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defensively, that it is what is called a "put-on." Who would I be
trying to put on? And why? By attributing the book to Smitty, I
intended, among other things, to call into question the novel's "truth–
fulness" - to mock any claim the book might appear to make to be
delivering up
the
answer - though in no way is this strategy intended
to discredit the book itself. The idea is simply to get the focus off the
question, "What
is
America really like?" and on to the kind of fan–
tasy (or rewriting of history) that a question so troublesome and dif–
ficult has tended of late to inspire. I would not want to have to
argue that Smitty's is the true dream of our lives, his paranoia the
wedge into our enigmatic American reality; I would claim, however,
that his is not so unlike the sort of fantasies with which the national
imagination began to be plagued during this last demythologizing
decade of disorder, upheaval, assassination, and war.
Why I finally anchored the book in the investigations into Com–
munist activities conducted by the House Un-American Activities
Committee was to give Smitty a break, too; as far off in an Amer–
ican never-never land as he may come to seem with his story of the
destruction of the imaginary Ruppert Mundys of the imaginary
Patriot League, his version of history has its origins in something that
we all recognize as
having taken place,
and moreover, at a similar
level of bizarre, clownish inventiveness as so much of the "real"
American history that Smitty has obviously invented out of whole
cloth. I was trying, then, to establish at the conclusion of the book a
kind of passageway from the imaginary that seems real to the real
that seems imaginary, a continuum between the credible incredible
and the incredible credible. This seems to me an activity something
like what many deranged laymen must engage in every morning,
reading the newspaper on the one hand and swooning over the
prophetic ingenuity of their paranoia on the other. Truly, it is the
Land of Opportunity - now even the nuts are getting an even break.
So, to conclude: Smitty is to my mind correct in aligning him–
self with Melville and Hawthorne, whom he calls "my precursors, my
kinsmen." They too were in search of some encapsulating fiction, or
legend, that would, in its own oblique, charged, and cryptic way,
constitute "the truth" about the national disease. Smitty's book, like
those of his illustrious forebears, attempts to imagine a myth of an
ailing America; my own is to some extent an attempt to imagine a
book about imagining that American myth.
