Studies in American Fiction

2 THE MORAL STRUCTURE OF CHEEVER'S FALCONER Glen M. Johnson* Writing in the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, Leo Braudy offers two generalizations about John Cheever's novel Falconer: it is "irresolutely plotted," and its mood "is more important than the matter."1 Braudy's evaluation follows the consensus of critics who reviewed Falconer when it appeared in 1977. Seeking to describe the "mood" that Braudy calls "almost incantatory," these reviewers praised the "grace" of Cheever's prose, the "light . . . shin[ing] through" his style, the "transcendance]" of his imagination At the same time, however, there were complaints like Braudy's about the novel's "puzzling" form, its "disjointed," "haphazard," or "loose" structure.3 The inability of these critics to find structural coherence in Falconer derives from their assumption that Cheever can be categorized among (to quote the title of Braudy's essay) "Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners." In fact, Cheever's novels are effective because their plots do not serve "realistic" expectations. Cheever's imagination is fundamentally a romancer's and specifically religious, as suggested by the tendency of Braudy and others to adopt the vocabulary of religious experience when describing the mood or style of Cheever's books. A religious imagination indeed controls the mood of Falconer; more important, it determines the plot. This novel's structure is moral: it defines right action and then rewards it, claiming the romancer's freedom to employ "miracles" in its plotting. The specific form of Falconer is a secularized version of the Christian pattern of redemption: forgiveness of sins through conviction, repentance, and the receipt of grace. Cheever prepares the reader's recognition of this redemptive structure by filling Falconer with religious diction and allusions. The measure of his success will be the reader's acceptance of the book's "Glen M. Johnson is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at the University of Louisville. He has written articles for American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film, Studies in the American Renaissance, and Emerson Centenary Essays. He is currently editing volumes of Emerson's Journals and Works for publication by Harvard University Press. 22Glen M. Johnson culminating imperative and last word, "rejoice." But religious references begin early. Falconer, the prison whose name is the novel's title, suggests the central symbols of two familiar poems whose subject is faith, Hopkins' "The Windhover" and Yeats' "The Second Coming." Cheever's allusion to Yeats is most obvious and most crucial, indicating from the first the focus of moral attention in this novel: the "mystery of imprisonment" symbolized by Cheever's Falconer may be the unheard Word of Yeats's falconer—a disintegrating but perhaps recoverable "center" of faith for the contemporary world. Cheever's protagonist, who will experience the mystery and recover the faith, appropriately shares the name of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, who "saw visions of God" while "among the captives by the river."4 As Ezekiel Farragut enters Falconer in the novel's opening section, Cheever introduces two religiously charged symbols, both of which will reappear: "a man in prison grays feeding bread crusts to a dozen pigeons" and "a tarnished silver Christmas garland" hung on a water pipe. For Farragut, the convict St. Francis carries "resonance of great antiquity" while the Christmas garland supplies not irony but "a grain of reason."5 From the first, then, Cheever's method supports his vision by finding—or fashioning—transcendent value within a world of suffering and miscreancy. Cheever's word for Farragut is "miscreant," suggesting by etymology that Farragut's wrongdoing is at base a sort of heresy—a failure of responsibility deriving from a failure of belief. The first third of Falconer explores the nature of its protagonist's miscreancy, developing in the process Cheever's own ethical vision. Farragut's imprisonment evidences his violation of responsibility in three areas central to Cheever's morality; in each case the miscreancy is defined by human suffering but has religious resonances as well. First, Farragut has violated his responsibility to love: he is locked with his wife in a destructive relationship marked by "ritualistic" exchanges of hurt (p. 25...