ti Dice La Patria?": "On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed" (229).

It is notable that [Faulkner's] future rival Hemingway had been in Rapallo in 1921 and again in February 1923 and had given his account of the place in a powerful story, "Cat in the Rain," which is as stark as Faulkner's paragraph is lush. Faulkner was willing to be enchanted by the siren sea. When Hemingway returned to the region in 1927, he wrote another story that is an implicit indictment of Mussolini's Italy, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?"(originally, "Italy, 1927"). The climax of this is an ominous confrontation with a corrupt Fascist militiaman, reminiscent of the mood encountered by Faulkner and Spratling, although not ending in detention. (Bacigalupo 325)

It is as if Percy Grimm of Light in August snatches the bicycle right out of this Italian scene: "Grimm rammed the pistol back into the holster ... and sprang onto the bicycle, with never a break in motion" (459).

In Pylon one encounters the comparable type of the petty fascist when the parachutist Laverne Shumann is

   arrested by three village officers one of whose faces Shumann
   remarked even then with a violent foreboding--a youngish man with a
   hard handsome face sadistic rather than vicious, who was using the
   butt of a pistol to keep the mob back and who struck at Shumann
   with it with the same blind fury. They carried her to jail, the
   younger one threatening her with the pistol now; already Shumann
   realised that in the two other officers he had only bigotry and
   greed to contend with, it was the younger one that he had to
   fear--a man besotted and satiated by his triumphs over abased human
   flesh which his corrupt and picayune office supplied him. (909)

This is the sexual fascist as one encounters him in Klaus Theweleit's study of the Freicorps' male fantasies: "Then he began to struggle and scream again, cursing now, screaming at Laverne, calling her whore and bitch and pervert in a tone wild with despair until the engine blotted it" (P 912). (21) Primarily in Shumann, Jiggs, and the reporter, Faulkner represents the character of a certain robust popular disrespect and derision for such small-scale despots (they always begin as small-scale despots until--as Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte--the social struggle "create[s] circumstances and relationships that ma[ke] it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part" [8]). (22)

The key example of what fascism called "the Leadership Principle" in Pylon is Colonel Feinman, who (a figure of the international Jew, the powerful capitalist) becomes the object of a certain degree of racist vitriol even as he himself generates the echoes and rhymes, the trappings, of a certain fascist imagery and style (Payne 5). In a classic essay Kenneth Burke has explained our capacity to accept the image that fuses opposites into its very structure (the Jew as fascist, the Bolshevik as capitalist). (23) In his review of Hitler's Mein Kampf, Burke observes: "Nowhere does this book, which is so full of war plans, make the slightest attempt to explain the steps whereby the triumph of 'Jewish Bolshevism,' which destroys all finance, will be the triumph of Jewish finance" (196). Faulkner too understands the mysterious operations of such a weird condensation and displacement, as Hightower, at the end of Light in August, hallucinates a "halo ... full of faces" one of which "alone is not clear. It is confused more than any other" since in fact it is not one face at all, but two, Joe Christmas and Percy Grimm (491): "Then he can see that it is two faces which seem to strive ... in turn to free themselves one from the other, then fade and blend again" (491-92). In accordance with this fading and blending agency, we can replace the pairing of Joe Christmas and Percy Grimm with that of the international Jew and the fascist leader. As Jiggs boards the bus which will take him out to the airport, he opens a newspaper:

   It spread its pale green surface: heavy, blacksplotched, staccato:
   Airport Dedication Special; in the exact middle the photograph of a
   plump, bland, innocently sensual Levantine face beneath a raked
   fedora hat; the upper part of a thick body buttoned tight and soft
   into a peaked lightcolored doublebreasted suit with a carnation in
   the lapel: the photograph inletted like a medallion into a drawing
   full of scrolled wings and propeller symbols which enclosed a
   shieldshaped pen-and-ink reproduction of something apparently cast
   in metal and obviously in existence somewhere and lettered in
   gothic relief:

   Feinman Airport
   New Valois, Franciana
   Dedicated to
   The Aviators of America
   and
   Colonel H. I. Feinman, Chairman, Sewage Board

   Through Whose Undeviating Vision and Unflagging Effort This Airport
   was Raised Up and Created out of the Waste Land at the Bottom of
   Lake Rambaud at a Cost of One Million Dollars

"This Feinman," Jiggs said. "He must be a big son of a bitch."

