The flight westward from hostility and corruption has, since the time of the Founding Fathers, through Brigham Young and up until the millennial cults of more recent years, marked a secessionist reflex within the American psyche. This tendency towards withdrawal from, rather than participation within, the social, political and cultural mainstream has become an important topic within contemporary American fiction, as writers have come to reassess the individualistic and libertarian discourses of both the counterculture of the 1960s and the ascendancy of the New Right during the 1980s.

It is religion that frequently provides the means by which American society is prevented from disintegrating into endless breakaway communities. In their study of the relationship between politics and religion in the US, Fowler, Hertzke and Olson conclude that religious groups offer “a source of meaning, morality, and community that the culture and government cannot provide.”Footnote ¹ This uneasy resolution, however, frequently amounts to disengagement from mainstream society, as the growth of secessionist groups with not only religious, but also survivalist, ecological and sundry other orientations, attests. This signifies the failure of a mainstream polity based upon individualistic acquisitiveness to fulfil its promises of satisfaction and gratification to many of its citizens. Although such a refusal has most frequently been associated with political conservatism, it is perhaps no surprise, in the context of a post-Reaganite climate of strident New Right hegemony, that left--liberal writers and commentators should have begun to contemplate the withdrawal into alternative collectives as a source of inspiration. Of course, leftist secession in the US is by no means new, but the decline of the countercultural communes and collectives over the course of the 1970s seemed to be in inverse proportion to the rise of cults led by charismatic but authoritarian figures such as Jim Jones, David Koresh and Marshall Herff Applewhite.Footnote ² The contention of this piece is that, since the triumph of the New Right in the 1980s, contemporary novelists – many of them with countercultural associations and sympathies – have begun to reassess communitarian themes and secessionist strategies in terms of what possibilities these might offer to a dissenting liberal left.

The decades following the Second World War saw the rise of a dissenting libertarian individualism throughout American cultural life, manifest in forms such as the beat movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and a wave of experimentalism in both art and lifestyle. If such developments are understood as a reaction against the triumvirate of dystopian collective ideologies that haunted the middle years of the twentieth century – Soviet communism, fascism, and Fordist corporatism – then it is unsurprising that the New Left broke from the collectivist orientation of the traditional left in favour of an iconoclastic individualism that sought to question all forms of authority, custom and restraint. Although this interrogation formed an important part of the leftist assault on patriarchy, racism, imperialism and the iniquities of capitalism in the postwar years, the impetus of that assault foundered badly over the course of the 1970s, and reached a nadir with the successive election victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. It is arguable that the adoption by the New Left of the individualist-libertarian Zeitgeist made the New Left in some ways complicit with the success of a New Right rhetorical model based upon the notion of freedom from collective intervention. This idea – that the abandonment of collective discourse and practice was at the heart of the failure of the countercultural left – is one of the principal themes of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland (1990).

Pynchon's novel has two principal settings: California in the late 1960s (when Reagan was governor), and the same state in 1984 (when Reagan was re-elected President). Ronald Reagan's absent presence in the novel underscores the change in political fortunes between the two decades. During the earlier setting – what David Porush calls the novel's “magic middle”Footnote ³ – a group of radical students and professors take over the strait-laced College of the Surf and re-name it the People's Republic of Rock and Roll (or PR³), a counter-cultural redoubt and a “a lively beachhead of drugs, sex and rock and roll.”Footnote ⁴ This portrayal might seem to run the risk of reinforcing the received idea of late 1960s America as a haven of triumphant liberalism – the facile repackaging of the decade against which Fredric Jameson has warnedFootnote ⁵ – but for the character of Brock Vond, the government agent who embodies Nixonite – and Reaganite – repression.Footnote ⁶ Vond's internment camps and punitive raids on countercultural targets are a reminder that the US was – to say the least – a divided nation even at the zenith of countercultural activity. More disturbing for those on the liberal left, however, is Vond's realization that within the counterculture itself there runs a tendency to betray its own political causes, and to accept passively the terms of its own demise. Vond sees that the severance of the countercultural individual from all social and historical ties and assumptions will necessarily involve a crisis of identity that will in turn involve the need for a reassuring collective context.Footnote ⁷ Crucially, Vond identifies this as the moment of counterrevolution:

