iBook Action figures 4 - Airport Fiction: The Men of Mass-Market Literature

4. Airport Fiction: The Men of Mass-Market Literature

Before the 1980s and the so-called Reagan revolution, the globe-trotting military adventurer, popular for most of the twentieth century, appeared perhaps in decline in U.S. popular novels and films. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. military’s failures in Vietnam called into question the utility of the international-soldier model. Subsequent events during the Carter administration, most visibly the aborted hostage-rescue mission in Teheran in 1980, further eroded popular confidence in military institutions and military ideology. In popular U.S. cinema, the war film had all but disappeared. The war in Vietnam was portrayed most often from domestic perspectives, in films such as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter (both 1978), which highlight the debilitating psychological effects of warfare.1 Film studios chose different settings for the representation of successful male conflict. These included the science-fiction battleground and western-genre allegiances of films such as Star Wars and its sequels. Here and in the Star Trek series (1979 and following), Flash Gordon (1980), and Tron (1982), military war and hand-to-hand or smallarms combat were transformed into family-friendly, live-action cartoons (a trend hugely revisited in the early years of the current decade). Another outlet appeared in what might be called working-class competition films, films such as Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Every Which Way but Loose (1978), both among the top grossing films of their release years. The more realist underdog drama Rocky and its sequels also validated a form of aggressive masculinity, if in the confined realm of sports. Active men also moved from war zones to the urban frontier of police films such as Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981). Closest to the model of the war film was the crumbling-infrastructure milieu of disaster films such as The Towering Inferno. In that film, a military model of organization allows male (fire-) fighters to rally against a singular threat. The film’s conflicts and alliances 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 113 among men hearken back to the war film, but the setting is shifted to the contemporary urban United States. Meanwhile, in fiction, war novels such as Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers (1979) portrayed the horrors of war rather than its glory, while espionage-fiction writers such as Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth focused on the relatively bloodless realm of Cold War information gathering. In the 1980s, however, resuscitated images of militant, male leaders and heroes in U.S. politics and popular culture supplanted the previous years’ critiques of state-sanctioned global violence and its effects on the men who engage in it. Expanded U.S. military spending and the patriotic, militant rhetoric of the Reagan presidency produced a cultural climate in which traditional male heroism again could be endorsed unapologetically. In cinema, the early 1980s saw the return of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character, absent since 1975, in Sudden Impact (1983), as well as the popularity of Sylvester Stallone’s muscular Vietnam veteran John Rambo in First Blood (1982). In fiction, Tom Clancy’s hugely successful The Hunt for Red October (1984) reasserted the primacy of U.S. intelligence and military power. Authors such as Stephen Coonts, Harold Coyle, and W.E.B. Griffith would also profitably exploit this newly prosocial attitude toward military and intelligence institutions.2 Clancy’s and Coonts’s so-called technothrillers not only depict military conflict on a global scale but also extensively catalog the logistical underpinnings of such conflict. Clancy’s novels in particular represent the activities of bureaucrats, administrators, and analysts alongside the exploits of military personnel of varying ranks and services. His fiction connects the bureaucratic and military worlds through exhaustive description of technical apparatuses and procedures: weapons, vehicles, communications equipment, medical operations, and engagement strategies. Novels such as Clancy’s privilege hierarchical activity in military and bureaucratic organizations over the spectacular feats of solitary heroes. These texts immerse readers in complicated and putatively realistic group activity. Rather than granting primacy to the visible attributes of male heroism, novels often rely on readers’ psychological and experiential familiarity with protagonists’ situations. The narratives of male-oriented popular novels often call for a mode of heroism that accords with readers’ own presumed cerebral (and to a lesser extent, physical) capabilities. Similarly, they offer readers the experience of male mastery as a consequence of reading itself. With their interest in technical description and historical detail regarding military technology and weaponry, the novels promise to confer expert knowledge of these historically male disciplines. The enormously popular works of Clancy and fellow thriller writer Clive Cussler find their largest audiences among white, middle-aged, professional men. 114 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 114 These novels’ protagonists exhibit cerebral qualities, managerial capacity, and conservative, prosocial values. Such traits closely align the central characters with the mindsets, experiences, and workplace duties of the books’ principal readerships. These novels, many of which have been produced as major-studio films, appear as mature (by virtue of their graying or balding protagonists and most loyal audience) versions of Hollywood action films or thrillers. They combine domestic and international settings, male protagonists who think and act in conventionally heroic ways, and violent interpersonal and military conflict. They repeat and refine conventions of ritualized male conflict, earning enormous popularity and longevity in the process. Works such as Clancy’s and Cussler’s contribute substantially to the proliferation of normative models of active masculinity. Clancy and Cussler remain among the most popular authors of contemporary fiction. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, their novels routinely achieved high positions on national and international bestseller lists— Clancy was the most successful U.S. writer in any genre in the 1980s and 1990s—and their early-2000s works have been bestsellers as well. Along with horror writer Stephen King and legal-thriller writer John Grisham, Clancy is one of the most successful novelists of all time. As of the late 1990s, his novels had been translated into twenty-three languages and sold in forty countries.3 His last 1990s novel, Rainbow Six, released in summer 1998, moved immediately to the top of the U.S. best-seller list, initially outselling the second-place title by a margin of seven to one.4 In a five-year period, three of Clancy’s novels were adapted into successful Hollywood films: The Hunt for Red October (1989), Patriot Games (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994). (A fourth successful adaptation, The Sum of All Fears, followed in 2002.) In addition to his many novels, Clancy authored or coauthored seven works of nonfiction by the end of the 1990s, the last being Every Man a Tiger (1999), an account of air combat in the Persian Gulf War cowritten with a retired Air Force general. Cussler, although not a household name to the degree that Clancy is, has commanded large audiences since the mid-1970s, and his last novel of the 1990s, Atlantis Found (1999), spent nearly ten weeks in the top ten of the New York Times’s list of best-selling hardcover fiction. Like Clancy, Cussler has forayed successfully into nonfiction, coauthoring The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks (1996), which appeared in paperback in 1997 with a one-million copy first printing.5 Cussler, too, has had less success with cinematic adaptations than with novels: of his nearly two dozen best-sellers, only the 1976 novel Raise the Titanic was produced as a studio film in the twentieth century. The expensive film performed dismally at the box office in 1980, nearly bankrupting its British financiers and long hindering film adaptations of Cussler’s novels. (His 1992 novel Sahara was adapted as a AIRPORT FICTION 115 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 115 medium-budget action film in 2005.) Regardless of their successes as feature films, the novels of both Clancy and Cussler have achieved substantial cultural visibility worldwide. Both too have intriguingly refined genre-fiction conventions surrounding narratives of male agency. Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels doggedly preserve constructions of heroic, idealized masculinity within the generic terrain of the spy thriller and the nautical thriller. While indebted to popular-fiction conventions, Clancy and Cussler repeatedly reference cinematic masculinity as well. Their novels call upon paradigms of masculinity developed in 1960s and 1970s films. Men who came of age with these films are no longer exclusively targeted as consumers of mainstream action films, but they do form the primary audience for popular military novels and thrillers. Lacking abundant representations of male activity in mainstream film, older men can find such representations instead in mass-market fiction (produced of course by similar media conglomerates). Marked declines in book reading among young adults have contributed as well to novels’ courtship of more loyal, older readerships.6 The social reality of corporations and the military differs substantially from the streamlined, exaggerated worlds of genre texts. Clancy’s and Cussler’s fictions both traverse the landscape between these disparate spheres. Both writers’ novels play out against a backdrop of international politics, global espionage agencies, and corporate and military conflict. Such narratives grant prominence to government agencies, the military, and the soldiers, bureaucrats, and managers who fill buildings and bases. These texts combine the generic world of action and intrigue with the narrow military or business world of ordered, ostensibly purposeful interactions. In Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels, the white-collar worker’s narrow range of skills and experiences grants him access to a vast and alluring world of international intrigue. Problem-solving skills and managerial prowess substitute for previous signifiers of active masculinity such as physical strength and personal charisma. The novels advance a model of heroic masculinity that privileges competence and self-esteem (not coincidentally, two prominent components of business manifestos and self-help books) over physical toughness, agility, and facility with violence. Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels also present restraint as a necessary component of heroic masculinity. Restraint represents civilized masculinity and separates thoughtful, self-controlled heroes from reckless villains. Similarly, by validating restraint, the authors explicitly compensate for their middle-aged heroes’ waning physical strength. In both men’s novels, physical talents prove to be only intermittently useful. The novelists part ways in other areas, though. Clancy’s novels feature extensive description of procedures both familiar and esoteric, from suburban traffic patterns and characters’ 116 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 116 deliberations over neckwear to condensed treatises on submarine propulsion. Clancy’s novels promise descriptive if not psychological depth. Cussler works in a more fantastic, cartoonish mode. In his world, adults engage in conventional adolescent pleasures: car chases, gunplay, seafaring adventure (often in fanciful underwater craft), and brief sexual episodes. Clancy’s novels include most of these elements as well, though he repeatedly uses rhetorical gestures to assert differences between the “real” world of his fictions and the artificial world of film westerns and television police dramas. Cussler’s work rarely insists upon such a disjuncture, instead remaining faithful to popular fiction’s illusionist conventions of character and action. This chapter examines a range of 1980s and 1990s novels by each author (of Clancy’s novels, I address mostly those featuring the technocrat hero Jack Ryan), with some concluding attention to their post-9/11 novels as well. Clancy’s and Cussler’s formative works illuminate the textual operations underway in popular fiction during the Reagan–Bush era of economic growth and military buildup. These novels show how political and economic factors shape fictional models of active masculinity. The novels’ privileged traits, such as managerial skill and cerebral ability, could in principle be attributed to female as well as male characters. However, both writers identify their protagonists’ domains as expressly and emphatically masculine. This gendering process occurs through configurations of plot, character, and narrative space. The novels also surround their protagonists with a palpable but often intangible masculine aura, revealed through dialogue among men, internal monologue (in Clancy’s novels), described gestures, and invocations of male intuition. Both writers represent corporate, military, and government institutions bound together by masculinist codes of honor, brotherhood, and loyalty. In addition, both writers’ male protagonists spend active and leisure time manipulating vehicles and apparatuses coded as masculine. The men interact with high-technology products such as nuclear weapons and computers and with modes of military transportation such as combat aircraft, helicopters, and submarines. Cussler’s novels add classic automobiles to the mix, signifying male luxury, taste, power, and mechanical aptitude. Both writers also define their narrative worlds through the exclusion or marginalization of women characters. In their novels, women appear principally as dutiful mates, sexual temptresses, or token figures against which male expertise can be judged. Women tend to weaken or inhibit male characters’ homosocial relations with their male coworkers and off-duty associates. These supporting men are usually linked to the protagonists’ work realms, as former military comrades or workplace associates with whom the protagonists maintain friendly relations. While women characters AIRPORT FICTION 117 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 117 represent the social world the heroes are sworn to protect, they more frequently impede rather than aid the heroes’ goals. At the same time, both Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels introduce the recurring figure of the exceptional woman, defined according to masculine categories such as candor and rationality and set apart from conventions of femininity such as domesticity and desire for romantic commitment. In her casual relations with men, the exceptional woman reduces male anxieties about interactions with women and legitimizes the otherwise exclusionary codes of male interpersonal conduct. This figure, usually the protagonist’s sexual or romantic interest, functions as the ideal “man’s woman.” Her sober logic and lack of emotionality correspond to the male hero’s militant, patriarchal worldview. Columnist Sean French disingenuously identifies Clancy as a “radical feminist” because of these strong female characters.7 Generally, though, Clancy’s figurations of women systematically justify the aggression and competitiveness of the male hero’s world, a world to which most women are denied access. Both Clancy and Cussler present narrative worlds that women can enter safely only if they divest themselves of conventionally feminine traits. Even when the exceptional woman does participate in masculine activities, her heavily emphasized beauty—an unimpeachable radiance set against the male hero’s more rugged, understated appearance—distinguishes her from the novels’ male agents. Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels link corporate and military divisions of labor and models of problem-solving, indicating that such models are best suited to resolve global crises. This worldview is all-encompassing; dissenters are ridiculed or simply excluded. (Cussler occasionally crafts a caricature of a liberal politician, and Clancy sometimes assails a powerful woman or a political activist.) The novels emphasize professional hierarchies, and they implicitly value the specialized labor of middle-class workers under capitalism. That labor serves as a bridge to a comprehensive world of suspense and action. In the novels, cinematic constructions of active, masculine space validate and embellish the routinized world of multinational capitalism. In a manner similar to action cinema’s frequent conflation of private and public spaces, Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels largely erase categories of interiority and the private. The novels take place instead in a wholly public dimension that legitimates patriarchal constructions of identity. Men do not bring their problems home because they rarely go home.8 Economic developments in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s eroded public faith in the post–World War II model of organizational capitalism and corporate loyalty. These changes included the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s, ongoing corporate “downsizing,” the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the rise of corporate consultants and 118 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 118 independent contractors, and the subsequent growth of the high-tech and information-technology economy. All contribute to a changing understanding of multinational corporations’ relationship to their blueand white-collar workers (groups that remain disproportionately male). Susan Faludi reports in Stiffed that General Motors, Chrysler, IBM, and AT&T together eliminated nearly one-half million jobs in the first half of the 1990s (60–61). Similarly, in a case study of laid-off aerospace workers in Southern California, Faludi notes a loss of one-half million jobs in Los Angeles County alone, including more than fifty percent of all aerospace jobs in the region and a total of one-quarter million manufacturing jobs (52). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, though, Clancy’s novels fetishized the organizational structures of traditional institutions. Such emphasis could reassure readers that venerable notions of corporate loyalty were not obsolete, and that qualities of white-collar labor remained fulfilling. Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels depict successful, working fraternities of middle-aged men. Amid evolving business and economic conditions, their representations of traditional male solidarity offer paeans to a dying era of group loyalty while disavowing negative economic shifts. In a March 2000 essay, business writer Michael Lewis argued that the late-1990s U.S. labor shortage, the rise of corporate stock options, and the emergence of freespending, high-technology startups together encouraged a decline in workers’ loyalty to corporations and a general public skepticism about corporations’ contributions to social good.9 Lewis’s argument intersects with Faludi’s view of a 1990s crisis in male identity. She points to an eroding pact between men and the larger public world, a pact “forged through loyalty, through a conviction that a man’s ‘word’ meant something in the larger society, through a belief that faithfulness, dedication, and duty would be rewarded in kind, or at least appreciated in some meaningful way” (595). Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels thoroughly redeem archaic notions of loyalty and duty, and they passingly acknowledge ongoing economic and technological developments. However, they locate these developments only within conventional representations of espionage and the military, institutions that still rely on the masculine compacts Faludi describes. In other words, these somewhat recession-proof institutions stand in for all others. Triumph of the Technocrat Tom Clancy’s novels advance an explicitly conservative worldview. His fiction foregrounds patriarchal, militant characters and environments. AIRPORT FICTION 119 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 119 At the same time, it co-opts emotional rhetoric and superficially validates family and domestic concerns. At the narrative level, Clancy presents relatively fast-paced stories of international conflict focused around single themes or situations, such as Cold War political and military relations, terrorism, drug trafficking, and threats of nuclear war. Though particular heroes and villains receive prominent treatment, an ever-growing cast of supporting characters, along with extensive technical descriptions and strategic information, add complexity to the novels’ principal conflicts. Ideologically, Clancy establishes connections among various spheres— political, military, business, academic, and domestic—both within and across national borders. He also labors to overcome the visible or implicit contradictions of specific intersections, for example, highlighting the relative sameness of marriage in the United States and Russia in The Hunt for Red October, or asserting similarities between corporate and military strategies in Patriot Games. Unlike the extensive category of British spy fiction, in which intelligence agents often work autonomously, with little relation to military actions or immediate political situations and with subdued nationalism, Clancy’s novels also adopt an emphatically pro-U.S. stance. Clancy’s recurring protagonists embody and explicitly defend U.S. social structures, economic practices, and military and intelligence activities. Although the Vietnam War altered both U.S. military policy and popular perceptions of the wartime capabilities and responsibilities of the United States, Clancy’s novels expound the virtues of the (largely male) participants in national-security activities and the venerable institutions that support them. Clancy’s novels reassert the primacy of U.S. military power after Vietnam (and after the end of the Cold War, though Russia and the Soviet Union figure prominently in many of his 1990s and early-2000s novels as well). They also provide moral and strategic lessons for the successful negotiation and deployment of that power. An overwhelmingly male cast of characters implicitly connects the various realms—military, political, academic, and in passing, corporate—in which Clancy’s narratives occur. In the novels, shared masculine codes of friendship, diplomacy, emotion, ethics, and action undergird the institutions in which power is held and exercised. The fundamental similarities among Clancy’s narrative realms allow their protagonists—and more significantly, their readers—to shift smoothly among them, without disorientation. The composite status of Clancy’s frequent protagonist, Jack Ryan, facilitates shifts among institutional codes and discourses. Ryan, as constructed by Clancy, is a former Marine lieutenant, then a stockbroker (a long-past career in the novels, used to show the character’s familiarity with but ultimate rejection of “the rat race”), then a Naval Academy instructor (with a doctorate in naval history, identifying him as an academic), and 120 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 120 finally, a CIA analyst (the position he occupies, at various ranks, in many of Clancy’s novels). The breadth of Ryan’s experience makes his character intermittently appealing to a range of white-collar readers whose own backgrounds intersect with the character’s. Moreover, Ryan’s successful heroics allow readers to share vicariously in his experiences and imagine them as their own. Despite Ryan’s frequent declaration in the early novels that “I’m only a historian,” he consistently plays an instrumental role, helping to foil political terrorists, drug traffickers, and foreign superpowers. Clancy validates characters’ military affiliations above other categories. Still, many characters, military or otherwise, demonstrate the proper masculine bearing that grants them access to a similarly esteemed realm, that of male camaraderie. My argument concerns Clancy’s oeuvre as a whole, and this chapter includes textual analysis from a range of his 1980s and 1990s novels. For precision of analysis, though, I devote most attention to two of Clancy’s 1980s novels, The Hunt for Red October, published in 1984, and Patriot Games, published in 1987. While relatively wide in scope, these novels are ultimately more contained than many of Clancy’s later epics, such as the 900-page The Sum of All Fears (1991) and the 1,300-page Executive Orders (1996). The sheer heft of Clancy’s later works partly accounts for their appeal—simply transporting a hardcover copy is a manly labor—but the shorter works offer compelling narrative operations that the sprawling structure of many of his later novels partly obscures. The Hunt for Red October, Clancy’s first novel, narrates a Russian submarine commander’s attempted defection to the West, along with U.S. and British efforts (crucially Ryan’s) to assist him and gain possession of his technologically sophisticated vessel before opposing Soviet submarines can destroy it. (Clancy’s second novel, Red Storm Rising 1986, presents another Cold War narrative, a scenario of a global war between the United States and the Soviet Union.) Patriot Games, Clancy’s third novel, deals with an IRA splinter group’s attempts to kill members of the British royal family as well as the family of Jack Ryan, who has foiled the assassination attempt that opens the book. Other Clancy novels, including in the 1990s Without Remorse (1993), Debt of Honor (1994), and Rainbow Six (1998), feature exNavy SEAL John Clark, a considerably more active and aggressive figure than the often deskbound Ryan, who in Executive Orders becomes U.S. president. (Ryan does appear in complementary roles in some of John Clark novels. Clear and Present Danger [1989] and Debt of Honor showcase them both, and Ryan makes cameos in others.) Most critical work on Clancy deals with his novels’ foreign-policy positions. Amid this interrogation, some critics have called attention to Clancy’s figurations of masculinity and family.10 These latter issues of AIRPORT FICTION 121 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 121 representation are central to my analysis; in particular, I hope to demonstrate how the novels’ constructions of gender, family, and characters’ overall worldviews function alongside the books’ complicated plots and nationalist overtones. Critics routinely find fault with Clancy’s slender characterizations and simplified psychological conflicts, yet such elements provide a substantial foundation for the larger ideological projects of his texts. Reviews of Clancy’s books repeatedly assert that the author describes technical operations and narrates action sequences well, but provides “cardboard” or otherwise inauthentic characters. Thus, plot elements and description fulfill criteria for genre fiction (i.e., thrillers should thrill, just as they should give access to some secretive institutional world such as the CIA’s). Curiously, reviewers do not grant generic characters the same exceptions. Somehow the lack of psychological realism bedevils reviewers more than the many implausible plot contrivances (such as Ryan’s or Clark’s serendipitous involvement in countless events of global significance). Yet the highly conventionalized characters and formulaic narratives of novels such as Clancy’s carry ideological and aesthetic weight precisely because of their generic qualities. By assessing only Clancy’s characters in terms of their putative realism or lack thereof, critics acknowledge Clancy’s broader milieu of male camaraderie, political intrigue, and military strength as a legitimate, authentic representation of social reality and distributions of power. Clancy’s imagined social world legitimates its characters’ patriarchal, militant, and nationalist codes of behavior. In Clancy’s networks of subplots and minor but significant events, such codes appear indispensable. When individuals fail to abide by particular cultural and institutional codes, catastrophic consequences ensue for other members of the social world. In Clancy’s world, human error appears principally as a moral failing or a lapse in professionalism. Conversely, characters adhering to the strictest moral and professional codes tend to succeed against all odds. While many of the novels’ incidental passages—concerning popular tastes, parenting strategies, marital relations, and the like—bear only marginally on plot concerns, they provide the novels’ connective tissue, presenting readers a coherent world of common experiences and attitudes. Throughout Clancy’s novels, shared interests in particular subjects, however rarefied or quotidian, connect male characters. Whether the subject is television sports or shipbuilding, though, the areas of interest remain implicitly male dominated. Women only rarely enter the equation, either as complement or impediment. In Patriot Games, for example, the common experience of military service engenders a friendship between Ryan and the Prince of Wales (who, like most heads of state in Clancy’s novels, is not referred to by name). Clancy also notes in passing that Ryan’s wife, Cathy, and the Princess share an interest in the violin, but he devotes 122 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 122 no extensive dialogue to this subject. In this and other respects, Clancy constructs women’s pursuits as greatly subordinate to those of men. Repeatedly, promotion of male experience appears to take a back seat to promotion of broader social and economic conservatism—esteem of family, limited government, and support for existing class hierarchies. Yet even here, women