"He's a son of a bitch all right," the driver said. "I guess you'd call him big too."

"He gave you guys a nice airport, anyway," Jiggs said.

"Yair," the driver said. "Somebody did."

"Yair," Jiggs said. "It must have been him. I notice he's got his name on it here and there."

"Here and there; yair," the driver said. "In electric lights on both hangars and on the floor and the ceiling of the lobby and four times on each lamppost and a guy told me the beacon spells it too but I don't know about that because I don't know the Morse code."

"For Christ's sake," Jiggs said. (783-84)

Blake Pontchartrain, a certain self-styled "New Orleans Know-It-All," explains that

Abraham Lazar Shushan ... was president of the Orleans Levee Board when the airport was built, between 1929 and 1933.... [He was] indicted on charges such as income-tax evasion, improper use of WPA labor, theft of material, mail fraud, accepting kickbacks and conspiracy to defraud.... After the scandal, the Orleans Levee Board prudently decided to change the name of the airport. But you can't imagine what a difficult task it was. Abe Shushan had decided to immortalize himself by putting his name on any and everything in the airport. And where he couldn't find a place big enough for his name, he used his initial: on doors, in lavatories, in floor tiles, on the sides of the buildings, in the pavement and even in the pattern of the gardens outside. Everywhere you went you would see S's ... Shushan had often boasted it would take $50,000 to $100,000 to remove all signs of himself from the airport. (Pontchartrain)

In Mussolini's Rome, the fasces of the Roman Empire, the official symbol of the regime, is being reproduced everywhere "(though [as Payne notes] in 1928 Mussolini did order that it be removed from Italian garbage carts). Over this presided the individual cult of the Duce.... He was constantly photographed--in cars and airplanes, skiing, riding horseback, even working bare-chested in the harvest" while the exploits of the great Italian Air Force, led by Italo Balbo, are being trumpeted in the press (120).

Feinman is a shameless self-promoter in a similar vein, and one reads the signatures of his inflated personal style in the innumerable flags and pennons and special new symbols that dominate the airshow's visual field, its backdrop and ceremonies, its funeral rites, and its architecture of runways, apron, and rotundra with its huge murals of Lindberg and other heroes of

   the furious, still, and legendary tale of what man has come to call
   his conquering of the infinite and impervious air. High overhead
   the dome of azure glass repeated the mosaiced twin Fsymbols of the
   runways to the brass twin Fs let into the tile floor ... [and]
   monogrammed into the bronze grilling above the
   ticket-and-information windows and inletted friezelike into
   baseboard and cornice of the synthetic stone. (800) (24)

Outside one encounters "the bright vague pavilionglitter beneath the whipping purple-and-gold pennons" (869), and everywhere "the purple-and-gold guards" watch over "the throng huddled in the narrow underpass beneath the reserved seats" (799).

If the textuality of Pylon is densely woven with this kind of coloration, suggestive of militaristic uniformity, and remains astonishingly rich in suggestive symbols and hidden intertextual keys, the purple-and-gold motif needs to be read in relation to the overall matter of a certain fascist vertigo in the 1930s involving the gathering of large crowds (whether in Berlin, Munich, Rome, Chicago, or New Valois), especially in celebration of the militarization of flight. The year 1933 marks a decisive turning point in this respect. Hitler takes dictatorial power on January 30 of that year, while Time magazine puts Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering on separate covers (March 13, July 10, August 21), quoting them at length in the feature articles. The major newspapers of the day are covering the story of European fascism with massive daily exposure: "Hitler Proclaims War on Democracy at Huge Nazi Rally" (at Nuremberg), "Nazis Pile Books for Bonfires Today." On July 16, 1933, Italian Fascist and Secretary of State for Air, Balbo, led a squadron of 24 seaplanes from Rome across the Atlantic to Chicago, site of the World's Fair in celebration of a century of progress ("Italy is Jubilant")--a flight of 6100 miles (undertaken in seven stages). Wohl notes "the ecstatic welcome they encountered in Chicago when the squadrons put down on Lake Michigan on 15 July before a cheering crowd of a hundred thousand onlookers" (Spectacle 93). After a swirl of Motorcades, parades, banquets, receptions, and honorary degrees as well as a nineteen cannon shot salute, "the Italians took off for New York on the morning of the 19th" escorted by American fighters (95). Then "Balbo and twenty of his pilots were flown to Washington, D.C., where the most senior of them were invited to a luncheon at the White House hosted by President Roosevelt" (96). (25)