By rejecting the restraints imposed by state, religion, family and community, the counterculture effectively severs itself from all social connection other than that generated by its own exclusive cohort, composed in the main of young, hip, white collegians. Feeding on the overwhelmingly individualistic indulgences of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and – most significantly, for Pynchon – television, the young rebels remain needful of social and historical connection, but Vond calculates that these needs can be met by the virtual networks of the electronic media, which commodify those desires and neutralize their resistance to external control. Whereas the combination of emancipatory and communitarian urges might take on a truly subversive form – the initiation of “good” communities – the commodifying media promulgated by Vond and his ilk represent a placebo – a “bad” community – that allows the collective instinct to be drained off into the junk culture that covers almost every page of Pynchon's novel. It is a situation summed up by the “Gen X” teenager Isaiah Two-Four, who tells the ageing rocker Zoyd Wheeler,

The suggestion that the collapse of the counterculture occurred not so much as a result of external repression but rather as a result of individualistic self-indulgence and the failure of social connection, is underlined by the fact that, as DEA officer Hector Zuñiga points out, Vond's more aggressive methods were rendered superfluous by youthful submission to the imperatives of the Reagan era: “since about ’81 kids were comín in all on their own, askiń about careers.”Footnote ¹⁰ The age of the yuppie had dawned.

In fact, Zuñiga's vision of corporate conformity fails to become realized, at least in Vineland itself. Instead, the novel's youthful cohort – Prairie, Isaiah, Slide, the Russian traveller Alexei – tend to be anarchic, freewheeling characters who seem too worldly to submit themselves to revolutionary optimism, yuppie consumerism or cult membership. Along with the glowing portrayal of the novel's older characters – the politically active and civic-minded Beckers and Traverses – it appears that the individualist-liberationist instincts of the 1960s generation – represented by Frenesi Gates and Zoyd Wheeler – form a generational stratum that represents political betrayal, social decline and behavioural fecklessness rather than Porush's “magic middle.” At the end of the novel, when the generations are reconciled at the Becker–Traverse family reunion, the 1960s cohort is bracketed uncomfortably between the ostensibly more civic-minded older and younger generations.Footnote ¹¹

This critical interrogation of the 1960s cohort occurs in a number of Reaganite and post-Reaganite fictions. The work of Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland, for instance, is informed by hostility towards the parental generation evident in its young protagonists. In Ellis's Less than Zero (1985), the narrator Clay is disturbed by the apathy of his mother towards his younger sisters' consumption of cocaine and pornography, and by his father's dispensation of large cheques in lieu of parental involvement. Towards the end of the novel, Clay, having surrendered a vain search for some form of familial intimacy, notices a graffito that sums up his sense of resentment towards his elders: “Fuck you Mom and Dad … You both can die because that's what you did to me.”Footnote ¹² Patrick Bateman, the narrator of Ellis's American Psycho (1991), is also searching for a sense of social connection: “I … want … to … fit … in,” he declares; but, like Clay, he finds the networks provided by competitive consumerism and sensual gratification utterly inadequate, and is driven towards a nihilistic despair that manifests itself in a series of sadistic murders.Footnote ¹³ In a novel such as American Psycho, the 1960s dream of individual emancipation has been traduced by its outcome within the context of capitalism reconstructed according to its own interpretation of that dream: a behavioural nexus between social libertarianism and economic liberalism, the apotheosis of which is the (unofficially sanctioned) domination of one physical body by another. Similarly, as is made evident by the scene in which Bateman and his fellow bonds dealers each display their successively more elaborate business cards, social connection (or “fitting in”) is obtained through competitive consumption rather than cooperation or intimacy.Footnote ¹⁴