matter only insofar as they are visible along continuums of male achievement, defined according to professional and economic criteria. In Executive Orders, for example, President Jack Ryan designates a friend, wealthy investment banker George Winston, as treasury secretary. Following his confirmation, Winston makes an impromptu speech against progressive taxation, singling out Ryan’s wife, a highly paid surgeon and now First Lady, as a laudable example of “the marketplace at work” (574). In the rest of his speech, which continues for five pages of the novel and includes the unchallenged assertion that “[w]e don’t have a class system in America” (576, italics in original), he names numerous professional athletes and politicians, all male. By leading with the example of Cathy Ryan, Winston’s pontifications appear supportive of gender equality. Women who command six-figure salaries are the norm in Clancy’s market meritocracy, but only because of the broader exclusion of other kinds of women. Clancy’s Superwoman substitutes for all other women, leaving the bulk of the massive narrative free to depict the work of men. Notably, Winston’s speech occurs immediately after a scene in which an evildoer canvasses the Ryan children’s private school, planning a kidnapping. As in other Clancy novels, Cathy Ryan’s professional work leaves her children unprotected, and ultimately it is Jack Ryan who is called upon to protect them. While validating exceptional mothers at one level, the novels implicitly scold them at another. Discussions of sexual activity also reinforce male bonds at women’s expense. Male characters often casually extol their own potency, yet corresponding dialogues about women’s sexual experience do not occur. In Patriot Games, Ryan engages in much good-natured banter concerning his wife’s pregnancy, which has occurred during an English vacation. Such dialogue presents Ryan as a standard-bearer of the traditional family, proudly attesting to the procreative value of marital sex. In another example, the following exchange from The Hunt for Red October, Ryan’s close friend Skip Tyler regards marital sex in a manner that both trumpets his virility and supports conservative notions of family: “Ha!” Dodge laughed. “Johnnie says you have a bunch of new kids.” “Number six is due at the end of February,” Tyler said proudly. “Six? You’re not a Catholic or a Mormon, are you? What’s with all this bird hatching?” AIRPORT FICTION 123 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 123 Tyler gave his former boss a wry look. He’d never understood that prejudice in the nuclear navy. It came from Rickover, who had invented the disparaging term bird hatching for fathering more than one child. What the hell was wrong with having kids? “Admiral, since I’m not a nuc anymore, I have to do something on nights and weekends.” Tyler arched his eyebrows lecherously. (176, italics in original) Clancy offers Tyler’s antiquated sexual beliefs as oppositional to implied institutional preferences. Repeated demonstrations of male potency, the passage suggests, challenge the careerist, anti-family principles of a military service branch. In reality, both options represent explicitly conservative understanding of work and family. Men’s interests can differ, Clancy suggests, because their superficial antagonisms testify to a more fundamental kinship. The small disagreement apparent in the previous exchange relies on the men’s shared knowledge of an exclusive institutional discourse. In another episode in the novel, an examination of a sonar frequency grows into a minor dispute about musical taste. After his superior officer compliments his hearing, sonar operator Jones, a fan of Bach, unusually chides the officer for his less cultured preferences: “You’ve got better ears.” “That’s cause I listen to better music, sir. That rock stuff’ll kill your ears.” Thompson knew he was right, but an Annapolis graduate doesn’t need to hear that from an enlisted man. His vintage Janis Joplin tapes were his business. (74) In this passage’s economy of taste, either musical choice (Bach or Janis Joplin) appears to represent departures from predominant cultural beliefs. Thompson’s unspoken defense of his tastes suggests a 1960s notion of rock music as countercultural. Even in the novel’s mid-1980s setting, the idea of classic-rock music as unconventional seems quaint, though perhaps not to readers of Clancy firmly entrenched in the U.S. cultural mainstream. Clancy presents Jones’s enjoyment of Bach as similarly exceptional, though the notion of classical-music appreciation as eccentric works only within the particular context of military experience. Ultimately, the noted disparity in rank between the two men—“Annapolis graduate” versus “enlisted man”—indicates the real issue at stake in the debate. Clancy applauds Jones’s idiosyncrasies while paying tribute to the military’s hierarchical structure. Similarly, he enshrines old-world power (military academies and the officers they produce) in populist trappings (classic-rock fandom). 124 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 124 Ideological sleight-of-hand—such as the construction of a large, traditional family as a challenge to U.S. institutions—abounds in Clancy’s work. This craftiness is perhaps most notable in the presentation of the patriotic CIA functionary Ryan as an antiestablishment figure. In one scene in Patriot Games, Ryan ponders his and his wife’s class situation during a reception at Buckingham Palace: “She’d been raised in a similar atmosphere, a big house in Westchester County, lots of parties where people told one another how important they all were. It was a life he’d rejected, and that she’d walked away from. They were both happy with what they had” (95). Clancy contrasts the royal family’s opulent surroundings with Ryan’s “$300,000 home on Peregrine Cliff” (85). Since working-class characters or representations of poverty are absent from Clancy’s narrative world, his protagonist appears relatively austere. Indeed, Clancy repeatedly offers Ryan’s “rejection” of a moneyed life as a sign of virtue. Importantly, though, Ryan’s rejection of the business world occurs not because of a lack of aptitude, but simply because of apathy. Early in The Hunt for Red October, Clancy offers a brief biographical sketch of Ryan from the perspective of the character’s CIA superior: “Ryan had made money on his own in four years as a stockbroker, betting his own money on high-risk issues and scoring big before leaving it all behind—because, he said, he hadn’t wanted to press his luck. Greer didn’t believe that. He thought Jack had been bored—bored with making money. He shook his head. The talent that had enabled him to pick winning stock Ryan now applied to the CIA” (55). Again, Clancy asserts the compatibility of business skills and military-intelligence interests. National service presumably offers Ryan the sense of fulfillment that materialism cannot. As this and later novels demonstrate, though, material success often comes easily to those most devoted to government service. The comparison between business pursuits and national-security work offers readers further means of identification with Ryan’s situation. Following the novels’ logic, any reader’s business activity hypothetically qualifies him for intelligence work. The strategy similarly absorbs virtually all capitalist enterprise, with stock trading at any level becoming an implicit training ground for CIA work. (Of course, in this system, the moral stock trader will abandon his vocation for the nobler calling of espionage.) The construction of the investment banker turned treasury secretary in Executive Orders follows a similar trajectory—who better to trust with a nation’s fiscal health than a man whose profession is to make money? Notably, Executive Orders also echoes the middle-class virtues of the Patriot Games-era Ryan, as President Ryan finds the White House lacking the “intimacy” of an ordinary home (627). Made anxious by its excessive luxury, Ryan asks himself, “Did real people really live that way?,” and AIRPORT FICTION 125 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 125 answers, “Not real people, just royalty, and the family sentenced to the presidency” (628, italics in original). Ryan’s disavowal of the trappings of power connotes his simple humanity and effaces his own privilege and spectacular good fortune. Ryan’s disavowal of hero status further constructs him as a male ideal. He performs dutiful acts of national service yet shuns public accolades. Through Ryan, Clancy reminds readers of the value of anonymity and the perils of celebrity (perhaps disingenuously, given the author’s own penchant for self-promotion). Clancy privileges a conservative model of masculinity in which worthy men avoid being the object of public spectacle. In Clancy’s ideological realm, interest in appearances or acceptance of public merit indicates vanity, a marker of errant masculinity. Introducing Ryan’s character in The Hunt for Red October, Clancy writes, “The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest. He had no ambition to celebrity” (46). In Patriot Games, Ryan foils an attempted assassination on the British royal family in the novel’s opening pages, then repeatedly disclaims hero status for this act. However, each of the novel’s central narrative threads—Ryan’s relationship with the Windsors, Irish terrorists’ pursuit of Ryan, and the climactic battle sequence staged at Ryan’s home, where the royal family has come for dinner—follows directly from this initial event. While rhetorically validating anonymity over celebrity, Clancy depends upon the dynamism of public figures and events to propel his narrative. After the novel’s opening terrorist attack, a wounded Ryan recovers in a British hospital, where U.S. and British intelligence agents, as well as members of the press, interrogate him: “The press wants to see you,” Taylor said. “I’m thrilled.” Just what I need, Ryan thought. “Could you hold them off a bit?” “Simple enough,” Owens agreed. “Your medical condition does not permit it at the moment. But you should get used to the idea. You are now something of a public figure.” “Like hell!” Ryan snorted. “I like being obscure.” Then you should have stayed behind the tree, dumbass! Just what have you gotten yourself into? (38, italics in original) In the logic of the story, Ryan’s desire for anonymity stems both from his own modesty and from the need to avoid disclosure of his confidential CIA work. Clancy here presents public fanfare—in particular, mass-media attention—as a distraction from men’s authentic, private activities. Association with the visible, public sphere requires attention to appearances, to surfaces; in short, to an illegitimate masculinity aligned with codes of femininity. 126 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 126 Paradoxically, public and press scrutiny contribute to the delegitimation of masculinity. For Ryan as well as for the CIA itself, public attention curtails clandestine activity. By the time of Executive Orders, Ryan, as president, is sufficiently visible to warrant an extensive plotline surrounding his vice president’s efforts to discredit him, efforts that include secret meetings with gullible journalists.11 In the earlier Patriot Games, Ryan withstands police and press inquiries about his past intelligence work with a CIAdevised cover story. He offers an airbrushed account of his past and later meditates on his statements. Readers might expect the character to feel guilty, as he effectively lies to the journalists and civil authorities of an allied nation. Instead, he responds with irritation, an irritation Clancy invites readers to share. Publicity compromises Ryan’s autonomy and, later in the novel, his family’s safety. Ryan comes to embody proper intelligenceagency conduct, as well as the roles of protective husband and father. Through cause-and-effect narration and emotional appeals, Clancy persuades readers that Ryan’s heroic-parent status depends on obscurity and government-sanctioned obfuscation. Just as Ryan prefers to work without public fanfare, so Clancy’s novels promote a view of U.S. intelligence functioning behind the scenes, without public scrutiny of its actions. Ryan’s dutiful, initially unheralded service implicitly validates the labor of readers, whose potentially unfulfilling jobs can be reimagined as vital to national economic and political interests. In her own analysis of Clancy’s novels, Susan Jeffords argues that like the activities of the Reagan and Bush administrations surrounding the Iran/Contra conflict and the Persian Gulf War, Clancy’s fictions attempt “to rationalize the coversion of U.S. public information systems and to present that rationalization as a form of managerial necessity.”12 Assessing Ryan’s managerial capacity in The Sum of All Fears, Jeffords notes the novel’s insistence that Ryan’s intelligence-gathering requires the daily labor of countless “professionals” whose private or governmental service contributes immeasurably to national security. Jeffords argues that Clancy’s novel offers a tacit promise to readers whose routine work goes unappreciated: “ ‘You will probably never know the real role your work plays in world events, but be assured that it will’ ” (551). Such a promise, she argues,“may serve as a productive panacea for many workers’ increasing senses of alienation, anonymity, and displacement” (550). By presenting workers’ systematic alienation from the products of their labor as a positive attribute of the capitalist economy, Clancy also disconnects readers from responsibility for the acts of corporations, institutions, or military or governmental bodies of which they are a part. In The Hunt for Red October, Clancy presents such denial as a necessary component of Ryan’s work: “He had little interest in field operations. Ryan was an analyst. AIRPORT FICTION 127 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 127 How the data came to his desk was not his concern, and he was careful to avoid finding out” (49). Ryan’s enforced ignorance aligns with a spy-fiction tradition in which excessive knowledge of sensitive information proves lethal. At the same time, such a position distances him and readers from the moral and ethical consequences of global intelligence gathering. Clancy uses devotion to family and friends as a wholesale sign of characters’ moral bearing. In his world, then, principles of ethics and compassion need not extend into the world of work. Such moral relativism appears consistent with the paradoxes of 1980s and early-1990s values. The Reagan/Bush veneration of the traditional, Christian family took place against a backdrop of hostile corporate takeovers, the savings-and-loan industry collapse, Wall Street junk-bond scandals, and revelations of U.S. government involvement in arms sales to Iran and support for Nicaraguan paramilitary groups. The valorization of unscrutinized private life coincides with a conservative disdain for mass media, particularly news media. In Clancy’s world, public knowledge of international events endangers national security and threatens individuals. In Patriot Games, publicity surrounding Ryan’s antiterrorist escapade leads to an assassination attempt on his wife and daughter. The Hunt for Red October follows the actions of a renegade Soviet submarine crew and attempts by both Russian and allied U.S./British navies to retrieve it. Though the political leaders of the involved nations engage in tense political and military interactions, the crisis abates partly because of the absence of media attention. Clancy thus endorses the view that intelligence operations—and by extension, successful engagement with military foes—succeed through circumvention of public knowledge. In Patriot Games, Ryan must sidestep press inquiries about his past. His irritation at this scrutiny appears legitimate because such inquiries would merely edify the reading public, not benefit the CIA. (Indeed, as the novel’s transitions between scenes indicate, media attention instead provides Ryan’s terrorist enemies with information about him.) By contrast, Ryan willfully submits to interrogation by British police and intelligence agents, who, like him, appear simply as men dutifully serving their nation.13 Clancy takes care not to alienate readers by disdaining all mass-media products. Instead, he constructs a hierarchy of fictions that privileges his novels as the most authentic and reliable source of information about police and military procedure, in contrast to television or film representations. In The Hunt for Red October, Clancy contrasts Ryan’s labor with the “glamour” of cinematic spies: “Analysts had none of the supposed glamour—a Hollywood-generated illusion—of a secret agent in a foreign land” (55). In Patriot Games, though, Ryan deflects reporters’ suspicions of his intelligence work by commenting,“I’m not good-looking enough to be a spy” (64). 