Given the levels of European armaments in this period, and the escalating displays of aviation rhetoric and technology, it was impossible not to have somewhere in mind "at least some conception of the next war" (Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism" 313). (26) Certainly F. T. Marinetti and the futurists made no secret of their intentions, little changed from the manifesto of 1909 written in the aftermath of Wilbur Wright's demonstration of his Flyer in France: "We will glorify war--the world's only hygiene--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.... We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice" ("Founding and Manifesto" 42). Marinetti's fantasies of destruction were always from the beginning inseparably bound up with the airplane:

   For me, then, everything is lawful! ... I want expensive playthings
   to smash ... cities to crumble, human anthills to kick aside!
   ("Let's Murder" 48)

   [The planes] rose like the bloody vultures that lift thrashing
   heifers into the sky. Here it is: my own multicellular biplane
   steered by the tail; 100 HP, 8 cylinders, 80 kilograms.... Between
   my feet I have a tiny machine gun that I can fire by pushing a
   steel button. (52)

   But you are numberless! ... And we might use up our ammunition and
   grow old in the slaughter! ... Let me direct the fire! ... Up 800
   meters! Ready! ... Fire! ... Oh! the joy of playing billiards with
   death! ... Continue the massacre! (53)

In 1913, the futurist journal Lacerba could shriek, "The future needs blood. It needs human victims, butchery. Internal war, and foreign war, revolution and conquest: that is history.... Blood is the wine of strong peoples, and blood is the oil for the wheels of this great machine which flies from the past to the future" (qtd. in Payne 63). The great scandal of futurism is that its bloody rhetoric became only more intense after the First World War as it made common cause with Mussolini and Hitler. Here these self-styled avant-garde fascists were calling not only for self-sacrifice, of course, but also for a massive sacrifice of the Others, of all the Others. In case there should be any doubt about the correctness of this program, the leader is there to reassure us with such slogans as "Il Duce ha sempre ragione (The Duce is always right)" (Payne 120) or "Everything within the State, Nothing outside the State, Nothing against the State" or "Believe, Fight, and Obey" (qtd. in Mudge 60). Since, as Mussolini claimed, "Liberty is a rotten carcass" (with its feeble parliamentary democracy and endless cacophonous squabbling of puny human voices), we need only one amplified voice to guide us (qtd. in Mudge 2).

If, in Pylon, such murderous echoes are felt only on the level of presentiment and premonition, we are, nonetheless, in the midst of an aviation arms race: "history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems" (Virilio 90). Jiggs underscores the issue when he comments to the bus driver that the "Ship's obsolete. It was fast two years ago, but that's two years ago. We'd be O.K. now if they had just quit building racers when they finished the one we got" (783). Later, suddenly,

   a flight of army pursuit singleseaters circl[ed] the field in
   formation to land and then coming in, fast, bluntnosed,
   fiercelyraked, viciously powerful. "They're oversouped," Shumann
   said. "They will kill you if you don't watch them. I wouldn't want
   to do that for two-fifty-six a month." (880)

These are the planes on which Matt Ord's lethal machine is clearly modeled:

   a lowwing monoplane with a big nose and a tubular fuselage ending
   in a curiously flattened tailgroup which gave it the appearance of
   having been drawn lightly and steadily through a huge lightlyclosed
   gloved fist.... the queer empennage, the blunt short cylindrical
   body. (922)

   It had none of the waspwaisted trimness of the ones at the airport.
   It was blunt, a little thickbodied, almost sluggish looking; its
   lightness when moved by hand seemed curiously paradoxical. For a
   good minute the reporter and Marchand watched Shumann stand looking
   at it with thoughtful gravity. (923)

   "Monocoque." (924)

Here Shumann is contemplating, quietly, the machine that will kill him.

