321 - Protocol to a Damnation & Exit 36: A Fictional Chronicle

Protocol to a Damnation
By Peter Berger
New York, Seabury Press, 1975. 208 pp. $7.95.

Exit 36: A Fictional Chronicle
By Robert Farrar Capon
New York, Seabury Press, 1975. 200 pp. $7.95.

These novels reveal little that is novel. Protocol of a Damnation and Exit 36 are issued by the same press, cost the same, run to about the same length, and are fictional offerings of much-published authors. With identities, differences emerge. Berger is Professor Of Sociology at Rutgers University; Capon is Vicar of Christ Church in Port Jefferson, New York, and Dean of the George Mercer, Jr., Memorial School of Theology in Garden City.

Berger and Capon both have a clear sense of the job expected of them. Not only do they participate in the acute authorial selfconsciousness found generally in twentieth century novels, they also recognize the extra onus of trying to make living, breathing, experiential sense of life-in-Christ rather than of life-in-general, Berger and Capon see their basic fictional problem as that of establishing a direct and authentic tone of voice that will engage readers and carry them into and along with the course of the story. The chosen mode of presentation in both novels is first person narration: the persona is a perceptive, experienced man in his fifties who is intimately involved in the events that he relates.

Although the events differ greatly in their particulars, the underlying subject of the two novels is remarkably similar. Both Berger and Capon make their novels turn on the mystery of a single human personality. In both novels, the mystery is particularized in central figures who are men in their mid-thirties (Christ-bearers?). Both novelists also use as the mainspring of their plots a death-specifically, a violent death-to force their theological questions and the need for commensurate answers to the fore. It is obvious, then, why the choice of a first person narrator was made.

The atmosphere of Capon's Exit 36 is, oppressively and aggressively, that of Long Island suburbia. The narrator is an Episcopal priest who makes no bones about belonging to this freeway-and-shopping-center, banal, comfortable, TV-family-comedy way of life and thriving in it, talking its lingo and living by its rhythms. He saves his self-respect by pouring it on for the theology class he has been retained to teach on Saturdays at a nearby seminary. Otherwise he is, as he introduces himself, Bill Jansson, an easy-going, extrovertive, life-affirming regular guy. The pages of Exit 36 race with Jansson's embracing love of self and others, mingling wit, slang, up-to-the-minute four letter words, big

322 - Protocol to a Damnation & Exit 36: A Fictional Chronicle

theological generalizations, and a rueful awareness now and then that he is rarely the persuader and mainstay that he would like to be. (Is Capon flirting breezily with some comic self-portraiture in Jansson?)

The subject of Exit 36 is the suicide of a thirty-eight-year-old Episcopal priest from the parish next to Jansson's. Ted Jacobs died by driving his car at full speed into an abutment at Exit 36, Sunnyside Boulevard, Northern State Parkway. The novel unfolds as the revelation of Jacobs' all-too-human errors and ineffectualities, which center in his four-year-long "double life" as not merely a gentle idealist and leftwing activist, a model of pastoral care, and a passable husband to Anne but also as the tortured and magnetized lover of Pat, a desirable divorcee who lives in Jansson's parish. Jansson's self-appointed mission is to bring the two women to accept the truth about Ted, and their own separate yet somehow mutual relations to him, without repudiating their love for him or their potential respect for each other. This is what Jansson calls "reconciliation"-"One Main Subject: God, it is just so obvious!" (p. 81)

Unfortunately, it is Capon's treatment of Christianity as "so obvious," so open to brash paraphrase, so approachable in over-familiar or trendy terms, that precludes any achievement of human authenticity or religious vision in his novel. Exit 36 simply begs its ultimate questions instead of confronting them directly. Mod-pop God-talk may be acceptable to that segment of Capon's readership for whom he is a preacher to the converted. But those readers who judge him as a novelist will see their time and money as having pretty largely been wasted.

By contrast, Berger's Protocol of a Damnation evokes a deep-reaching, if often incoherent and tentative, sense of the workings of the divine in the events of life. His narrator is Jacob van Buren, a fat Dutch expatriate and career adventurer who has proceeded from revolt against a strict Calvinist upbringing, through a number of commercial and military posts in Indonesia, to a deliberately rootless existence with his wife as a studio photographer in the tourist town of Ascona, in the Swiss canton of Ticino. The Ascona setting, the locale, incidentally, of the annual Jungian "Eranos" seminars, prompts an abundance of satiric and imaginative detail from Berger on the flotsam and jetsam of the international set. These characters are never trivialized but retain their human dignity in their questing for meaning as adherents of two rival, latter-day Gnostic sects. Against the backdrop that the Gnostics provide, van Buren slowly realizes that he has become a witness to events demanding record. The term "protocol" in the title of the novel denotes the making of a formal deposition, which is how van Buren conceives of his narrative. But as "damnation" suggests, judicial and legal connotations come to shade into theological significance.

Because Berger's van Buren gropes painstakingly with his heavy style toward discovering and articulating what evidence he has and

323 - Protocol to a Damnation & Exit 36: A Fictional Chronicle

what it is evidence of, the plot line of Protocol is riddled with false emphases and lines that lead to impasses. On one level, the novel seems to be an off-beat whodunit. Who killed Herr Karstmann, the self-admitted Nazi "doer of duty" who executed Polish Communist and Jewish adults and children? On another level, the identity of the person who contrived a "gas chamber" for Karstmann in his own luxury car and garage is made of no account whatever as the narrative draws to a close. The true enigma is the lean, young, and cynical American, Raymond Dell, a sometime Methodist seminarian, Chattanooga nightclub entertainer, and at present a gigolo and fashion model. In an excess of fury, Dell performs an impressive though improvised ritual damnation of Karstmann at a drunken party where the ex-Nazi lets his guard down and tells his story explicitly without penitence.

All of these characters and all of these incidents might have been empty exoticism. Dell's "damnation;, of Karstmann is, however, invested with considerable emotional and theological impact. For Dell, the most convincing argument for the existence of God and the providential governance of the world is "the argument from hell." It goes like this: Hell is a necessity because it is the only proper fate for humans who deny their shared humanity. But no human can create a Hell. Hell, therefore, is a tribute to a being who is powerful enough and who cares enough-namely, God, without whom it could not exist.

Berger's novel, though presented through the consciousness of a narrator who can call forth only limited sympathy and interest, reveals nevertheless an intensely imaginative humanism and, what is most important, an understanding of the agonies and imperatives that drive people to seek and affirm God.

Both novels are indications of the continuing interest in theology as narrative, and both employ the genre of fiction to probe dimensions of human and divine reality. This is hardly a new phenomenon in the Christian tradition or in western literature, and though neither author ranks with Dante or Goethe, Berger at least conveys a compelling religious vision.

Janel M. Mueller
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois