Psychoerrata

RELIGION WAS RIGHT and science is wrong," wrote D.H. Lawrence in 1923. "Every individual creature has a soul, a specific individual nature, the origin of which cannot be discovered in any cause-and-effect process whatever. Individuality appears in defiance of all scientific laws." By "science" and "laws" Lawrence meant psychoanalysis, which to him stripped away the dignity and mystery of mankind and reduced all human actions to the perfectly rational level. Under psychological scrutiny man ceases to be human at all. Instead he becomes "a little god inside a machine, working all the gears."

Anne Tyler has filled her splendid new novel Morgan's Passing with this same hostility to analysis. Morgan Gower, her protagonist, defies analysis or explanation. He acts with a breathtaking lack of reason, and his thoughts and feelings spin in a jumble of delusion, nostalgia, and impulsiveness. He still perplexes his wife Bonnie after 20 years. He confuses and embarrasses his daughters by wearing funny hats and keeping a pet goat in his Victorian mansion. Even Morgan doesn't understand himself. He revels in the total absurdity of everything he does.

Morgan's eccentricities would be excusable, or at least understandable, if reason ever skipped alongside insanity. If he deplored his marriage, his wife might comprehend why he disappears from home for days on end. If he hated his job, it might be clear why he often masquerades as someone else--a doctor, a short-order cook, a puppet collector. But Morgan has no reasons. Even when he leaves his wife for his lover Emily, he doesn't do so because he loves Emily more or because he is tired of Bonnie. The spirit moves him, and he leaves.

The explanation for Morgan's character is that no explanation exists. There are no cause-and-effect relationships in Morgan's personality. To Tyler, what makes Morgan run is an unfathomable extra something in all human beings that makes us people instead of machines. He has the individuality common to all of us that defies psychoanalysis and makes all humans hopelessly erratic.

If Morgan is an Everyman, are we all simply less outrageous versions of that peculiar persona? Tyler makes it clear that she believes we are:

Do you suppose we couldn't all act like that? Go swooping around in a velvet cape with red satin lining and a feathered hat? That part's the easy part.

Very subtly Tyler turns Morgan into a universal character. She shows remarkable skill at placing eternal truths in the mouths of her character without overstepping the line between truth and triteness:

"Oh, it's just like with my shadows puppets. You won't try anything new," she said. "I'm tired of the old ones."

"So?" he asked her. "You can't just switch the universe around, any time you're tired of it."

THE UNIVERSAL MORGAN transcends the setting of the story, an achievement all the more remarkable because the author has set her novel specifically, almost immovable, in time and place. The Gowers live in Baltimore of the late '60s and '70s, and each chapter has a date for a title. While the externals of '70s life--Master Charge, the Brady Bunch, straight-leg jeans, and Tab--wander through the book, they do so like ships adrift without any place to anchor. In fact, these details act like red-herring clues to the insoluable detective story of Morgan's psyche. Morgan seems even more eternal in contrast to the petty details of time and space that he rises above.

About halfway through the novel, Tyler concedes what we have suspected all along: all of her characters, not only Morgan, act irrationally. Morgan's sister marries her childhood sweetheart, who sleeps with her graduation photo under his arm. His wife publishes his obituary in the newspaper while Morgan is still alive; Emily's husband Leon develops an inexplicable hatred for marionettes. Tyler hammers home Morgan's role as archetype for humanity. As Morgan realizes about his father, human beings simply do not think or act in an orderly or understandable process:

Without a hint of despair or ill health he had taken a room at the Winken Blinken Motor Hotel one starry evening in April and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Morgan has spent a large part of his life trying to find out why. The possibility had begun to settle upon him, as imperceptibly as dust, that perhaps there hadn't been a reason at all. Maybe a man's interest in life could just thin up to a trickle and dry up; was that it?

As long as the Gowers remain content to gallivant around Baltimore in their peculiar fashion, they don't harm anyone. Morgan's wife has only to worry about where to get his ostrich feathers laundered. But Morgan's Passing develops an ugly side. Morgan's family realizes that their actions have no basis in reason. They give up trying to influence or even approach one another. The family, and by Tyler's analogy, all human beings, withdraw into hollow conversation, a Chekhovian void where people talk over each other's shoulders and pay less attention to their friends than to their furniture.

Yet Tyler shies from any condemnation of her characters, even when they act thoughtlessly cruel to one another. She portrays Morgan's family as indifferent to each other's feelings because, in their world, no person has the power to consider anyone else in his actions. This rejection of others goes beyond narcissism. If human beings could act with regard for others' feelings, they would be acting rationally and could therefore be subject to explanation or successful analysis. Egocentricism guarantees the mystery, and therefore, the humanity, of all people.

The characters of Morgan's Passing, for all their failings, are not playing tragedy. The novel ends happily for nearly all the main characters. To Tyler things often work out well for us despite our fundamental inability to escape irrationality. Clearly, an unpredictable bizarre world full of Morgans is better than a cold, rational world with no Morgans at all.