In Pylon the acceleration of history and technology signifies a global system organizing itself for something truly horrible, masquerading for now as transcendence. As we turn to Faulkner's review of Jimmy Collins's Test Pilot, Faulkner exposes futurism's essential nihilism and mysticism and drains it absolutely of its triumphalism. The aviation arms race has been, all along, "'the arming of the race' toward the end of the world" (Virilio 152):

   Perhaps they will contrive to create a kind of species or race like
   they used to create and nurture races of singers and eunuchs, like
   Mussolini's Agello who flies more than four hundred miles an
   hour.... I would watch them, the little puny mortals, vanishing
   against a vast and timeless void filled with the sound of
   incredible engines, within which furious meteors moving in no
   medium hurtled nowhere, neither pausing nor flagging, forever
   destroying themselves and one another, without love or even
   copulation forever renewing. (ESPL 332-33)

This is not to suggest that the age of Pylon is without heroes, but for Faulkner they are more likely to resemble not so much Lindberg or Balbo or Mussolini's Agello but Lauro de Bosis, Johnny Sartoris ("Then he thumbed his nose at me like he was always doing and flipped his hand at the hun and kicked his machine out of the way and jumped" [FD 754]), or Roger Shumann, who "without any rudder or flippers and looking down on the closepeopled land and the empty lake" makes a split-second decision--steering his airplane out over the water and falling free of the machine (P 982). (27) Yet the machine remains. Out at the new airport on the first day of the dedication ceremonies,

   the first starting bomb went--a jarring thud followed by a vicious
   light repercussion as if the bomb had set off another smaller one
   in the now empty hangar and in the rotundra too. Within the domed
   steel vaccuum the single report became myriad, high and everywhere
   about the concave ceiling like invisible unearthly winged creatures
   of that yet unvisioned tomorrow, mechanical instead of blood bone
   and meat, speaking to one another in vicious highpitched
   ejaculations as though concerting an attack on something below.
   (791)

Presciently contained in the image-generating bomb repercussions is the knowledge that the age of Icarus--of the heroic single flyer--is being overtaken by the age of the military squadron. The air above the metropolis will soon be darkened by the formation flights of the bombers.

University of British Columbia, Vancouver

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(1) I presented an early version of this paper at the American Literature Association (Boston, May 2007) on a panel, "The Space(s) of Faulkner's Pylon: Politics, Economics, Culture," organized by Peter Lurie. My thanks to Peter Lurie and fellow panellists Taylor Hagood and David M. Earle. I also thank Randall Wilhelm for his comments on that earlier draft and Marlene Briggs for getting me to read Robert Wohl.

(2) This is at least my third kick at this particular can. I discuss Pylons language in "Faulkner's Pylon: The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Pylon, Joyce, and Faulkner's Imagination."

(3) "The Surrealists' Paris, too, is a 'little universe.' That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no different. There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day" (Benjamin, "Surrealism" 211).

(4) IG Farbenindustrie AG "was a mighty industrial colossus.... [I]t dominated the chemical business of the world.... [Through] a maze of cartels whose members included such industrial giants as Kuhlmann of France, Imperial Chemical Industries of Great Britain, Montecatini of Italy, Aussiger Verein of Czechoslovakia, Boruta of Poland, Mitsui of Japan, and Standard Oil (New Jersey), Du Pont, and Dow Chemical of the United States," IG Farben "fortified [its] commercial leadership" (Borkin 1). IG Farben would collaborate with the Nazis, employ slave labor in its factories, and produce Zyklon B, used in the mass murder of prisoners in German concentration camps (Borkin passim).

