Marathe and Steeply on the Outcropping
The only two men in the desert
For a night and part of a morning the novel's whole argument sits on a rock shelf above Tucson, in the mouths of two men who cannot stand each other and have no one else to talk to. Rémy Marathe, legless agent of the Wheelchair Assassins, waits blanket-lapped in his customized chair with a machine pistol under the blanket; Hugh Steeply, of the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services, slides clumsily down onto the shelf in field-drag as a huge unconvincing woman, skirt riding up, hosiery torn on the cactus. They face out over the city and do not look at each other, and the not-looking is the tell: their talk has "an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple" (scene 029, p. 91). It is, the narration notes, their "sixth or seventh" such meeting; both services "looked forward to these meetings," though they "accomplished little" (scene 103, p. 528). Two governments have arranged, at great expense, for their most eloquent men to bore and needle each other on a hillside — and to become, in the process, the closest thing either has to a confidant.
The debate they conduct is the book's clearest statement of what it is about, and the political half of it — freedom against the pursuit of pleasure, the continent that auctioned its own calendar, why the samizdat is a weapon aimed at a nation's appetite — belongs to the O.N.A.N. essay, which owns the argument as argument. What sits here is the stranger fact underneath it: that the novel gives this thesis not to a philosopher or a hero but to two compromised operatives in costume, a quadruple agent and an interviewer in a wig, each grotesque in his own national uniform, neither of whom the reader is meant to trust or to want to become. This is the dyad the book builds to carry its own earnest ideas, and the men matter as much as the ideas.
Two arguers, mirrored
They are built as opposites who keep turning into each other. Marathe is the book's most extreme figure of allegiance and the one whose allegiance can never be fixed: a triple or quadruple agent depending on which layer you count. His cell-leader Fortier believes Marathe only pretends to betray Québec while feeding the Americans controlled information; in fact Marathe is really betraying the cell, to buy U.S. cardiac care for his dying wife; Steeply's service knows this, and Fortier does not know they know. Steeply needles him about the recursion — "Well you are already tripling, Rémy, aren't you? Or would it be quadrupling" (scene 031, p. 94) — and Marathe closes the ledger without answering it: "have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray" (scene 031, p. 94). The endnote apparatus keeps the count deliberately uncountable, warning that his own violent death "will be the smallest of his (Marathe's) problems should his Mont-Tremblant countrymen come to suspect the even-numbered total of his final loyalties" (scene n040, p. 994). Where he finally stands is the book's open question about him, and it stays open: the theorist of chosen attachment is the one man whose attachments cannot be read.
Steeply is the mirror image — a man made entirely of assumed selves. The received wisdom among the Québécois anti-O.N.A.N. cells is that there is something latent and sadistic in his service's assignments of fictional personae — men cast as women, Caucasians as caricatured Haitians, the healthy as deformed; what Marathe privately adds, watching him, is that Steeply himself needs the mortification and burns it as fuel for the performance. Steeply has spent the better part of a year shaven-headed and with teeth pulled to infiltrate a Seattle cult, and now wears the worst persona of all. "Helen Steeply" is a soft-profile journalist for Moment magazine, and the drag is famously, almost aggressively bad: the gigantic prosthetic breasts will not stay aligned — "Steeply's gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky" (scene 029, p. 89) — the electrolysis has raised red welts along the jaw, the heels are agony on his broad flat feet. And it works anyway, on everyone from a smitten punter to a tableful of prorectors: the book's running joke, and its quiet thesis, that Americans will extend belief to any surface that offers to find them exceptional, to ask them about themselves. The mask, oddly, carries more biography than the man. "Helen" gets a curriculum vitae and a byline; Hugh Steeply gets one unguarded memory and a pale ring of skin where a wedding band was.
That one memory is the hinge — and the exchange around it is one-way, which is the point. Steeply's father, a heating-oil dispatcher in Troy, was swallowed whole by the broadcast program M*A*S*H — the secret notebooks, the letters to a fictional major, the retreat into a den he renamed the Swamp, the death in his recliner mid-rerun, "a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle" (scene 123, p. 646). Marathe hears it and folds it instantly back into his own doctrine of misplaced love — "This attaching of excessive importance" (scene 123, p. 641) — and offers nothing from the other chair. What he might have offered, the novel keeps inside his skull: his own dead father, killed when a videophonic pulse damaged his used Kenbeck pacemaker — an accident, the narration is careful to say, an unsolicited advertising call, not a temple anyone chose — surfaces only as interior memory on the hillside while Steeply talks (scene 098, pp. 489–91) and again in a dream (scene 103, pp. 528–30). The closest the pacemaker ever comes to spoken conversation between the two men is a technical recitation — Steeply, whose dossier already lists it, prompts, and Marathe answers with power-pack specs and safety warnings, never the death (scene 096, pp. 470–75). The story itself Marathe finally tells aloud to a stranger: the suicidal Kate Gompert, in a bar, through his fake-Swiss persona (scene 156, pp. 774–82). The one true thing Steeply owns, he volunteers on the outcropping; the one true thing Marathe owns, he withholds there and hands instead to someone with no file and no stake. And the rhyme with the lethal Entertainment — a father destroyed by wanting something too much — holds only for Steeply's story; Marathe's father wanted nothing, and was killed by an incoming call.
