the New Pantagruel

The Soulless World of Tom Wolfe

by Telford Work

She was Charlotte Simmons. Could she ever have that conversation with herself, the way Momma told her to? Mr. Starling put “soul” in quotes, which as much as said it was only a superstitious belief in the first place, an earlier, yet more primitive name for the ghost in the machine.

So why do you keep waiting deep in the back of my head, Momma, during my every conscious moment — waiting for me to have that conversation? Even if I were to pretend it were real, my “soul,” the way you think it is, what could I possibly say?

— Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

Am Charlotte Simmons : A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

AS I READ Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, I could have sworn I heard a faint voice saying, “Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”

No! I thought. It can’t be! Wolfe isn’t a believer, and this is a work of fiction. Am I imagining things?

You be the judge.

In one of a series of essays he published in 2000 as Hooking Up, Wolfe claims that this century’s two deepest thoughts are headed for a collision. As neuroscience and evolutionary psychology discover the physiological basis of all human behavior they are closing in on solutions to the timeless riddle of human existence and are squeezing philosophy’s now-unfashionable traditions of self-knowledge into a determinism far more radical than anything sixteenth century Calvinism envisioned. According to Wolfe, “here we have the two most fascinating riddles of the twenty-first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely.” Of course, determinism has severe consequences for whether and how human beings ought to be understood as moral agents. Wolfe thinks Nietzsche’s fulfilled predictions of the bloody consequences of twentieth century nihilism will pale in comparison to what will happen once we realize that “transcendence” is just a misnomer for mental impressions that once had survival value.

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice (of modern scientific knowledge) collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He’s floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some mighty dolphin. He can’t see it, but he’s much impressed. He names it God.

That’s an attractive thought. But tomorrow’s futility will have to worry about itself. Today’s troubles are enough for us. Our interest in the self continues to thrive. Yet our philosophical culture offers less and less room for the self as a thing of enduring interest. Our age already senses that final twilight, into darkness or light we cannot yet tell, approaching but not yet arriving. What will happen to us after whatever happens to “us”? As a student of the trend, Wolfe makes a good early indicator.

For decades Wolfe’s writing has been driven by a sociological “Theory of Everything” that declares that we are all constantly absorbed with social status: “we’re all motivated, and I certainly include myself here, far more than we want to admit, by group expectations,” he told Time magazine. “How other people view us has an important effect on how we view ourselves.” Wolfe’s social-scientific journeys led him to Edmund O. Wilson, who connected the genetically determined social behaviors of ants to rhesus macaque monkeys and finally to human beings. Wilson is the father of sociobiology, “the hottest field in the academic world,” which claims that all human action, all human thought, is the result of mere evolutionary genetic adaptations which obey a strictly material rule of cause and effect. Wolfe realizes that his old-school Weberian Theory of Everything stands challenged by Wilson’s new Theory of Everything — toe to toe, so to speak. Wolfe claims to be a skeptic of Wilson, but he allows that he is ready to exchange one reductionism for the other as the evidence comes in.

The evidence is coming in. Wolfe’s latest (and final?) novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is something of a test-drive of Wilson’s vision, for which his essays in Hooking Up appear to have been preliminary studies. Does the new paradigm work as well as the one that put Wolfe on bestseller lists for decades? Does a novel need a self? Or will a sociobiologically constructed “self” suffice?

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