The young, hip, white, middle-class protagonists of Coupland's novels – in particular the “slackers” in Generation X (1991) and the corporate hirelings in Microserfs (1996) – also stress their own dissatisfaction with the world bequeathed them by a parental generation deemed too selfish to have any interest in either posterity or the public realm. In these novels, the dissatisfaction of Coupland's characters with individualistic assertion and consumerist self-indulgence pushes them towards a need for social connection in the form of friendship, storytelling and (often frustrated) attempts at familial reconciliation. In his later novels, such as Girlfriend in a Coma (1997) and Hey Nostradamus! (2003), this need for some form of personal confirmation within a collective context takes on an increasingly spiritual dimension – an indicator, perhaps, that in the contemporary American context, social communion and spiritual surrender are rarely far apart.

The perception of communal and civic decline is not restricted to the work of left-liberal novelists who bemoan the acquisitiveness and self-indulgence of the Reagan years. The same theme informs the writings of the philosopher Richard Rorty, whose book Achieving Our Country (1998) is prefaced by a lament for the lack of hope for social and political progress that he perceives within contemporary American fiction.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, Robert E. Putnam's celebrated work Bowling Alone (2000) was a concerted attempt to quantify a perception that, however widespread, might otherwise have been dismissed as millenarian griping on the part of a depressed and defeated generation of ageing left-liberal baby-boomers.

Putnam's argument is that recent decades have seen a decline in the kind of social participation that he sees as healthy for both society and the individual – one telling statistic he cites is that, whereas two-thirds of Americans in the mid-1970s claimed to have attended a recent meeting of some form of club or association, by the late 1990s only one-third claimed to have done so. Putnam blames this decline on a coalition of factors, from television to suburbanization and an increasingly unstable job market, but is acutely aware that a simplistic reassertion of such notions as tradition, community and local or national identity can have reactionary political implications, and cites the example of the Ku Klux Klan as an example of the negative implications of “bonding” rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁶

In order to resolve this political difficulty, Putnam makes a crucial distinction between what he terms “inclusive” and “exclusive” communities. The former, he argues, are positive in that, being open, flexible, egalitarian and tolerant, the kind of “bridging” social capital they generate provides greater levels of general and particular human contentment in the long term. The latter, however, through their insistence that membership of the community is conferrred and prioritized by factors that are held to be largely non-negotiable – race, nationality and gender, for example – contribute inferior and precarious forms of social capital.

It is the uncertain political nature of appeals to the collective, with the lingering possibility that such appeals might further endanger the gains made by the countercultural left, that makes the “communitarian turn” evident in such novels as Vineland a tentative and ambivalent exercise. The communal epiphany of the Becker–Traverse reunion at the end of the novel seems fragile, and its lack of political force is underlined by the fact that Brock Vond's undoing occurs not at the hands of this loose coalition of the disaffected and marginalized, but as the consequence of Reaganite cost-cutting: the bottom line remains the bottom line.

This communitarian reassessment of individualistic libertarianism frequently mourns (in an acutely self-conscious fashion) an older sense of collective confirmation, yet the revivalism implicit in this mood is undercut with the feeling that what is lost has been lost irrevocably and may only be recovered fleetingly, if at all. An even more debilitating thought for the liberal left is that articulated in a novel such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001), which suggests that the vanishing American Gemeinschaft, being founded mainly upon white middle-class patriarchy, may not be worth the risk or the effort of revival. Texts such as The Corrections, that question the post-1950s libertarian ethos, but that also remain wary as to the potential offered to the liberal left by a revival of New Deal-era social and political consensualism, are haunted by an ambivalence and in-built sense of inadequacy that makes the “radical” idea of secession from mainstream life even more tempting.

In this context, it is probably no accident that writers from social groups hitherto placed in a position subordinate to the white, middle-class male have sounded warnings about the “communitarian turn,” as if to indicate that individualism and libertarianism are not necessarily exhausted seams for such groups, and that appeals to tradition as a means to achieve social cohesion can mask an agenda based upon domination and submission. One of the best-known fictional representations of this danger is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), but an arguably more prescient statement about the nature of American freedom, and its difficult accommodation with the American collective, is provided by Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love (1989).