(5) In "Return of the Flaneur," Benjamin notes

   the extent of the prevailing resistance to flanerie in Berlin,
   and ... with what bitter and threatening expressions both things and
   people pursue the dreamer. It is here, not in Paris, where it
   becomes clear to us how easy it is for the flaneur to depart from
   the ideal of the philosopher out for a stroll, and to assume the
   features of the werewolf at large in the social jungle--the
   creature of whom Poe has given the definitive description in his
   story "The Man of the Crowd." (265)

(6) According to Robert Wohl, "The triad of two men and a woman would become a standard fixture of the Hollywood aviation film" in the 1930s (Spectacle 121). The reporter's voyeuristic fascination with this triad produces an additional dimension of intense psychological complexity.

(7) Another "theme that would figure prominently in the aviation movies of the 1930s: the conflict between the daredevil pilots of the heroic period of flight and the businessmen, bureaucrats, and engineers who were increasingly coming to dominate the aviation industry" (Wohl, Spectacle 135).

(8) Jack Holmes, Laverne Shumann's other husband, injures his leg when he slams into one of these "jerrybuilt refreshment booths when landing his parachute" (887). Here, as throughout, Faulkner's essential narrative attitude combines nightmare fascination with relentless irony.

(9) The world's first major public exhibition of powered heavier-than-air flight was held in Reims, France in August 1909. By 1913 there had been so many pilot deaths in such exhibitions that, "To attract customers," the promoters of the Moisant International Aviators exhibition "posted the portraits of their pilots who had been killed while performing" in their own previous air shows (Wohl, Passion 206n258).

(10)"Captain W. Merle Nelson of Hollywood, stunt flier, was burned to death at 9 o'clock tonight when his small comet plane crashed to earth and was destroyed by fire at the Shushan Airport here.... The pilot's body was burned beyond recognition" ("Stunt Flier Burns" 11).

(11) On October 3, 1931, de Bosis, after only seven hours of solo experience, in a plane named Pegasus, dropped 400,000 antifascist leaflets on and around Mussolini's headquarters in Rome. Author of a play entitled Icaro, he ran out of gas before he could complete the return flight, crashing somewhere in the Mediterranean. His body and his airplane were never found. See Mudge passim; "Anti-Fascist Flier" 6; and "Flier Leaves Story" 12.

(12) In Faulkner's intertextual allegory the cyclops beacon is associated with Feinman/King Minos; the airport is the island of Crete; the streets of New Valois and the torturous airport pathways that wend "like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent" are the Daedalean labyrinth (Eliot 3); Shumann is Icarus. See my essay, "Pylon, Joyce, and Faulkner's Imagination" for an extended discussion of Faulkner's mythical method in the novel as it involves Joyce and Homer.

(13) "Lovesong of J. A. Prufrock" is the title of the sixth and penultimate chapter of Faulkner's novel.

(14) See Wohl's discussion of the fantasy fiction of Rudolf Martin and H. G. Wells in Passion 69-96:

   Martin was so excited by the military implications of Wright's
   machine that he sought to mobilize public opinion in Germany in
   favor of its purchase. At the end of 1908 he suggested that, given
   the relatively inexpensive cost of the Flyer and the facility of
   its construction, it would be possible to invade England with a
   fleet of 50,000 airplanes, each carrying two men. Though the
   English press scoffed at this idea, the joke lost some of its humor
   when Bleriot successfully flew the Channel seven months later. (81)

(15) The image sequence of this crash at Issy-les-Moulinaux in May 1911--aviation's Zapruder film--can be seen at Wohl, Passion 277. Thus are we invited to become spectators of violent airshow immolation ourselves--an irony I fully acknowledge.

(16) "The return from the airdrome after the first day of the competition, wrote Georges de Lafrete on 9 September, 1909, had been 'terrible.' Because of insufficient tramway service, twenty thousand people had been forced to make the fifteen-kilometer trip by foot amidst thick dust caused by automobiles. 'I met elegant women walking while clinging on to their husband's arm, on the verge of exhaustion. Peasant carts, requisitioned at sky high prices, transported as many as fifty people. Clearly, the masses had been carried away by aviation'" (Wohl, Passion 297n39).