Choose your temple
The argument itself is short and total, and Marathe carries the aggressive side of it. Everyone worships something, he insists; the only real question a human being answers is which temple. "Are we not all of us fanatics?" he asks, and notes that the word fanatic descends from the Latin for temple — a worshipper. "Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care" (scene 035, p. 107), because what you choose to die for is simply what you are: "You are what you love" (scene 035, p. 107); "You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice" (scene 035, p. 107). To die for one person is "a craziness," because persons "change, leave, die, become ill" — a cause outlives you and a nation outlives you, and a love not carefully chosen leaves you worse than free. Choose your temple to be your own appetite and you become "a citizen of nothing," "kneeling to yourself," "the slave who believes he is free" (scene 035, p. 108). That last figure is the whole indictment of the couch: the viewer of the Entertainment is not a victim of tyranny but a free citizen who has chosen the one temple that kills him, and calls the choosing freedom.
Steeply argues the American case, and the book is careful to give it real force rather than a straw version. Against the choose-your-temple creed he offers personal liberty, the sacredness of the individual, the wager that each citizen pursuing his own good maximizes the whole: "We want choice. A sense of efficaciousness and choice. To be loved by someone. To freely love who you happen to love" (scene 088, p. 423). Addiction and crime and suicide are, in his telling, just the toll: "These things you find so weak and contemptible in us—these are just the hazards of being free" (scene 072, p. 320). The exchange keeps circling one image Marathe presses: the child of a wealthy father who is permitted to eat only candy is not free, whatever the father calls it, because no one ever taught him how to choose — and a nation that gives its citizens every liberty except the knowledge of what is worth wanting has produced exactly that child. Marathe caps the American character in six words — "The loyalty of a domestic pet" (scene 088, p. 423) — and Steeply, disarmingly, half-agrees. Neither of them is refuted. The scene ends where it began, two positions and no verdict, which is the design: the reader is handed the question and denied the answer.
The temple he actually kneels at
What makes Marathe more than a mouthpiece is that his biography is a rebuke to his own doctrine. He preaches that the supreme act is to choose one's temple with care, and his own founding choice was made without care, without thought at all. Legless and suicidal in his early twenties, unable even to will his own death, he crested a hill above an autoroute and saw a small hunched woman frozen before an oncoming truck — a woman born without a skull, her head hanging soft as a half-filled balloon — and released his brake without deciding to, coasting down to sweep her clear. "She had no skull, this woman" (scene 156, p. 779); "I had chosen loving her above my lost legs and this half a self" (scene 156, p. 779). The unclamping of the brake was the whole of it: an attachment seized before the thinking-twice he later makes the measure of everything. He married her; it was, he says, "the happiest day ever for me, since the train" (scene 156, p. 781); and now Gertraude lies in an exitless coma, and the advanced U.S. heart that could keep her alive is the price of everything Marathe is doing on the outcropping.
So the double-agent muddle is not spy-plot decoration but the doctrine put under load, and the book states the load plainly. In the dawn interior narration it gives away what Fortier does not know: that Marathe "loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Québec" (scene 103, pp. 528–29) — the temple he actually kneels at is a woman, not a flag, and discovery means a railroad spike through her boneless right eye. The disclosure fixes his affection and leaves his allegiance open on purpose: knowing whom he loves more tells you nothing about which service he will finally serve. His last attested scenes only tighten the knot. Drunk in a Cambridge jazz club, he tells his whole life to a suicidal stranger, Kate Gompert, transposed into a fictional "Switzerland," and defends the choice that chained him — "It chains me, but the chains are of my choice" (scene 156, p. 781) — while she rejects the whole doctrine to his face as low self-esteem dressed as philosophy. Then, in the coldest turn the book gives him, the apostle of careful choosing seems to offer her the Entertainment itself: the one temple that ends all choosing, dangled by the man who has argued all night that choosing is the only thing that makes us human.