Dunn's novel begins with the description of a travelling show presided over by the controlling patriarch Al Binewski. Narrated by Al's daughter Olympia, the description of Al is not entirely unsympathetic: Al is said to embody “the standard issue Yankee, set on self-determination and independence.”Footnote ¹⁷ True to the pioneering spirit, Al is adept in many fields, and scornful of established interests and institutions. Along with this fierce independence, however, comes a willingness to dabble in extortion and to dose his wife with potentially lethal substances in order for her to bear mutated children who are subsequently recruited into the travelling show (known as the “Fabulon”). It thus appears that Al represents the American paradox whereby the right to unrestricted liberty, which allows one to act according to one's own values and priorities, involves the imposition of those values and priorities on others, so that the refusal of reliance eventually becomes its promulgation. The attainment of freedom is matched by the assertion of power – in this instance the power of the white patriarch – whose corrupting influence is symbolized in the novel by the transformation of Al's informal and benevolent staff infirmary into the sinister amputation surgery developed by Al's son Arty.

It is Arty who gradually becomes the star attraction of the show. In keeping with his father's Yankee defiance, the hideously mutated Arty begins his rise to prominence by rejecting the fate of dependency that appears to await him: “You know what they do with people like me? Brick walls, six-bed wards, two diapers a day and a mothball Santa at Christmas!” Instead, Arty begins combining his physical stunts with the dispensation of advice to members of his audience, one of who tells him, “I want to be like you are!”Footnote ¹⁸ Consequently, Arty conceives his own cult – Arturism – with himself as the charismatic leader who demands the complete submission of his followers.

Reflecting on the popular demand in contemporary American society for “how-to” manuals, for counsellors, gurus and seemingly endless sources of professional expertise, the narrator of Martin Amis's novel The Information (1995) asks, “Who could explain the fact that ‘My Way’ was the anthem of modern America? Americans didn't want to do it their way. They wanted to do it your way.”Footnote ¹⁹ The is the end-point of Geek Love's parable of the trajectory of American individualism, in which the fear of individual freedom is accompanied by the temptation to surrender it to a body or institution that represents not “good” community (in the Putnam sense) but rather a set of untrammelled psychotic desires. The acceptance by large numbers of people of a comforting, ready-made network of codes and rituals – which promise to restore a sense of purpose and an enabling framework to those threatened by the possibility of guilt and failure within a culture based upon competition and success, but which also demand the unequivocal submission of rights and responsibilities – is both disturbing and revealing within a nation whose Constitution sets such store by the freedoms of the enfranchised individual.

In his study of religious cults led by charismatic figures, Thomas Robbins acknowledges that cult communities can provide to their members a sense of communal belonging that is deemed to be missing from mainstream society. Far from providing a stable sanctuary from the world's ills, however, Robbins claims that movements that are centred around the appeal of charismatic individuals are liable to become locked into “a very erratic trajectory culminating … in sensational violence.”Footnote ²⁰ This claim seems borne out by the fate of the People's Temple, the Branch Davidians and the Heaven's Gate cults, and indicates that, where the basis of a community is not true mutuality, but rather domination by an individual, the outcome will be catastrophic. Thus in Geek Love – a novel that pre-dated the Waco and San Diego incidents – the Fabulon is destroyed by the kinetic powers of Arty's younger brother Chick in a conflagration described in the same apocalyptic terms that, according to Robbins, are used frequently by cults such as those led by Jones, Koresh and Applewhite.

The rhetoric of apocalypse is an indication of the ways in which alternative communities are more closely related to the mainstream than is immediately apparent. Just as the threat of nuclear annihilation was held in some quarters to be a tool of social and political control by governments during the Cold War (in a way that made nuclear weapons both a threat and a means of security), so cults and sects employ the concept of apocalypse (and the fear of the same) as both a menace and a means to salvation.