(17) "What else has the proletariat been since antiquity, if not an entirely domesticated category of bodies, a prolific, engine-towing class, the phantom presence in the historical narrative of a floating population linked to the satisfaction of logistical demands?" (Virilio 99).

(18) Victor Klemperer describes the sound of Hitler's voice in a diary entry of March 10, 1933: "the never ending propaganda in the street, on the radio, etc. On Saturday, the fourth, I heard a part of Hitler's speech from Ko'nigsberg. The front of a hotel at the railway station, illuminated, a torchlight procession in front of it, torchbearers and swastika flag bearers on the balconies and loudspeakers. I understood only occasional words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest" (5).

(19) Like "These trailblazers of the Wehrmacht" whose book Benjamin reviews in "Theories of German Fascism," Grimm "could almost give one the impression that the military uniform represents [his] highest end, [his] heart's desire" (313). See also Faulkner to Cowley on September 20, 1945: "If I recall him aright, he was the Fascist galahad who saved the white race by murdering Christmas. I invented him in 1931. I didn't realize until after Hitler got into the newspapers that I had created a Nazi before he did" (Cowley 32).

(20) Mussolini's March on Rome took place on October 28, 1922. When Faulkner made his visit to Genoa and Rapallo in August, 1925, Mussolini was dictator of the country.

(21) "I don't want to make any categorical distinction between the types of men who are the subjects of this book and all other men" (Theweleit 171). Barbara Ehrenreich elaborates in the foreword:

Theweleit refuses to draw a line between the fantasies of the Freikorpsmen and the psychic ramblings of the 'normal' man: and I think here of the man who feels a 'normal' level of violence toward women (as in, 'I'd like to fuck her to death') ... the man who has a 'normal' distaste for sticky, unseen 'feminine functions' ... the man who loves women, as 'normal' men do, but sees a castrating horror in every expression of female anger ... or that entirely normal, middle-class citizen who simply prefers that women be absent from the public life of work, decisions, war. Here Theweleit does not push, but he certainly leaves open the path from the 'inhuman impulse' of fascism to the most banal sexism. (Ehrenreich xv)

(22) "With his inner ear [Hitler] always listened for the voice of mockery; and if anyone at court wished to ruin the career of an officer, he had only to whisper, in the right quarter, that his intended victim had referred to Hitler as 'the corporal'" (Trevor-Roper 62).

(23) Of course there were Jews in the National Fascist Party in Italy, until the Manifesto of Race (1938) stripped them of citizenship and positions in the government and the professions.

(24) See Wohl on the ubiquity of the military metaphor, "The conquest of the air," during the first decades of flight. "The conquest of the air followed naturally from the conquest of colonial peoples, the exploration of the earth, and the penetration of the seas by submarines. The urge to dominate, to master, to conquer" (Passion 288).

(25) Although Balbo boasted in response to the crowd's feverish welcome that "Anti-Fascist sentiment abroad was a Myth" ("Anti-Fascism Here a Myth" 2), "heavy security forces had been mobilized in Chicago and New York to forestall the possibility of embarrassing anti-Fascist demonstrations" (Spectacle 101-02).

(26) "A proposal which has won the approval of the House Naval Affairs Committee to purchase 1,184 planes for the navy is bound to arouse a great deal of interest abroad.... Germany, officially speaking, has no military machines under the terms of the Versailles treaty. However, Germany has a fleet of 1,144 commercial machines, convertible it is believed into efficient bombers, pursuit, observers and attack ships in a very short time--a matter of days. Japan is believed to carry a strength of close to 2,000 combat and active service type machines on regular duty.... Russia is very much an unknown quantity" ("Navy Seeks Air Power" XX8). Benjamin points out that Junger et al. "like to speak--emphatically--of the 'First World War'" ("Theories of German Fascism" 313). In other words, in 1929-30, this formulation is not a retronym.

(27) "Ben Grew, 40, veteran parachute jumper, of Chicago, and his pilot, Charles N. Kenily, 27, Marion, Ohio, fell 2,000 feet to their deaths in Lake Pontchartrain before many of the spectators had settled in their seats.... Kinely jumped from the plane before it struck the water. His body was not found near the plane" ("Two Fliers Killed" 28).