128 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 128 The ironic gesture to such an image subtly reinforces the “Hollywoodgenerated illusion” that Clancy disdains. The gesture also assures savvy readers that Ryan is enjoying a joke at reporters’ expense. Elsewhere in Patriot Games, Clancy makes further appeals to readers who may engage with the popular media that Ryan derides. In a conversation with British police, Ryan observes: “Most of what I know about police procedures comes from watching TV, and I know that’s wrong” (31, italics in original). Meanwhile, Secretary Winston observes during his antitaxation speech in Executive Orders that “[i]f there is an idle-rich class in America, I think the only place you find them is in the movies” (575). Through these characters, Clancy sanctions the consumption of popular entertainment while reassuring readers of their mastery over works ostensibly less authoritative than Clancy’s own. Notably, another form of popular entertainment, televised sports, remains venerated, further aligning readers’ presumable preferences with Ryan’s. The Sum of All Fears features terrorists’ detonation of a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl, and disrupted television broadcasts alert faraway viewers to the disaster (and provide the opportunity for Clancy to describe the effects of a nuclear blast on satellite communications). In earlier works too, sports are offered as the one unimpeachable form of television programming. In a more modest episode in The Hunt for Red October, Clancy depicts Ryan as a stereotypically male football addict: “Ryan made the mistake of turning the TV on to the beginning of Monday Night Football. Cincinnati was playing San Francisco, the two best quarterbacks in the league pitted against one another. Football was something he missed living in England, and he managed to stay awake nearly three hours before fading out with the television on” (63). Ryan, characterized as sleep-deprived immediately prior to this episode, succumbs to the allure of the most mainstream of male pursuits. Again, the exclusive appeal to male pastimes implicitly disavows feminine pleasures while making Ryan’s character sympathetic to a wide range of male readers. In depictions of work and leisure pursuits, Clancy privileges an exclusionary, old-boy network of male camaraderie, veiling patriarchal power imbalances with the language of “tradition.” Before a closed-door White House briefing in The Hunt for Red October, a general reassures the nervous Ryan that “[e]verybody in this damned cellar puts his pants on the same way as you” (100–101). With the formation of an exclusively male coalition through a simple rhetorical gesture, differences among individuals recede. Male cohesion thus ensures the successful execution of national-security doctrine. Similarly, Clancy advances a conservative notion of tradition as tacit justification for military policy. In Patriot Games, Ryan and his wife attend a private security ceremony at the Tower AIRPORT FICTION 129 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 129 of London, during which a British tower sentry extemporizes about tradition: “Tradition is important,” Evans said. “For a soldier, tradition is often the reason one carries on when there are so many reasons not to. It’s more than just yourself, more than just your mates—but it’s not just something for soldiers, is it? It is true—or should be true—of any professional community.” “It is,” Cathy said. “Any good medical school beats that into your head. Hopkins sure did.” “So does the Corps,” Jack agreed. “But we don’t express it as well as you just did.” (120) Clancy offers the British tradition as a model for appropriate conduct by the younger United States, disregarding differences between the two nations’ political and military systems. At the same time, the incorporation of other “professional communities” into the discourse of tradition normalizes contradictory belief systems. Ryan’s wife, for example, swears allegiance to the “tradition” of a medical school that long denied admission to women, and Ryan’s beloved military has similarly been forced to change its long-standing exclusionary policies. The British ceremony that Clancy describes, though, can be performed only by retired soldiers. Because women’s integration into military ranks remains a relatively new phenomenon, the ceremony ensures male exclusivity for decades beyond Clancy’s narrative. Clancy presents networks of male friendships as an inevitable byproduct of inborn masculinity. The men praised in his novels radiate a natural charisma that gains them a wide circle of friends and earns them the admiration of women. Ryan and his close friends—predominantly military personnel or other government employees who Clancy depicts as upright family men—do not pursue power but instead acquire it almost incidentally. In The Hunt for Red October, Ryan convinces Navy officials to hire his old friend Skip Tyler for essential strategic-analysis work. From an outsider’s perspective, such recruitment might represent a conflict of interest, but in the novel’s schema, Tyler appears the logical choice because of his specialized expertise and his willingness to work tirelessly and without the administrative delays that performing the work through conventional channels would entail. Through this episode, Clancy presents another apparent contradiction: while his novels trumpet the value of teamwork and official routine, they also feature an assortment of superlative individuals without whom the conventional apparatuses of power would be ineffectual. Clancy resolves such a contradiction by promoting a paradoxical ideology in which organizational hierarchies are necessarily 130 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 130 comprised—in democratic nations, at any rate—of exceptional individuals who transform their routine labor into a series of challenges that test their skills. Skip Tyler’s casual friendship with Ryan leads to Tyler’s profitable engagement in a secretive submarine-tracking operation. Similarly, Ryan’s own range of acquaintances converts him from chair-bound analyst to globe-trotting field operative. Ryan’s list of social and business contacts extends to the most influential heads of state and military leaders. Ryan acknowledges one of these contacts in a briefing with the president in The Hunt for Red October: “The judge tells me you know the commander of that British task force.” It was like a sandbag hitting his head. “Yes, sir. Admiral White. I’ve hunted with him, and our wives are good friends. They’re close to the Royal Family.” “Good. Somebody has to fly out to brief our fleet commander, then go on to talk to the Brits, if we get their carrier, as I expect we will. The judge says we ought to let Admiral Davenport go with you.” (115) Ryan’s sphere of acquaintances in this passage alone includes a CIA chief and former Texas State Supreme Court judge, naval admirals on two continents, the British royal family, and the U.S. president. Such breadth of contacts justifies Ryan’s presence on the novel’s key military mission, a mission that otherwise would not appear to require the services of a midlevel CIA functionary. Ryan’s desire to impress only “those who knew him” attests to his homespun character and his preference for close friendships over political connections. Conveniently, though, many of Ryan’s close friends happen to be men of great influence. Ryan’s friendships with statesmen and military leaders appear either as fortuitous coincidences or as the inevitable fruits of a model life and career. Clancy facilitates his characters’ many career-based interactions by presenting them as constantly at work. To cement bonds among his male characters and to separate exceptional men from unmotivated wage-earners, his novels repeatedly invoke the Protestant work ethic. When British police appear to question Ryan in Patriot Games, their fatigued condition signifies their devotion to duty: “Both senior detectives were well dressed, and both had the red-rimmed eyes that came from an uninterrupted night’s work” (25). Ryan, too, makes frequent references to his long hours, which serve as a badge of honor rather than an indication of unreasonable working conditions. Nowhere in his novels do men in democratic countries long for early retirement or vacations. Russian sailors on the Red October daydream about a planned trip to Cuba’s beaches, but readers AIRPORT FICTION 131 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 131 may infer that the sailors’ unrewarding toil under Communism justifies their desire for leisure time. For U.S. characters, leisure time serves principally to prepare men for further grueling service. In The Hunt for Red October, a diligent sonar operator receives an extra-long shower as a reward for his tireless labor: “Commander Mancuso was given to awarding this sensuous pastime in return for above-average performance. It gave people something tangible to work for. You couldn’t spend extra money on a sub, and there was no beer or women” (259). The peculiar nature of submarine work conveniently neutralizes the issue of financial compensation, and by asserting women’s absence, Clancy reinforces the notion of submarine service as an exclusively male domain. The long working shifts that Clancy’s men perform help to distance them from the traditionally female spheres of home and family life. Clancy insists upon his male characters’ devotion to their wives and children, but men rarely appear at home with their families. The tour-of-duty nature of military service, particularly naval service, implicitly absolves men of regular responsibilities for domestic labor or child care. Conversely, because women are assigned to the domestic and familial spheres, military service or long working hours are not possible for them. While Clancy offers a discourse of paternal responsibility, men in his novels tend to serve their families best by working outside the home to keep their nations’ defenses strong. Women, by contrast, usually appear as devoted wives and mothers without outside professions or interests. Cathy Ryan is the novels’ sole positive representation of active femininity; women’s activity elsewhere in Clancy’s books dangerously encroaches on terrain that men successfully patrol. Periodically Clancy narrates the strains of men’s efforts in the public sphere, as when Ryan’s long hours prevent him from fulfilling a quota of fathering time: “I’m home!” Jack announced. Silence. That was odd. He went downstairs and found the kids in front of the TV. They were doing too damned much of that, but that was their father’s fault. He’d change that too. He’d cut back on his hours. (The Sum of All Fears, 570) Children’s avowed bad habits are attributed to male neglect. Curiously, mothers have no discernible positive impact on their children. In this passage, the children’s lack of interest in their father is a byproduct also of their mother’s unease; she suspects Jack of adultery. Her suspicion disallows her positive agency within the family. Though Clancy represents her anxiety sympathetically, this anxiety inhibits her mothering. Cathy Ryan’s suspicions abate in the wake of the novel’s more explosive events, and Clancy later invokes family only in Jack Ryan’s fears that his family might die in a nuclear blast. 132 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 132 Clancy’s formation of virtuous masculinity includes the tendency to regard women, and the institutions of maternity and marriage that surround them, as sacrosanct. Villains, of course, do not enjoy marital bliss. In The Sum of All Fears, a scientist from the former East Germany, linked both to Communism and terrorism, reflects on his home life as he prepares for a last-minute trip: “ ‘What do I tell my wife?’ Fromm asked, then wondered why he’d bothered. It wasn’t as though his marriage was a happy one” (298–299). In the realm of virtue, Clancy uses Skip Tyler’s love for his wife as a device through which to render the character’s crippling brush with death: His most vivid memory was of waking up, eight days later he was to learn, to see his wife, Jean, holding his hand. His marriage up to that point had been a troubled one, not an uncommon problem for nuclear submarine officers. His first sight of her was not a complimentary one—her eyes were bloodshot, her hair was tousled—but she had never looked quite so good. He had never appreciated just how important she was. A lot more important than half a leg. (The Hunt for Red October, 173) The passing reference to Tyler’s “troubled” marriage normalizes marital problems within the military but assigns blame to the conditions of service rather than to the people involved. More significantly, the scene depicts male vulnerability as a necessary precondition for positive gender relations. In Tyler’s case, the accident, a semicastration, only serves to make him more virile, as he and his wife go on to bear many children. Only through a traumatic event—a car accident in this case, but the stress of combat also suffices—do men learn of women’s innate goodness and dependability. Such an equation might appear to privilege women’s roles and to critique notions of rigid, aggressive masculinity. However, such events tend not to occur within the range of women’s experiences. When terrorists attack Cathy Ryan and her daughter in Patriot Games, Clancy represents the incident in terms of her husband’s reaction: He reflected that God had given him a wife he loved and a child he treasured more than his own life; that his first duty as husband and father was to protect them from an often hostile world; that he had failed; that, because of this, their lives were now in strangers’ hands. All his knowledge, all his skills were useless now. It was worse than impotence. (278) Unlike Tyler’s accident, in which the victim realizes his devotion to his spouse, this event principally affects the party not involved. Though his wife has been hospitalized, his own physical symptoms—“worse than impotence”—demand the reader’s attention more than Cathy’s do. AIRPORT FICTION 133 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 133 The threat to Ryan’s masculinity solidifies his enmity toward the terrorists rather than stirring Cathy’s devotion to her husband, which never appears in question. Clancy presents Cathy Ryan as the ideal female counterpart to Jack Ryan’s technocrat hero. The Hunt for Red October pays tribute to her character mostly in passing, holding her as a worthy but nonvisible mate for Jack Ryan. In Patriot Games, though, she fulfills marital, maternal, and career obligations. She is a prominent eye surgeon, and the novel features an episode in which she performs emergency surgery on a child’s wounded eye. To some extent, Clancy represents her presence in the traditionally male world of Western medicine as a matter of course; because of her dedication and professional skill, she has earned her place in this world. At the same time, though, this world appears particularly challenging for a woman, as when Clancy points to its disturbance of her beauty regimen: “A green cap was over her hair, and she wondered yet again why she bothered to brush it out every morning. By the time the procedure was finished, her hair would look like the snaky locks of the Medusa” (248–249). By evoking the mythological image of female monstrosity (an image repeated later in the same chapter), Clancy indicates that Cathy’s work inevitably compromises women’s otherwise hallowed appearances. The Medusa reference also hints that Cathy’s power is dangerous to men. Throughout Patriot Games, Clancy contains Cathy Ryan’s power by associating it with traditionally feminine goals and occupations. Through her medical profession, she acquires a range of attributes that Clancy normally assigns to masculinity: manual precision, technical and scientific knowledge, demanding working hours. However, Clancy also emphasizes the maternal, nursing dimension of her work, a facet not apparent in representations of male doctors here or in The Hunt for Red October. As she prepares for the emergency surgery on the child, injured in a daytime accident, Cathy’s maternal impulses contrast with male doctors’ emotionless demeanors: “A new sound arrived, the high-pitched shrieks of a child in agony. The doctors moved into the OR. They watched dispassionately as two orderlies were strapping the child down. Why weren’t you in school? Cathy asked him silently” (Patriot Games, 253, italics in original). The passage also links maternal concerns to a moralizing tendency, further prescribing a notion of women as socially conservative, despite the novel’s occasional assertions of Cathy Ryan as a “liberated woman.” In a scene later in the chapter, Clancy depicts Cathy as an aggressive driver, racing her sports car through rush-hour traffic. Again, though, Clancy links her ostensibly masculine behavior to traditionally female tasks: her “weaving through traffic like a race driver at Daytona” occurs just after she picks up her daughter from a day-care center, and she drives quickly so she can 134 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 134 arrive home in time to prepare dinner for the family (262). Significantly, Clancy also constructs a privileged background for Cathy Ryan’s character that explains her relative autonomy. Cathy’s assertiveness and self-confidence, according to Clancy, derive from her upper-class upbringing: born into a moneyed family, she is accustomed to the trappings of wealth and the assurances it brings. Cathy Ryan’s superficial “liberation” allows Clancy to use her character as a conduit for antifeminist and misogynist rhetoric. In Patriot Games, the Ryans attend a reception in which they mingle with members of the English aristocracy. Customarily, Jack discusses political and military issues with the men of the gathering, while Cathy chats with the women. When the event initially occurs in the novel, Clancy narrates only Jack’s activities. Many chapters later, a conversation between the couple recalls the episode: “Did I ever tell you what—no, I didn’t. It was one of the ladies-inwaiting. I never did find out what they were waiting for. Anyway, this one countess... she was right out of Gone With the Wind,” Cathy said with a chuckle. It was his wife’s favorite epithet for useless women.“She asked me if I did needlepoint.” Not the sort of thing you ask my wife. Jack grinned at the windows. (161, ellipses and italics in original) By presenting Jack Ryan’s thoughts immediately after Cathy’s statement, Clancy reminds readers as to whose perspective guides the narrative. Similarly, just before the quoted exchange, Cathy twice refers to Jack as a “chauvinist pig” after he makes sarcastic comments about a Barbie doll they have purchased for their daughter. (Barbies also figure marginally in The Hunt for Red October, revealing the limited scope of Clancy’s interest in children, or the limited interest he presumes of his readership.) Cathy’s accusation, playfully delivered, indicates her as an easygoing woman, one for whom sexual slights represent only the harmless idiosyncrasies of a loved one, not systematic patriarchal inequities. Jack’s “chauvinist” positions appear as a facet of his waggish charm. With Cathy Ryan, Clancy constructs an ostensibly strong-willed woman who responds sympathetically to her husband’s masculinist pronouncements. Such a dynamic can appeal to middle-aged male readers of Clancy’s novels, men who may find themselves uncomfortable in a social climate in which patriarchal privilege is intermittently questioned. By distilling the legacy of feminism to casual husband–wife banter, Clancy presents women’s interests and desires as easily apprehensible and reassures women readers of the trifling nature of male sexism. AIRPORT FICTION 135 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 135 Rather than proffering a model of female power independent of or complementary to male strength, Clancy constructs an ideal woman who does not challenge male agency. Despite Cathy Ryan’s apparent autonomy, her husband still fulfills the conventional male protector role. In addition to his feeling of impotence following the terrorist attack on her in Patriot Games, Jack rises in chivalric fashion to defend her from a verbal assault from her overbearing father. In contrast to the novel’s levelheaded hero, Clancy describes Cathy’s father as “a man who had not learned the limitations of his power” (308). Women’s need for protection from such men stimulates the prosocial, defensive impulses of sympathetic men such as Jack Ryan. Occasional displays of masculine proficiency notwithstanding, Cathy Ryan’s character exists principally to sanction displays of male power. Clancy contains female strength by necessitating its dispersion into the domestic and maternal spheres. He represents female power not tethered to these spheres as illegitimate, as threatening to the established social order of the United States. In Patriot Games, the sole powerful female character aside from Cathy Ryan is a French assassin, represented only through surveillance photos. Jack Ryan conceives of her in ardently heterosexual terms: “She didn’t look dangerous—she looked like every man’s fantasy. ‘Like we used to say in college, not the sort of girl you’d kick out of bed. Jesus, what sort of world do we live in, Marty?’ ” (339). Ryan appears incredulous at the prospect of an attractive female killer, notwithstanding the conventionality of such a figure in spy fiction and cinema, about which Clancy does not comment. Ryan’s response suggests that unsanctioned female power betrays some commonly held code of global morality. Clancy’s novels present male killers, however vilified, as commonplace figures (and notably, such men are not eroticized). Women who kill, however, even if on the side of justice, become targets for criticism. The Hunt for Red October includes a minor female character, Sissy Loomis, an FBI agent who apprehends a villainous senator’s aide. A fellow FBI agent joins her to complete the arrest, after which Clancy presents the male character’s views about his female coworker: “The inspector had been in the FBI for twenty years and had never even drawn his service revolver in anger, while Loomis had already shot and killed two men. He was old-time FBI, and couldn’t help but wonder what Mr. Hoover would think of that, not to mention the new Jewish director” (315). Lacking the patriarchal tradition of the “oldtime FBI,” Loomis appears incapable of restraint, a quality Clancy consistently applauds in his male characters. Even her first name, Sissy, lends childlike connotations to her character, who wields irresponsibly the power granted to her. The anonymity of the accusing character, and the simultaneous invocation of Hoover and the “Jewish director” dissociates the male agent’s attitude from a particular political affiliation. Through the nameless 136 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 136 character’s judgment, Clancy implies that the two presumably adversarial leadership styles—that of the ultraconservative Hoover and that of a Jewish director, whose religion stereotypes him as a liberal (or some other sort of antithesis of Hoover)—would both find fault with Loomis’s actions. Clancy invokes a range of male authorities, real and fictional, to raise objections about the mobilization of female power. The very existence of powerful women among Clancy’s characters might suggest a willingness to evaluate positively women’s gradual advancements in pubic and professional life since the 1960s. However, the vigor with which Clancy regulates such characters bespeaks an antiprogressive impulse. The novels’ putatively strong women prompt male characters to reclaim their traditional power. As noted previously, Sean French argues, somewhat facetiously, that “by traditional standards, Tom Clancy is a radical feminist. There are no docile women in his fiction” (34). More to the point, women are altogether in short supply in Clancy’s novels. French disregards the novels’ small contingent of unnamed secretaries and doting wives, not to mention the overwhelmingly male constitution of Clancy’s military and political worlds. French continues, “Women fly planes, shoot missiles, kill on behalf of America, alongside the men. Uncomfortable but true, and revealing perhaps of a huge social change. If Tom Clancy is saying it, then ordinary people must believe it” (34). One would be mistaken to regard Clancy’s fiction as a wholesale approximation of popular beliefs. His novels expound viewpoints by turns more extreme and more craftily manipulative than the views held by the bulk of his mainstream readers. French’s noted discomfort suggests instead a plausible narrative motivation for Clancy’s occasional insertion of women characters into dangerous situations. Women’s presence accentuates the danger of narrative events; threats to women simply produce stronger emotional reactions than do those to men. Correspondingly, the presence of women transforms the male protector role from an abstraction— with men facing danger to protect women and children who are removed from the action—into a palpable necessity. In The Hunt for Red October, after U.S. pilots win a strategic victory over a wayward Soviet warplane, they tease the enemy pilot and provoke a crude sexual threat: “Thank you, 106,” the voice acknowledged. “You see, we have some trainee operators aboard. Two of them are women, and we don’t want them to get rattled their first time out.” Suddenly it was too much. Shavrov thumbed the radio switch on his stick. “Shall I tell you what you can do with your women, Yankee?” (212) Clancy presents the U.S. men’s observations about women’s lack of combat-readiness as jocular, while the Russian’s angry retort indicates AIRPORT FICTION 137 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 137 incontestable misogyny. Just as Jack Ryan’s sexist barbs are softened by his wife’s unperturbed reception of them, here the Russian pilot’s stereotypical remark supplants the latent sexism of the American speaker’s observation about women’s delicacy. In this exchange, male U.S. military personnel become chivalric defenders of female virtue. Later, an overanxious Russian pilot does fire a missile at a U.S. plane, making good on the earlier rhetorical threat. Fortunately, a supercompetent man pilots the targeted aircraft and manages to escape; Clancy withholds the spectacle of female soldiers dying in warfare. Clancy further secures the masculine terrain of his novels against female intervention through a co-optation of emotional responses and sentimental rhetoric. Clancy’s hierarchy of male behavior esteems men who are both professional and capable of sentiment and disparages those who are unprofessional, unrestrained, or unsentimental. Clancy represents such base men, such as the Irish terrorists of Patriot Games, as barbaric or inhuman. When Ryan first encounters the terrorist leader Sean Miller in a London courtroom, he appraises the Irishman in characteristically analytical fashion: Then he looked at Miller’s eyes. He looked for . . . something, a spark of life, humanity—something that would say that this was indeed another human being. It could only have been two seconds, but for Ryan the moment seemed to linger into minutes as he looked into those pale gray eyes and saw . . . Nothing. Nothing at all. And Jack began to understand a little. (100, ellipses and italics in original) Antisocial behavior, Clancy implies, arises from a failure to exhibit “humanity,” which for Clancy entails a particular constellation of beliefs, including patriotism, a sense of duty, and special esteem for women and children. Clancy’s books abound with men who lack humanity, whether ruthless terrorists or unscrupulous lawyers or politicians. Contrastingly, women typically appear as sentimental or emotional by nature, so departures from such behavior—as in the unrestrained FBI agent Sissy Loomis or the female French assassin—represent an affront to social order. The capacity for heartfelt statements or emotional displays, Clancy suggests, separates good men from villains and makes virtuous men appealing to women. Clancy’s validation of male sentiment obviates the need for attention to women. Through homosocial networks of military and political camaraderie, Clancy’s male characters share profound emotions with each other. Clancy does not include women characters amid such exchanges: his 138 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 138 novels appear incapable of rendering male–female relationships based on friendship or professional interaction. Instead, women characters serve often as witnesses to men’s romantic, explicitly heterosexual sentiments. Aside from intermittent assertions about the sanctity of motherhood, women’s emotional displays rarely appear. Such displays might invalidate men’s own hard-won empathetic faculties and restraint. In Patriot Games, Jack Ryan’s presents an expensive necklace to his wife, initiating a display of affection between the two: “It’s wonderful. Oh, Jack!” Both her arms darted around his neck, and he kissed the base of hers. “Thanks, babe. Thanks for being my wife. Thanks for having my kids. Thanks for letting me love you.” Cathy blinked away a tear or two. They gave her blue eyes a gleam that made him happier than any man on earth. Let me count the ways ... “Just something I saw,” he explained casually, lying. It was something he’d seen after looking for nine hours, through several stores in three shopping malls. “And it just said to me, ‘I was made for her.’ ” “Jack, I didn’t get you anything like—” “Shut up. Every morning I wake up, and I see you next to me, I get the best present there is.” “You are a sentimental jerk right out of some book—but I don’t mind.” (162–163, italics and ellipsis in original) The self-reflexive reference to literary fiction offers an ironic defense against male self-consciousness. However strong-minded women (or men) are, Clancy suggests, they still desire the normative pleasures of a bourgeois lifestyle and a heterosexual, nuclear family. The passage also represents female emotions from a male perspective, a recurring strategy in Clancy’s work. Cathy’s tears trigger Jack’s own response and substitute for her own interiority. Notably, even this tender moment advances Clancy’s discourse of professionalism and rigor, as he describes Jack’s shopping experience in terms of hours spent and labor invested. Jack’s admonition to his wife to “Shut up”—even with its ostensibly playful tone—further betrays the power relations operating in the episode. Men can subsume traditionally female emotions in Clancy’s world, but such behavior does not ultimately feminize them or impair their masculinity. Instead, men compartmentalize sentiment, laying it aside when purely active, masculine capabilities must be mobilized. In Patriot Games, Jack Ryan must divorce himself from emotion when his terrorist foes invade his home and mistreat his family: “He could hear his little girl whimpering anyway. Jack had to ignore it. There wasn’t room in his consciousness for anger or pity now” (473). While softhearted sentiment AIRPORT FICTION 139 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 139 guarantees Ryan a moral victory over his opponents, Clancy represents it as burdensome in situations that call for strategy and physical action. In such situations, for which Clancy’s male characters constantly prepare themselves even as they disavow heroism, masculine capabilities of clear thinking and swift action take precedence. For Ryan, conflict revives a deeply internalized military persona and transforms him into a machinelike warrior: “Ryan was proceeding on some sort of automatic control that the Marine Corps had programmed into him ten years before. It was a combat situation, and all the lectures and field exercises were flooding back into his consciousness” (471). Whatever warm tendencies Ryan displays to his wife, he never abandons the connection to military discipline that defines his masculinity. The “flood” of combat-ready lucidity that overcomes Ryan as his family is threatened also galvanizes the reader for climactic action, a relatively precious commodity amid Clancy’s network of technical operations and detailed military procedures. Overall, attention to characters’ routine activities far surpasses narration of violent action. While the novels regularly manifest the characteristics of technical manuals or military training guides, they also construct characters as familiar, sympathetic types to maintain readers’ personal investments. Characters serve as readers’ guides to the unknown, the indecipherable, and the exceedingly technical. Clancy’s novels feature disparate settings and situations unfamiliar to many of his readers. Counterbalancing these situations, the Ryans’ concerns about suburban traffic, parking spaces, clothing choices, child-rearing, and entertaining mirror the quotidian activities of the novels’ middle-class, middle-aged readers. The novels’ relatively narrow range of experiences fulfills a normative function. Whether depicting heads of state or low-level bureaucrats, Russian military commanders or Irish terrorists, Clancy presents characters whose behavior does not stray far from the mainstream of white, middle-class U.S. life. Family and interpersonal relations, financial concerns, and daily labors dominate characters’ lives. Conversely, Clancy represents transgression through inadequate or overabundant attention to bourgeois concerns. In Patriot Games, for example, a black American man who works with the Irish terrorists is coded as money-hungry. Greed helps to define him as a traitor to U.S. beliefs regarding legitimate financial aspirations and transnational affiliations (meanwhile, he is disarmed of a political motivation, as his skin color connotes him, however misguidedly, as not of Irish ancestry). Similarly, in The Hunt for Red October, Clancy briefly narrates the actions of a bumbling, drunken Soviet surgeon, making a point of the character’s disregard for the codes of professional conduct and skill that U.S. readers presumably hold dear. Clancy offers professional incompetence and greed as clear 140 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 140 indices of moral decrepitude. Other controversial social realities are wholly absent. Walter L. Hixson, in an analysis of Clancy’s novels in relation to 1980s Cold War discourse, argues that “[m]uch like the Reagan administration itself, Clancy’s characters dealt with poverty and racial inequality by acting as if they did not exist.”14 Clancy’s narrative world thoroughly excises sexual transgression, drug use, and other social behavior deemed marginal in mainstream U.S. cultural discourses. Clancy’s novels presume to offer readers sweeping depictions of global events and institutional cultures. The books delineate narrow social and experiential boundaries, yet somehow a limited perspective affords total knowledge. Consequently, the world’s social, political, and cultural differences are easily apprehensible, not to mention capable of resolution within a finite span of pages. The difficulty of this operation may suggest why Clancy’s novels from the 1980s to the present have ballooned from a length of four or five hundred pages to double or triple that length. A measure of the popular appeal of Clancy’s novels derives from the author’s visible public persona, which established him as a flesh-andblood brand in the mold of Martha Stewart or Michael Jordan. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he maintained a higher profile than similar best-selling authors, meeting with Republican presidents, purchasing large stakes in professional-sports franchises, and lending his name to series of books, computer games, and television series.15 Magazine profiles of Clancy frequently call attention to the traditionally masculine elements of his lifestyle, mirroring many elements of his fiction: his advocacy of firearms, his network of acquaintances in politics and the military, and notably, the implicitly masculine process of his own writing.16 A 1989 Time magazine article on Clancy describes his writing process in physical terms: “Clancy has been at loose ends since he came down from the adrenaline rush of completing [Clear and Present Danger] (he wrote the final 45 manuscript pages in a single day to meet his May 1 deadline).”17 Though hasty writing does not regularly connote artistic achievement, the article earlier distinguishes Clancy’s work from that of other popular novelists: “In fairness, he should not be dismissed as merely another book-biz commodity, the action-adventure counterpart to Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon. For one thing, Clancy’s narrative prose rarely descends to the all too familiar level of ‘I’m dictating as fast as I can’ ” (67). The two statements explicitly contradict one another, with rapid writing signifying either rigor or laziness. The verbal act of dictation is attributed to the female romance novelist Steel and the male romance and horror writer Sheldon, though, while the physical “adrenaline rush” accompanies the writing of military thrillers. The comparison endows Clancy’s novels with an aura of masculine labor. Such intensity of effort has been attributed to many respected AIRPORT FICTION 141 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 141 male writers since World War II, including Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and William Vollmann. This rigor has not been similarly linked to multimillionaire authors of mass-market best-sellers. Moreover, the profile argues that “to measure Clancy’s output solely in terms of bookstore Q-ratings and royalty statements would be to distort the moral seriousness that undergirds his fiction” (67). The combination of vigorous effort and moral weight, then, distinguishes Clancy’s novels from the putatively lazy, amoral, not-virile work of other authors. The positioning of the author as a man of vigor defines his novels as embodiments of this vigor. Transitively, Clancy’s persona reassures readers that the time commitment and mental efforts of reading will carry corresponding moral—and perhaps even aerobic—rewards. Like many writers of popular fiction, Clancy frequently connects narrative situations to his readers’ physical environments. In particular, the physical situations of air travel and sedentary office work are present in Clancy’s thrillers. By association, the act of reading a Clancy novel guarantees analytical rigor, tireless and worthy effort, and the execution of a prosocial masculinity. Clancy’s writing style, occasionally strident but mostly devoid of literary pretensions or artful affectations, allows for the experience of reading in otherwise distracting environments. His novels, like much other mass-market fiction, are mainstays of airplane cabins and airport lounges. Though his novels are too lengthy to be read in full during a single airplane flight, their terse dialogue and frequent shifts in location accommodate the interrupted reading practiced by business travelers. In Patriot Games, following the novel’s explosive opening episode and its aftermath, Clancy asks readers to settle into the act of reading by putting his protagonist in a similar circumstance, seeking diversion on a long airplane flight. The invocation of air travel works as an intervention, an attempt to elevate the experience of reading Clancy. More than eight pages of the novel describe the Ryans’ transatlantic plane flight, with narration of Jack Ryan’s discomfort in air travel interspersed with what amounts to an encyclopedia entry on the physics of flight. Shortly after the flight begins, Ryan’s situation mirrors that of the presumed reader’s: “He fished the paperback out of his pocket and started reading. This was his one sure escape from flying” (128). After thus extolling the utility of the reading act, Clancy describes in detail Ryan’s reading posture, then comments, “[h]e’d selected well for the flight, one of Alistair Horne’s books on the FrancoGerman conflicts” (128). The passage partly informs the reader that he or she is not the esteemed scholar that Ryan is. While readers immerse themselves in Clancy’s popular novel, Clancy’s hero reads a serious work of military history. At the same time, invoking real authors and real wars, Clancy makes implicit claims for his own work, positioning it as popular 142 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 142 history and identifying his readers as amateur historians. Clancy incorporates civilian air travel as well in the final paragraph of The Hunt for Red October, closing the novel with a scene in which the exhausted Jack Ryan falls asleep on a plane flight. The brief episode both ends the narrative on a tranquil note and serves as a cue to readers who, having finally completed the thick novel, can be permitted to doze off themselves. The rigorous (by virtue of its relatively high page count and its many exhaustive technical descriptions) novel finally authorizes readers’ own rewarding slumber. Just as Clancy presents information about jet propulsion and airplane construction as irrefutable fact, he invites readers to situate the novel’s ideological conceits in the realm of historical truth as well. In a 1998 interview, Clancy says of his readers: “They’re people who want to know how the world really works. My covenant with my readers is that I tell them the way things really are. If I say it, it’s real.”18 In a scathing counterpoint to Clancy’s assertions of truth, though, Washington Monthly editor (and former naval intelligence officer) Scott Shuger details the myriad falsifications and exaggerations surrounding military technology and procedure in Clancy’s 1980s novels. Noting the then President George Bush, Sr., and Vice President Dan Quayle’s public accolades for Clancy (Quayle’s during a Senate speech given while still a congressman), Shuger argues that Clancy’s novels generate unjustified public support for seriously flawed national-defense programs.19 Apart from delivering conservative polemics in narrative form to readers worldwide, then, Clancy’s novels can serve also to distort legislators’ understanding of pressing foreign-policy issues. Clancy’s repeated claims to authenticity help him disavow the novels’ generic situation. In Clancy’s generic world, a narrowly conservative worldview enables a low-level government bureaucrat to ascend the ladder of success, helping save the world repeatedly, and finally becoming president. Is this “the way things really are?” The broader effect of Clancy’s work is the normalization of a peculiar model of semi-active, compassionately conservative masculinity. Big Boy Toys: Arrested Adolescent Saves World, Gets Girl However successfully they immerse readers in their thick, fictional worlds, Tom Clancy’s novels unmistakably bear the imprint of the persona “Tom Clancy.” Most of his novels include multiple dedications, introductory author’s notes asserting the validity of technical information, and sometimes a short postscript relating his fictional scenarios to real military operations. His presence brackets his novels, and within the narratives, Clancy uses his protagonists and his readers as conduits for his convictions. AIRPORT FICTION 143 