A frequent alternative to apocalypse in terms of the dynamics of secessionist communities is the myth of a return to an “authentic” or “original” American order that has been superseded by a nation in the grip of hostile, treacherous conspiracies. This aspect of the “communitarian turn” is common to both left and right, and Geek Love acts as both an acknowledgement of such a tendency and a warning against it.Footnote ²¹ Extremists on the right, such as the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh (whose actions were alleged to be a reaction against the activities of federal agents at Waco) and the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, are typical of this nostalgia for an idealized pioneer age. Although Kaczynski acted alone, his manifesto is cast in a nostalgic mode that seeks to reconcile personal autonomy with some form of communitarian vision (although it is a vision that – like the Binewski Fabulon – is white and patriarchal in nature). Kaczynski claims that “the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community,” and, although his aggressive promotion of individualism and self-reliance seems initially to have little in common with the attributes required for life in a cult or sect, the transformation of Al Binewski's “Yankee” values in Geek Love demonstrates that Kaczynski arguably had the potential to become a leader in the same fashion as Jones, Koresh or Applewhite – or, indeed, Arty Binewski.Footnote ²²

What is of further interest in Geek Love is that Dunn has excised the religious element in her depiction of the Arturan cult, as if to indicate that its presence, although extremely useful, is superfluous to a dynamic that rests not on external belief but on the relationship that exists between a charismatic leader and his (the leader is nearly always male) submissive followers. This, along with the white and patriarchal nature of the default position of many American alternative communities, seems borne out by Kimmel and Ferber's study of the rural militia movement in the US. Such groups are said to revere “the independent self-made man … embedded in a political community of like-minded and equally free men.”Footnote ²³ Emphasizing the masculine bias of such communities, Kimmel and Ferber contend that their members see themselves as “the displaced sons of rural America, the Jeffersonian yeomen of the nineteenth century, dispossessed by global restructuring and economic downturns.”Footnote ²⁴

This brings us back to the question of whose liberties are being represented by appeals for a return to the values of pioneer-age America. The rural militias effectively declare their intention to reproduce the distinction made by the Founding Fathers between the liberties offered to the Elect and those available to other, subordinate, groups. From this, it may be worth speculating that, were the views of such militias ever to be allowed free rein, the attempt to reconstitute the “original” and “authentic” American freedoms might well reconstruct the very type of authoritarian (and selectively interventionist) state they profess to despise. In other words, the betrayal of the pioneer myth may very well – like the collapse of the 1960s counterculture – be inevitable, and brought about by the myth's own internal contradictions.

Dunn's novel draws several teasing correspondences between the dynamics of a cult and those of mainstream society. Arty derides politicians, claiming, “Only a lunatic would want to be president. Those lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.”Footnote ²⁵ Yet this is the very principle upon which he has built the cult of Arturism. Indeed, the descriptions of Arty recorded in the notebook of the journalist Norval Sanderson recall those made of presidents (such as JFK, Carter, Reagan and Clinton) considered especially charismatic in their time:

The implication here is that mainstream American society has become a form of “super-cult”: a “bad” community in which liberty, responsibility and identity – even the ability to distinguish truth from fiction – are surrendered to a figurehead such as the President, or to an abstract entity such as the Constitution, and are returned as a set of reassuring myths and platitudes. As Arty remarks to Sanderson, “The truth is always an insult or a joke. Lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort.”Footnote ²⁷

Arty replicates the evolution of American society by exploiting the rhetoric of freedom and individual happiness in order to create essentialized beings who, being reduced to the status of objects, are defined by their use-value: a process that is represented by invasive surgery.Footnote ²⁸ Rhetoric and abstraction form no part of Al Binewski's pharmacy, but they form a vital part of the power dynamic of the Arturan cult, with its promise that “Lobotomy is the shortcut” to the acquiescent goal of “Peace Isolation and Purity.”Footnote ²⁹

Don DeLillo is another contemporary left-liberal writer who articulates the “communitarian turn,” yet also draws disturbing correspondences between secessionist communities and the society from which such communities secede. In Mao II (1992) DeLillo examines the ways in which crowds coalesce into communities, and how those communities may be judged in positive or negative terms according to criteria that almost directly map onto those employed by Putnam.

