HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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endowed with a penetrating gaze, makes the most of looking at the
Reagan who loved to be looked at. Morris's fictive narrator writes of
Reagan with Jane Wyman: "He never really looked at her, only at us
looking at them."
He knew how to be looked at.
Morris is a great mir–
rorer, seeing reality through all its mirrors-reversed, backwards, and,
as in a telescope, upside down-and thus right side up for Reagan. Like
James, he knows that to see truly, you have to look obliquely. To tell
the truth, Emily Dickinson observed, you have to "tell it slant."
Like Proust's, Morris's narrator, Morris's pseudo-Morris, is a
searcher and researcher into lost times. These cannot be found, but only
re-found, re-constructed, and revived. There is a strong urgency in the
narrative to preserve what otherwise will be lost. Lost it is already to
Reagan himself, doomed
to
lose his way in Alzheimer's disease. But
Morris's still vital and grasping narrator seizes every detail before it slips
into the numbed zone of an archive, becoming dead letters and lifeless
notes or interviews, stuffed into locked file cabinets. Look at the chap–
ter titles: "The Land of Lost Things," "A Dark Form Half Hidden,"
"Inside Story," or "The Unexplored Mystery." All focus on the power
of the re-covering and re-constructing imagination, holding a
researcher's candle at the margin of dark forgetfulness. For every fiction
he created, Walt Whitman insisted: "I was the man, I suffered, I was
there." So with Morris. By constituting himself as a fiction, he
was
there, because he should have been there-Reagan's age, one who
notices Dutch from an early time, and finally, becomes Reagan's see-er
and seer.
In
the moving elegy for Reagan that concludes the book, Mor–
ris remembers for Reagan, who now lives "where madness, life, and
death collide." Morris's narrator remembers Reagan's life for him. That
is how memories are remembered, even after remembering forgets.
Norman Mailer observed that while Dos Passos is not numbered
among the three or four greatest American novelists of the century, in
U.S.A.
he wrote the greatest political novel. The trilogy employs a mul–
tiplicity of perspectives, mixing one with the other-documents, autobi–
ographies, biographies, and fictions. Did Dos Passos write a work of
fiction grounded in a score of short biographies of the exemplary politi–
cal figures of his time? Or an autobiography embedded in historicity? Or
a biography exemplified and ultimately expanded by fictive intentions?
He called his books novels. Morris's fictive narrator has retitled Morris's
biography a memoir. But whose memoir? Reagan's? Or the narrator's?
Perhaps both-a "Dutch treat" in which Reagan and his fictive
doppel–
ganger
will treat each the other
to
recovered inventions of memory.
In
any case,
U.S.A.
and
Dlltch
proceed by assemblages of genres that turn