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 143 Clive Cussler situates himself differently in relation to his fictions. His novels’ frequently antirealist plot conceits—such as the secret moon colony in Cyclops (1986)—necessarily limit the clarity of the political positions articulated in his works. Correspondingly, Cussler wisely eschews rhetorical devices such as solemn author notes (some of the books begin with heartfelt or patriotic dedications, while Deep Six is dedicated to four defunct taverns). Instead, he offers whimsically self-referential gestures within the narratives themselves. His 1990 novel Dragon includes a sequence in which the globe-trotting adventurer Dirk Pitt, a vintageautomobile enthusiast, engages in a classic-car race in which “Clive Cussler” appears as a competing driver who thoroughly tests Pitt’s mettle. Cussler’s literal insertion of himself into his own fictional world attests to his novels’ sense of play with literary conventions, to his readers’ presumed amusement with such a conceit, and perhaps to his own inflated selfregard. Cussler does not lend his own character any defining features, aside from an assumed interest in classic automobiles.20 Instead, he aims for dry humor through the uncanny juxtaposition of author and character: When the Hispano-Suiza pulled alongside, Pitt walked over and introduced himself as the driver stepped from behind the wheel to recheck his hood latches. “I guess we’ll be competing against each other. My name is Dirk Pitt.” The driver of the Hispano, a big man with graying hair, a white beard, and blue–green eyes, stuck out a hand. “Clive Cussler.” Pitt looked at him strangely. “Do we know each other?” “It’s possible,” replied Cussler, smiling. “Your name is familiar, but I can’t place your face.” “Perhaps we met at a party or a car club meet.” “Perhaps.” “Good luck,” Pitt wished him graciously. Cussler beamed back. “The same to you.” (224–225) In the ensuing race, Pitt narrowly overtakes Cussler. He subsequently becomes engaged in a more dangerous car chase, as Japanese criminals kidnap his romantic interest, a pro-trade congresswoman. The playfulness of the classic-car race—a contest of relatively slow-moving vehicles in which only pride and showmanship are at stake—serves as a contrast to the next chapter’s chase, in which characters’ lives are endangered. The departure of the Cussler character after the classic-car race alerts readers to the gravity of the following episode. The later chase is the domain of Pitt’s character, not Cussler’s, and so the novel’s promise of purely fictive excitement is reasserted. The different ways Clancy and Cussler signal their own works’ fictional qualities suggest how readers might most contentedly engage with the 144 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 144 worlds the novels devise. Clancy’s novels construct putatively realistic narratives of military action and political conflict, albeit with a dose of sensation (as when a vengeful Japanese pilot crashes a plane into the U.S. Capitol in Debt of Honor, killing the president, most of his administration, and the entire Congress and Supreme Court). In comparison, Cussler borrows from earlier models of fantastic, adventure fiction such as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Cussler presents the hero of most of his novels, Dirk Pitt, as a physical and cerebral ideal, a handsome, restless adventurer gregarious among men and irresistible to women. In contrast to Clancy’s dense realization of technical and strategic information, Cussler provides readers with the travel-guide thrills of myriad exotic locations, recurring cliffhangers, and countless permutations on the formulae of narrow escapes and last-second rescues. Recurring elements in Cussler’s novels include nautical settings and action, evil conspiracies bent on world domination, and searches for lost historical treasure—as the very titles of Raise the Titanic (1976), Inca Gold (1994), and most unequivocally, Treasure (1988), attest. Treasure combines a search for a fourth-century library of art and jewels with a battle against a powerful group of international anarchists. Dragon includes a Nazi treasure horde amid its narrative of a Japanese businessman’s plot to blackmail Western nations. Deep Six also features an Asian cartel that plunders merchant vessels and plans to overthrow the U.S. government. In each case, Dirk Pitt, a more rugged American variant on the James Bond type, uses his matchless ingenuity and endurance to restore global order and U.S. hegemony. In addition to their similarities to Ian Fleming’s Bond novels of the 1950s and 1960s and the novels’ subsequent film adaptations, Cussler’s novels borrow conventions from existing popular-literature and film genres geared principally toward men and boys. The novels’ nautical settings, narratives of male fraternity, and casts of lawless, seafaring smugglers and killers recall popular English and U.S. narratives of pirates and adventures. Cussler’s predecessors include the nineteenth-century novels of Verne and Stevenson as well as twentieth-century series such as Edward Stratemeyer’s 1920s Hardy Boys children’s mystery novels. Cussler’s terse, stylized prose also borrows from the conventions of 1930s and 1940s pulp storytellers such as Kenneth Robeson (author of the Doc Savage and The Avenger series), Robert E. Howard (creator of the mythological hero Conan), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Tarzan series). Distancing his novels from such fantastic fare, Cussler uses contemporary settings rather than historical or mythological ones. Similarly, he draws upon current political and cultural anxieties, usually surrounding fanatical challenges to the military and economic domination of the United States. (Cussler also AIRPORT FICTION 145 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 145 incorporates environmental threats, particularly to oceans, and manmade biological viruses.) Also distinct from the mostly male worlds of pulp adventure fiction, Cussler supplies romantic interests for his heroes. In their generally conservative ideological positions as well as their interest in the work of political and government agents, Cussler’s novels also overlap with the techno-thrillers and spy thrillers of Clancy, Ludlum, and Coonts. Still, Cussler’s rapidly paced narratives and fantastic plots locate his fiction in a less cerebral category than that of his peers on the best-seller lists. Where the other writers at least fabricate a recognizably adult world, Cussler unabashedly imagines a playground of protracted adolescence. Still, Cussler’s adolescent fantasies involve, and are read by, mostly adults. They also figure adult worlds of politics and capitalism in significant ways. Cussler’s novels are preoccupied with searches for historical treasure, stolen cargo, and weapons that pose threats to democratic nations. Amid their discourse of the fantastic, the novels recurringly invoke history: Incan society in Inca Gold, ancient Greece and Egypt in Treasure; Raise the Titanic’s sunken ocean liner; and in Sahara, ancient Egypt, the Civil War, and a vanished Amelia Earhart–like 1930s pilot. Many of the novels feature prologues set in the distant past. Cussler mobilizes history to legitimate his hero’s adolescent-style activity. Borrowing from pulp tradition, his novels reconceive historical events and cultures as sites of vigorous present-day activity. If Clancy’s novels partly transform dry technical manuals into quick-paced narratives, Cussler’s do the same for middle-school history texts. Cussler’s narrative alchemy reproduces other contemporary discourses as well. Through the objects of his searches, Cussler’s hero pursues a fantasy of entrepreneurial capitalism in the relatively autonomous space of the world’s oceans. Pitt searches for Raise the Titanic’s familiar passenger liner, Treasure’s library of antiquity, and Inca Gold’s cultural artifacts. These objects bear both market and historical value, making Pitt’s adventures exercises in both cultural preservation and personal financial gain. Pitt enjoys the moral rewards of government service and by implication, the more tangible rewards of commercial enterprise (Pitt works for a government agency, yet Cussler suggests through the characters’ material possessions that the character profits substantially from his treasure searches). Moreover, his efforts cross institutional lines: just as Jack Ryan works simultaneously as white-collar analyst and hardboiled field agent, Dirk Pitt effectively undertakes military operations alongside historical salvage work (unlike in Clancy’s novels, though, no rhetorical maneuvers explain the conflation of the apparently incompatible spheres). Cussler also presents Pitt’s seagoing skills as amenable to explicitly prosocial ends, as when Pitt deploys his talents in Dragon to halt a madman armed with nuclear 146 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 146 weapons. Throughout Cussler’s novels, the search for treasure coincides with the need to overcome a violent threat to the United States and its allies. Pitt begins Sahara, for example, on a search for sunken Egyptian riverboats, and is soon recruited to thwart a deadly plague, a slavery operation, and both regional and global tyrants. Even Dragon, amid its host of menaces, includes a trove of valuable art held by villains. Cussler thus regularly conflates Pitt’s entrepreneurial ventures with prosocial missions and cultural stewardship. In their representation of heroic masculinity, Cussler’s novels transport an adolescent ideal into a putatively adult world of political intrigue and conflict rooted in capitalist and nationalist enterprises. The very name “Dirk Pitt,” with its phallic connotations, monosyllables, and harsh consonants, represents an adolescent fantasy of adult male virility and activity. Like Clancy, Cussler links his hero’s missions to topical political and economic situations, often involving international-trade disputes, which allow Dirk Pitt to employ his seafaring skills. Cussler also provides intermittent technical description, though not in the exhaustive manner of Clancy. Cussler principally describes exotic weapons or scientific devices. Deep Six, for example, explains a particularly lethal chemical-warfare compound and a fantastic brain-implanted computer chip. Cussler also describes maritime vessels, diving procedures, and other apparatuses central to narrative action. Clancy’s elaborate technical descriptions frequently suspend narrative development, demonstrating instead the novels’ avowed utility as information sources and their characters’ cerebral capacities (and, by extension, readers’ brainpower as well). Comparatively, Cussler’s relatively brief descriptions work as a narrative shorthand through which readers quickly apprehend Pitt’s ingenuity and the dangers he must overcome. Clancy’s novels construct a largely deskbound, technocrat hero who inevitably finds himself at the site of action. In contrast, while Cussler’s hero is a friend and colleague of politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators, he is also a restless figure who refuses routine and bureaucracy. In Deep Six, Pitt discusses his attitude briefly with his recurrent romantic interest, Congresswoman Loren Smith: He nodded at the briefcase clamped in her left hand. “Your crutch. You’d be lost without it.” “I’ve noticed you never carry one.” “Not the type.” “Afraid you might be taken for a business executive?” “This is Washington; you mean bureaucrat.” “You are one, you know. The government pays your salary, same as me.” Pitt laughed. “We all carry a curse.” (234) AIRPORT FICTION 147 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 147 Through this passage, Cussler attempts to reconcile Pitt’s explicitly prosocial endeavors with the character’s rebel-hero persona. Cussler implies an organizational structure flexible enough to accommodate Pitt, who acts according to interdependent codes of personal interest (a virile desire for adventure, frequently combined with a revenge or rescue motivation) and national service. Cussler, like Clancy, presents individualism and professionalism as complementary rather than contradictory value systems. For both authors, it is men who embody these values. In another episode in Deep Six, Pitt receives orders from Admiral Sandecker, his superior and close friend, before embarking on an undersea venture. In the interest of national security, Sandecker tells him little, giving only the tersest instructions: “ ‘If you dive on it,’ Sandecker said coldly, ‘you’re not to enter. Our job is strictly to discover and identify, nothing else’ ” (183). At the end of the conversation, Sandecker anticipates that Pitt will not follow orders: “Almost as the words came out, Sandecker knew he’d waved a flag in front of a bull elephant. Once Pitt dropped beneath the river’s surface, the thin leash of command was broken” (184). Pitt’s situational rejection of authority appears as a positive trait, a sign of the hero’s innate curiosity and his willingness to court danger. Moreover, he is like a “bull elephant,” operating on a biological imperative to seek and act. In the novel’s logic of professional conduct, Pitt’s superiors accept his insubordination because he consistently achieves his goals. As in Clancy’s novels, the most esteemed professionals subordinate themselves in the name of duty but simultaneously act as autonomous individuals, guaranteeing action. Cussler’s novels usually play out on the world’s seas and oceans, and often on the remote ocean floor. These settings afford opportunities for action and interpersonal contact unburdened by shifting social values. In these settings, Cussler and his characters can also ignore contemporary social conditions such as economic inequality, class prejudice, and social injustice. These locales of course figure not only in Cussler’s novels but in countless other literary and cinematic narratives of male testing. The unclaimed, unpoliced oceans provide settings for apparently boundless male action. As in the best-selling “man versus the elements” worlds of Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, Cussler imagines a world in which physically capable white men can prove their mettle without bureaucratic intrusion or concessions to women or other potential opponents. But these are not liminal spaces in which identities shift and social boundaries dissolve. Instead, the “high seas” settings of Cussler’s fiction retain Western hierarchies of race, gender, and social power. Men are predominantly brave and resourceful, women are capable but willing, and foreigners and nonwhites plot to subvert democratic values and institutions. The novels’ thematic 148 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 148 preoccupations, then, are largely ahistorical: like their adaptable hero, the novels surface periodically to take stock of world conditions, then return to the deep, where male activity reigns. The absence of a controlling authority for such locations makes sea and ocean travelers susceptible to