Contrasting the chaos of crowd behaviour at the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, and at the Hillsborough stadium disaster in Sheffield, with the order of the massed couples at a huge Unification Church (Moonie) wedding ceremony, Mao II examines the means by which the tension between individual agency and the dynamics of humanity en masse is resolved not by absorption into a truly collective sensibility, but by the surrender of collective and individual agency to the dominant will of a charismatic leader. Karen Janney, a former Moonie bride, attempts to explain the appeal of the mass weddings:

The leader, the narrative explains, answers the yearning of his followers, “unburdens them of free will and independent thought,” until they “all feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the language of self.”Footnote ³¹ The orientation of the cult towards singularity of the mass rather than the plurality and dialogue of the collective means that cult members constitute a malleable crowd rather than a dynamic (“good”) community. As Jeremy Green indicates, a communal identity such as that offered by the Moonie cult, which emphasizes the dissolution of identity and the abdication of personal agency, in fact offers no true alternative to mainstream American society because “the genuinely collective does not imply a refusal of identity, but a way of mediating between differences, sharing what is common while respecting the distinctiveness of what is not.”Footnote ³² In Putnam's terms, cults such as the Moonies are exclusive, not inclusive.

As in Geek Love, Mao II suggests that the mechanics of life as a cult member are not so different from those within mainstream society. Karen likens the attitudes and practices of her parents and the de-programmers they hire to the brainwashing techniques of the Moonies, and her susceptibility to both is said to be the outcome of the assault upon the individual within consumer society of the gamut of selling techniques employed by the commercial media. Behind the latter lies the profit motive, but this is no less true of the Moonies: while a member of the cult, Karen exhorts the members of her fundraising group to “sell, make the goal, grab the cash,” giving the lie to her earlier claim that the Unification Church offers something other than acquisitiveness and striving.Footnote ³³

Karen's story is a sub-plot in the novel, whose main protagonist is Bill Gray, a reclusive writer troubled by his own communitarian issue: that of the social role of the white left-liberal intellectual obliged to ponder his own comparative marginalization; that is, his own loss of social connection. In this, the central strand of Mao II, DeLillo likens the cult to that other contemporary symbol of secession: the terrorist cell. Gray's foil in his own story is George Haddad, the suave representative of a Middle Eastern terrorist group who attempts to persuade Gray to participate in what amounts to a publicity stunt on behalf of the group. Haddad draws a comparison between the part played by the terrorist in the contemporary world and that played by the writer: both seek to bring to light the situation of the disaffected and powerless, he claims, while also attempting to evade commodification and irrelevance. Gray is tempted by the Mephistophelean suggestions of Haddad but, in resisting, is obliged to articulate that which distinguishes the “goodness” of the social connection he craves from the secessionist need for connection that, in Gray's eyes, leads to destruction and terror. He reasons that his function as novelist represents the values of “good” community in that his articulation of marginalized voices is inherently open, self-doubting and anti-foundationalist, given over to the Rortyan concept that all descriptions of the world ought to be subject to the alleviation of pain, suffering and cruelty.Footnote ³⁴ This is in contrast to Haddad's terrorist project, which Gray perceives as closed, resolutely confident and absolutist to the degree that human life can be sacrificed to its “higher” ends. Gray concludes by asserting that it is his own belief in the virtues of “Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, [and] hints”Footnote ³⁵ that separates him, as both participating citizen and committed writer, from the closedness of an outlook that leads directly from the insularity and certainty of the terrorist cell – or the cult – to the secrecy and mass terror of an oppressive society such as that of Mao's China.Footnote ³⁶

Despite this declaration of faith in open, tolerant and inclusive liberalism, the pitiful death of Gray at the end of the novel underlines the apparent fragility of his social and political position. Like the demise of Vond at the end of Vineland, Gray's death suggests that there is something inadequate, even defeatist, in his sober declaration of faith. The combination of a tempered individualism with a similarly tempered communitarian aspect does not indicate the arrival of a particularly new and potent political force, but writers such as DeLillo imply that it is the only desirable alternative to the injustices and suffering inherent in the exclusive community and the closed system.

