If you wanted to put in fiction form the split between the Protestant Ethic and the Social Ethic of organization life, you might, if you wanted to be extreme about it, come up with a plot situation something like this.
A middle-management executive is in a spot of trouble. He finds that the small branch plant he’s helping to run is very likely to blow up. There is a way to save it: if he presses a certain button the explosion will be averted. Unfortunately, however, just as he’s about to press a button his boss heaves into view. The boss is a scoundrel and a fool, and at this moment he’s so scared he is almost incoherent. Don’t press the button, he says.
The middle-management man is no rebel and he knows that the boss, stupid as he is, represents The Organization. Still, he would like to save everyone’s life. Thus his dilemma: if he presses the button he will not be acting like a good organization man and the plant will be saved. If he doesn’t press it he will be a good organization man and they will all be blown to smithereens.
A damn silly dilemma, you might say. Almost exactly this basic problem, however, is the core of the biggest-selling novel of the postwar period, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and rarely has a novel so touched a contemporary nerve. Much of its success, of course, was due to the fact it is a rattling good tale, and even if the author had ended it differently it would still probably have been a success. But it is the moral overtones that have made it compelling. Here, raised to the nth degree, is the problem of the individual versus authority, and the problem is put so that no reader can duck it. There is no “Lady or the Tiger” ending. We must, with the author, make a choice, and a choice that is presented as an ultimately moral one.
The boldness of it makes The Caine Mutiny something of a landmark in the shift of American values. Popular fiction in general, as I will take up in the next chapter, has been going in the same direction for a long time, and The Caine Mutiny is merely evolutionary in this respect. But it is franker; unlike most popular fare, it does not sugar-coat the precept to adjustment by trapping it up with the words of individualism. It is explicit. Author Wouk puts his protagonist in a dilemma and, through rigorous plotting, eliminates any easy middle course. The protagonist must do what he thinks is right or do what the system thinks is right.
The man caught in the dilemma is one the reader can identify himself with. He is Lieutenant Maryk, the executive officer of the mine sweeper Caine. Maryk is no scoffer, but a stolid, hard-working man who just wants to do his job well. He likes the system and all his inclinations lead him to seek a career in the Regular navy.
Ordinarily he would lead an uneventful, productive life. The ship of which he is executive officer, however, is commanded by a psychopath named Queeg. At first Maryk stubbornly resists the warnings about Queeg voiced by Lieutenant Keefer, an ex-writer. But slowly the truth dawns on him, and in a series of preliminary incidents the author leaves no doubt in Maryk’s—or the reader’s—mind that Queeg is in fact a bully, a neurotic, a coward, and what is to be most important of all, an incompetent.
In many similar instances subordinates have found ways to protect themselves without overtly questioning the system—they can make requests for mass transfer and thereby discipline the superior, control him by mass blackmail, and the like. Wouk, however, proceeds to build a climax in which such reconciliations are impossible. He places the Caine in the midst of a typhoon.
Terrified, Queeg turns the ship south, so that it no longer heads into the wind. Maryk pleads with him to keep it headed into the wind as their only chance for survival. Queeg, now virtually jabbering with fear, refuses to turn the ship around into the wind. The ship is on the verge of foundering.
What shall Maryk do? If he does nothing he is certain that they are all lost. If he takes advantage of Article 184 in Navy Regulations and relieves Queeg temporarily of command for medical reasons, he is in for great trouble later.
Maryk makes his decision. With as much dignity as possible he relieves Queeg of command and turns the ship into the wind. The ship still yaws and plunges, but it stays afloat. As if to punctuate Maryk’s feat, the Caine passes the upturned bottom of a destroyer that hadn’t made it.
Eventually there is a court-martial for Maryk and his fellow officers. The defense lawyer, Barney Greenwald, makes what appears to be highly justified points about Queeg and, through skillful cross-examination, reveals him to the court as a neurotic coward. The court acquits Maryk. Queeg’s career is finished.
Then the author pulls the switch. At a party afterward, lawyer Greenwald tells Maryk and the junior officers that they, not Queeg, were the true villains of the piece. Greenwald argues that Queeg was a regular officer, and that without regular officers there would be no going system for reserves to join later. In what must be the most irrelevant climax in contemporary fiction, Greenwald says that he is a Jew and that his grandmother was boiled down for soap in Germany and that thanks be to the Queegs who kept the ships going. He throws a glass of champagne at Keefer.
“I see that we were in the wrong,” one of the junior officers writes later, with Wouk’s blessing. “The idea is, once you get an incompetent ass of a skipper—and it’s a chance of war—there’s nothing to do but serve him as though he were the wisest and the best, cover his mistakes, keep the ship going, and bear up.”
Here, certainly, is an astounding denial of individual responsibility. The system is presented as having such a mystique that apparent evil becomes a kind of good. What would have happened if Maryk hadn’t relieved Queeg? We are asked to accept the implied moral that it would have been better to let the ship and several hundred men perish rather than question authority—which does seem a hell of a way to keep a ship going. True, Wouk doesn’t extend his premises to this blunt a point, and after it’s all over suggests that somehow things would have worked out all right even if Maryk hadn’t turned the ship around. But the lesson is plain. It is not for the individual to question the system.