Two fools in patriotic drag
Which raises the question the whole dyad is built to raise: why hand the novel's sincerest argument to two men it takes such care to make ridiculous — a legless fanatic with a gun under a blanket, and a linebacker in a bad wig whose falsies point at the sky? Wallace himself gave an answer, and it refuses to let Marathe win. Pressed on the record about Marathe's give-them-what-kills-them case, he called it "a terrible argument because Marathe is basically a fascist" — a culture that undertakes to teach its people how to choose, he went on, "teeters very easily" into a totalitarian one (the road-trip interview). The reading this licenses — that the hillside's most persuasive voice is arguing a fascist's case, and that a reread of every installment coheres better once you see it, the truly dangerous fascist being the one who leads with a real truth and maps you logically into the fold — the archive carries as a MINORITY reading, but one anchored in the author's own voice rather than in the fan record alone (Mapping the Zone).
A second reading grades the staging rather than the speaker, and it too is held as a MINORITY account: that the debate is engineered so the reader comes away judging both debaters fools — two company men who have made themselves grotesque in patriotic drag, Steeply's prosthetic horror and Marathe's ritually forfeited legs, laboring to give a philosophical justification to causes that have already mutilated them, while the actual answer to their question drifts up the hillside as the sound of young people at a party (Infinite Cast). The two operatives conspicuously are not at the party. On this account the scene is not a thesis with two spokesmen but a trap sprung on both of them at once: the freedom Steeply defends has produced the couch that kills, and the guided temple Marathe prescribes has produced the man beside him with no legs and no country he can name his own. Neither answer is livable, and the book withholds a third. The same doubling turns up in a compositional oddity the archive tracks as a design puzzle — the lone one-sentence hillside section walled off by itself early in the novel, formally quarantined the way the two men are physically quarantined on their rock (the walled sentence).
The argument came first
The final surprise is that these two, who feel like the book's philosophical bedrock, are among its latest arrivals. In the 1993 working draft there is no Tucson colloquy at all: Steven Moore's collation of that manuscript finds the entire Marathe/Steeply dialogue strand, and most of the Québécois superstructure around it, added in the 1994–95 revisions, when the exhibition opponents were still Ukrainians and the founding crisis was still Sierra Leone (Moore's first-draft study). The men were grown to carry an argument the book already wanted to make. The editorial record catches the growth in progress: reading the full manuscript in December 1994, Michael Pietsch reported that "Marathe and Steeply emerged more clearly as characters this second time through," and located the remaining labor exactly where this essay lives — "the main work in revising their Tucson colloquy as stressing who they are and what they're engaged in" (Pietsch's second-read letter). The argument came first, and the arguers were built up around it until they were solid enough to hold it.
That order of composition is legible in the finished scene, and it is finally what the dyad is for. The book had a thesis it believed — that a life is defined by what it chooses to worship, and that a culture teaching only the pursuit of pleasure has disarmed its citizens against the pleasure that kills them — and it declined to speak that thesis in its own voice or put it in a hero's mouth. It built instead two ruined men on a freezing shelf, gave one of them the argument and the other the rebuttal, made both of them absurd, let the party they will never join murmur up from below, and walked away. The most earnest thing in a thousand pages is spoken by a fascist in a wheelchair to a fraud in a wig, and the reader is left holding exactly what the two of them are: the question, and no way home.
Sources
This essay is anchored in the novel's own pages (scenes cited inline); the secondary and author-side record it draws on:
- nationalism-onan — the political frame the debate belongs to as argument: freedom-vs-pleasure, O.N.A.N., experialism, and the choose-your-temple speech read as the essay E Unibus Pluram's own conclusion given a mouthpiece; this essay owns the two men, that one owns the politics.
- lipsky-becoming-yourself — Wallace on tape, March 1996: the refusal to let Marathe win ("a terrible argument because Marathe is basically a fascist"), and the culture-that-teaches-choice "teeters very easily" toward the totalitarian.
- moore-first-draft-ij — the composition record: the whole Marathe/Steeply dialogue strand, and most of the A.F.R. superstructure, added after the 1993 draft (Ukrainians → Québécois, Sierra Leone → southern Quebec).
- pietsch-letter-dec-1994 — the December 1994 editorial letter: "Marathe and Steeply emerged more clearly as characters this second time through," the Tucson colloquy still being character-anchored at the last revision round.
- mtz-ep06 — paraphrased from audio; the reread cohort's adopted Marathe-as-fascist frame (from a half-remembered Wallace interview), with the listener's most-dangerous-fanatic extension.
- ic-part44 — paraphrased from audio; the both-fools reading: two operatives self-made grotesque in patriotic drag, the party heard below as the answer neither can reach.
- mtz-ep03 — paraphrased from audio; the lone one-sentence hillside section read as a deliberate formal quarantine.
The essay above stays in paraphrase; the novel's own words on the desert serial — the temple doctrine, the freedom exchange, the pea-soup parable, the two fathers — are gathered, page-cited, on the nationalism and O.N.A.N. and surveillance and disguise quotation pages.