In his biography of Ronald Reagan, Gary Wills suggests that “the terrorist is the true individualist of our time, the lone defier (and defeater) of the common will.”Footnote ³⁷ This suggests, in keeping with Gray's rejection of Haddad, that terrorist groups, like cults, propose only a “bad” communal context in which the will of an assertive individual (or a cabal) can effect escalating levels of destruction and death; it also links the myth of individual assertiveness fostered by Reaganite ideology to the power dynamic frequently found in both cults and terrorist groups. This dynamic, claims Stan Lindsay, can be summed up with reference to Kenneth Burke's term “psychotic entelechy,” which, Lindsay explains, is derived from Aristotle's concept of entelechy as the notion whereby the final purpose of a thing is present in its earliest form (for example, the way in which the shape of a plant is present in the seed). Lindsay employs the term to describe the ways in which the tendency of a closed group (such as a cult) towards escalating levels of authoritarianism and violence is predetermined by the closed system of belief of its leader, as well as by the need of its members to submit to that system. He demonstrates how certain psychotic individuals obsessively predicate their beliefs upon concepts of perfection and predestination that spring not from openness, pragmatism and inclusiveness, but from “selective perception, selective organization and selective interpretation.”Footnote ³⁸ Distractions from the one-dimensional visions of the leader, such as the unpredictable desires and decay of the human body, are ruthlessly suppressed, hence the twin themes of amputation and castration in “cult” fiction, from the progressive amputation practised by the Arturian cult in Geek Love (as well as Norval Sanderson's claim to have castrated himself in order to win Arty's favour) to Karen's demand in Mao II of her charges in the Unification Church: “Lose hair, lose nail off finger, lose whole hand, whole arm; it go on scale to stand against sins.”Footnote ³⁹

Strictures against the body, and against the sex drive in particular, are not confined to the fictional representation of cults: Lindsay notes that members of the Heaven's Gate cult had been castrated before succumbing to Hepplewhite's demand for mass suicide. He adds, “In an effort to bring to perfection the implications of religious purity, the Heaven's Gate cult engaged in very hazardous or damaging actions,” and claims that a similar destructive tendency was at work in Waco, where the behaviour of Koresh was not irrational but rather “super-rational. He [carried] his meaning to the extreme.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In Mao II Gray suggests that all closed systems share this tendency to carry “meaning to the extreme” in ways that have disastrous consequences. The contemporary left-liberal writer, as exemplified by Gray (or DeLillo himself), does not subscribe to the perfection of a cause as justification for terror or destruction in the name of singular interest. In place of these, it is the task of the contemporary intellectual to insist that openness, negotiation and mutuality are still feasible and necessary, and that it is the task of the social novel to articulate those values.Footnote ⁴¹

Such a conclusion is in keeping with America's oldest Protestant traditions in that it affirms the importance of individual autonomy while acknowledging the dangers of allowing the liberty of one individual to overpower that of others. It recognizes that the “pioneering” impulse to “master” nature is not in itself valuable without a reciprocity that limits not only that impulse but the desire to overcome the autonomy of others (a tendency that the novel implies is not restricted to gender, but which may arise in any unequal social or economic relationship). The novels mentioned in this piece propose that the search for a balance between the rights of the sovereign self and the circumscription of those rights in the interests of the collective is necessarily contingent, self-questioning and incessant, and that this is what distinguishes “good” communities from the “bad” communities of the Fabulon, the cult or, indeed, contemporary American society.