An extraordinary point of view, but did Americans gag on it? In the critical reception of the book most people got the point—and most of them agreed with it.* Partly this was a contemporary reaction to the spate of war books which in lazy anger personified the evil of war in officers and discipline. But the larger moral was not overlooked. The Caine Mutiny rationalized the impulse to belong and to accept what is as what should be. If we can be shown there is virtue in following a Queeg, how much more reason to welcome the less onerous sanctions of ordinary authority! The “smart” people who question things, who upset people—they are the wrong ones. It was Keefer, with his clever mind, his needling of authority, who led the ordinary people like Maryk astray. Barney Greenwald was too smart for his own good too, and to redeem himself he had to throw a glass of champagne in Keefer’s dirty intellectual face.
It could be argued that the public’s acquiescence was only apparent and if people had bothered to think about the moral they would have protested it. To get some idea of what would happen if people had to think about its implications, I tried a modest experiment. In co-operation with the authorities of a small preparatory school, I initiated an essay contest for the students. The subject would be The Caine Mutiny. Prize winners would be chosen for the literary excellence of their essays and not for their point of view, but it was the moral issue of The Caine Mutiny that was their subject. Here are the ground rules we announced:
The essay, which should be between 500 and 1,000 words in length, should consider the following problems:
I. What is the central moral issue of The Caine Mutiny?
II. How does the author, Herman Wouk, speaking through characters in the book, regard the resolution of the moral issue?
III. How do the resolution of the moral issue and the author’s judgment of that resolution accord with life as you know it?
At length the essays were finished, and when we sat down to read them we were pleased to find how well they had grasped the essential issue. In a sense, it was a highly nondirective test; not surprisingly, they had gone to some effort previously to cadge some hints from the teachers, and it was obvious they tried hard to cadge hints from Wouk. How they felt about the mutineers depended considerably on how they thought he felt; and, understandably, they were somewhat confused as to what side they were meant to disapprove. On the whole, however, they did grasp the essential issue at stake. Each interpreted its relevance to his life somewhat differently, but most of them saw the problem as that of individual independence versus the system.
With one exception they favored the system. Collusion may have fortified them in this, but their phrasing, and their puzzlement over Wouk’s position, left little doubt that their feeling was genuine. Several disagreed with Wouk, but the grounds on which they disagreed with him were that he was too easy on the mutineers. Here is a sampling of final paragraphs:
In everything we do there are certain rules and regulations we have to abide by, and, like Willie Keith, the only way we will learn is through experience. We have to abide by the rules of our particular society to gain any end whatsoever.
I cannot agree with the author in that I believe that one should obey orders no matter what the circumstances.
It seems that life in general is like a baseball game; everywhere there are rules and laws set up by many people for the ultimate benefit of all. Yet there are people who think as the young rookie that their actions should be directed by what they feel is right, not by what everyone else has determined. True, there may be partly extenuating circumstances; but unless the reason is more than subjective, the one who breaks society’s laws will be punished by fine, jail, or even death.
This is another example of why a subordinate should not have the power to question authority.
Morally, however, the very act that Maryk committed is against the law.
The underlying causes of the Caine mutiny have their parallel in everyday life…. The teacher who allows personal dislike to enter into his grading; the politician who blames his mistakes on others; both of these are examples of fraudulency…. Greenwald, Maryk’s lawyer, confused Queeg and twisted his words so that Queeg was made to look stupid.
Men have always been subjected to the whims of those in command; and so it will be in the future. This plan must exist or anarchy will be the result.
The student who dissented was not rebellious; like the others, he pointed out the necessity for codes and rules and regulations if society is to have any collective purpose. Unlike them, however, he put these points before, rather than after, the “but.” “Is a man justified,” he asks, “in doing what he truly thinks is right under any circumstances?” After pointing out the dangers of individual conscience, he comes to his conclusion: “A man must realize that a wrong decision, however sincere, will leave him open to criticism and to probable punishment. Nevertheless, and after weighing all the facts, it is his moral duty to act as he thinks best.”
It is his moral duty to act as he thinks best. Has this become an anachronistic concept? Fifteen students against, to one for, constitute, let me concede, very few straws in the wind. Nor do they mark any sudden shift in values. Had the question about Queeg been asked in, say, 1939, my guess is that a higher proportion of students would have voted for Maryk than would today; but even then it is probable that a majority would have voted against him.
It is a long-term shift of emphasis that has been taking place. So far we have been talking of only one book and one decade, and, while this gives some sort of fix, it does not illuminate what our popular morality has changed from. To this end I would now like to take a look at popular fiction in general—as it used to be, and where it seems to be going.
* Save for a few articles in the smaller magazines, critical reaction has been overwhelmingly favorable, and, to judge by my sample of reviews, only a handful of critics caviled at the moral. Theater and movie critics, possibly because the three-year time lapse between the book and the screen and stage versions gave them time for a double take, entertained more doubts than book critics. (John Mason Brown in The Saturday Review:”… he suddenly asks us to forgive the Queeg he has proved beyond doubt unfit for command.” Martin Dworkin in The Progressive: “Wouk wants us to think less and obey more…. There are voices stating this view more clearly than Wouk … he, at least, is still confused.”) As in the case of the book reviewers, however, the majority applauded, including even such usually perceptive critics as Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr. (Kerr: “… we are exhilarated by a ringing, rousing, thoroughly intelligible statement in [Queeg’s] defense.”)