an array of human and elemental threats. In the face of such threats, Cussler’s novels suggest, only an anachronistic man of action such as Dirk Pitt can offer protection. Just as many of Clancy’s novels filter a wide range of political, military, and technical situations through the perspective of a lone bureaucrat-hero, Cussler makes diplomatic and military conflicts legible by representing one man’s management and resolution of them. Dirk Pitt engages closely with a relatively limited cast of characters, but those characters’ influence and connections extend the boundaries of Pitt’s world into all the novels’ significant spheres of power. Cussler gifts Pitt with a congresswoman (Smith) for a lover, a retired senator for a father, and an eminent admiral (Sandecker) for a friend and superior, all of whom grant Pitt access to the highest ranks of U.S. political power. Congresswoman Smith’s involvement in trade legislation routinely puts her in close contact with the novels’ adversaries. Villains kidnap her in both Deep Six and Dragon, following the venerable adventure-narrative convention through which public and private agendas are conflated. Pitt’s world is quite orderly: characters fulfill precise functions (or, as in the case of Smith, dual functions that help link plots and subplots), and all significant conflicts are satisfactorily resolved at the end of each novel. Readers gain an easily negotiable narrative world, in which putatively real mechanisms of power and physical laws exist alongside the hero’s idealized persona of fantastic physical and mental aptitude. Distinct from science-fiction, fantasy, or historical-fiction genres, Cussler’s presentday novels deliver readers into a heightened version of the world they already inhabit. Appealing to readers who feel they lack control of their own surroundings, Cussler’s novels present a manageable and compact world. Vast conspiracies can be identified through the presence of a limited number of supporting characters, and individual acts of heroism produce a domino effect that restores political and economic conditions favorable to U.S. interests. Cussler uses time-honored genre-fiction strategies for the negotiation of real-world complexities. The novels owe the durability of their worldview predominantly to the iconic hero Dirk Pitt. Cussler represents Pitt’s masculinity as inextricable from capitalism and elite consumption. The author similarly links these economic systems to prosocial concerns such as national defense and historical preservation. Cussler’s hero represents a fictional government agency, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, or NUMA. Pitt’s investigation of offland crimes and performance of historical salvage operations make his work a AIRPORT FICTION 149 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 149 virtually unassailable component of national interests. The NUMA designation also dissociates him from the ethically compromised activities of other government bodies. Cussler and Pitt need not apologize for FBI surveillance, CIA insurgency, or the acts of aggression and environmental pollution undertaken by the military service branches. In addition, Pitt’s efforts to defeat rogue capitalists such as the villains of both Deep Six and Dragon tacitly endorse the pursuits of other, nondeviant capitalists. Like the commodityconscious super-spy James Bond, Pitt himself venerates the products of capitalism. He lives in a converted airplane hanger that “had the look of a transportation museum. The polished concrete floor held four long orderly rows of antique and classic automobiles. Most gleamed as elegantly as the day their coachmakers added the finishing touch. A few were in various stages of restoration” (Dragon, 147). Pitt’s reverence for “classic” vehicles indicates his commitment to U.S. and Western European capitalism (he owns British and Italian cars as well as American ones). This devotion also transforms capitalist commodities into sacred objects worthy of museum-quality display (but crucially, private rather than public display; Pitt is neither showoff nor philanthropist). Cussler converts the traditionally masculine preoccupation with automobiles from a conventional display of male ego into a mark of cultural stewardship. Indeed, Cussler makes Pitt’s relationship with cars at least as meaningful as the hero’s relationships with women. He is deeply saddened after damaging one of his classic cars as part of a high-speed pursuit to rescue congresswoman Smith in Dragon, and in Deep Six, the destruction of another car furthers his desire for retribution. As in the representation of profound companionship between a cowboy and his faithful horse in film, television, and literary westerns, cars in Cussler’s work serve as a male accessory that mediates or supersedes men’s social relationships. In Cussler’s novels, women exist to serve men’s needs and to define the parameters of ideal masculinity. Most of the novels’ women function as barely relevant aides to government officials, as helpless victims of cruel villains, or as outlets for Pitt’s magnetic sexuality. Rather than depicting Pitt as a roving Casanova, though, Cussler typically shows women first expressing sexual desire for Pitt, with his own attentions generally focused on the mission at hand. Unlike Clancy’s novels, in which marriage serves as an index of men’s humanity, Cussler offers an arrested-adolescent vision of marriage as a threat to male autonomy. In Dragon, after Loren believes Pitt to be dead, she meets for lunch with another woman whom Cussler has presented as also worthy of the hero’s affections: “Was marriage ever considered?” asked Stacy. Loren gave a brief shake of her head. “The subject never came up. Dirk wasn’t the kind of man who could be possessed. His mistress was the sea, and I had my career in Congress.” 150 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 150 “You were lucky. His smile was devastating, and those green eyes—God, they’d make any woman melt.” (531) Loren’s career merits a passing mention, but the passage focuses on the absent Pitt, whose allure derives partly from his resistance to commitment. Similarly, Cussler presents Pitt’s apparent indifference to women generally— “his mistress was the sea”—as a quality that earns women’s respect. When he does engage romantically with women, his lack of concession raises his status further. In Sahara, Pitt kills a pair of men who assault a sunbathing scientist, Eva Rojas, whom he later takes to dinner. Following Pitt’s spearheading of the dinner plans, Cussler observes, “[l]ike most women, Eva liked a take-charge man” (67). Loren Smith relishes Pitt’s brusqueness as well. Meeting her for lunch in Deep Six, he compliments her beauty by saying, “ ‘Damn, you look ugly today.’ ” In the ensuing discussion, Smith comments, “ ‘I do give you credit, though. You’re the only man I know who doesn’t kiss my fanny’ ” (194). Her response validates male discourtesy, transforming it into a sign of truthfulness. Politeness, by contrast, appears a sign not of civility but of artifice, which is anathema to the plainspoken Pitt. In addition to her wholesale acceptance of Pitt’s rough-edged individualism, the hero’s ideal woman combines a masculine ability to exercise social power with a requisite amount of feminine vanity. In Dragon, Cussler introduces Congresswoman Smith in her working environment but quickly turns the description toward her romantic pursuits: Tight-packed with energy, she was as elegant as a lynx and as daring as a tomboy. Respected for her political cunning, she carried a great degree of clout in the house [sic]. Many powerful men in Washington had tried to win her favors on and off the House floor, but she was a private person and dated only men who had nothing to do with business and politics. She carried on a loose secret affair with a man she deeply admired, and was comfortable with the thought that they could never live together as intimate friends or as husband and wife. They both went their separate ways, meeting only when it was convenient. (180–181) Cussler does not explicitly identify Smith as Pitt’s lover, indicating their relationship instead through their obviously compatible characteristics. Smith’s masculine attributes—“energy,” “cunning,” “clout,”and her “tomboy” nature—demonstrate that she shares Pitt’s values. Most importantly, her own uninterest in commitment supports the fantasy of autonomous bachelorhood that Pitt represents. Her avoidance of romantic partners who share her career similarly accords with Pitt’s antibureaucrat stance. AIRPORT FICTION 151 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 151 Of course, Pitt’s stated values indicate that he logically would not romance a politician, a contradiction Cussler does not fully resolve. However, Smith’s “private” nature codes her to some degree as an outsider, one who endures Washington’s atmosphere principally because of her dedication as a public servant. In a capsule description of Pitt, Cussler identifies the hero’s casual nature as a quality that allows him to transcend social and attitudinal divisions: “He was a smooth article who moved easily among the rich and powerful, but who preferred the company of men and women who drank their liquor straight up and liked to get their hands dirty” (Treasure, 47). Pitt’s “smoothness” contrasts with Smith’s “cunning,” locating him at a higher position in the novels’ moral hierarchy. Cunning serves here as a floating signifier. It is first a conventional quality of politicians, a disproportionately male group. At the same time, it aligns with a broad cultural formulation of feminine duplicity and artifice. The boundaries of Congresswoman Smith’s body also distinguish her from her virile mate while connoting her suitability as a romantic partner. In a rare moment of female interiority in Deep Six, Cussler represents Smith alone, examining her body: She struck an exaggerated model’s pose in front of a full-length mirror. The body was holding up quite well, considering thirty-seven years of use. Jogging and ballet classes four hours a week kept the centrifugal forces at bay. She pinched her tummy and sadly noted that slightly more than an inch of flesh protruded between her thumb and forefinger. [. . .] She steeled her mind to lay off the alcohol and desserts. (267–268) The passage’s insistently manly language—the use of words and phrases such as “struck,” “kept at bay,” and “steeled”—typifies Cussler’s prose style and suggests its unsuitability to representation of women’s psychological lives. Cussler consistently represents Pitt, whose age is close to Smith’s, as one who is in the prime of his life. In comparison, “thirty-seven years of use” of a woman’s body suggests a waning physical beauty. Smith’s “exaggerated model’s pose” underscores the impetus of the episode. The act of posing, with an implied but absent male gazer, reminds readers that Smith’s beauty works principally to define Pitt’s tastes, not to indicate her own self-fulfillment. Her body, too, requires scheduled maintenance— jogging, ballet, and dietary restrictions. This restrictive notion of female beauty applies to other women in Cussler’s novels. In Sahara, he describes a NUMA scientist, Muriel Hoag, as “quite tall and built like a starving fashion model” (272). Contrastingly, Cussler represents Pitt’s physique as a natural byproduct of his vigorous lifestyle: “His main exercise was diving; he seldom crossed 152 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 152 the threshold of a gym. [. . .] He was constantly busy, physically moving about, walking up to five miles a day in the course of his job” (Dragon, 65–66). Cussler thus privileges a working-class ideal in which routine labor produces physical strength. Introducing Pitt in Treasure, Cussler similarly discredits a bourgeois model of fitness by design: “Pitt was a lean, firmmuscled man in prime physical shape for someone who didn’t run ten miles every day or look upon the exertion and sweat of bodybuilding as a celestial tonic against old age. His face wore the tanned, leathered skin of an outdoorsman who preferred the sun to the fluorescent lighting of an office” (47). Pitt’s natural physique requires no extraneous activity; “crossing the threshold of a gym” represents, in Cussler’s universe, an act of weakness or submission rather than a legitimate pursuit of self-mastery. Pitt’s ability to maintain fitness in the course of his work situates him above white-collar workers in a hierarchy of male virtue. His casually maintained, ostensibly natural physical form easily surpasses his female counterpart’s conscientiously shaped figure. Smith’s sedentary career does not contribute to her physical fitness, and she finds herself pinching unwanted fat despite her exercise regimen. Periodically, women who fall outside the novels’ narrow parameters for acceptable female behavior appear. Some represent a femininity incompatible with Pitt’s worldview, such as a waitress who cannot comprehend his grief over the loss of a car. Others represent inappropriate, unsanctioned female power. The sinister leading villain of Deep Six is an aged, wheelchairbound Korean shipping magnate, Madame Bougainville. Forced into prostitution as a child, she has gained status after marriage to a prosperous Frenchman. Cussler depicts her as reclusive and disdainful of worldly pleasures, attentive only to her criminal enterprises. Because of her late husband’s business success, she herself acquires power in the maledominated industry of international trade. Her physical weakness requires that her son and other male functionaries perform the physical duties of the enterprise; in short, a monstrous foreign woman directs male servants to perform acts of violence and destruction. In addition to describing her ruthless activities and temperament, Cussler defines her villainy through her advanced age and infirmity, her Asian ethnicity, and her femininity. Bougainville’s physical decrepitude indicates the abnegation of her expected role as a woman; her disabled body cannot serve or accommodate men. Similarly, her psychological ruthlessness represents her betrayal of conventional principles of female compassion. She exhibits no remorse, for example, when recalling an act of piracy that has caused many deaths. Racial difference further signifies the villainess’s errant femininity, with the stereotype of the inscrutable Asian compounding readers’ estrangement from her. Cussler regularly serves up nonwhite villains, using racial difference AIRPORT FICTION 153 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 153 as shorthand for anti-Americanism. These racial constructions, like those of gender, further normalize the beliefs and activities of the novels’ conservative, white, economically privileged characters. Male Fantasies and the Real World Given the shifting roles of the U.S. military and government in world affairs, as well as the changes in gender roles and responsibilities since World War II, Clancy’s and Cussler’s formulations of male heroism can appear hopelessly anachronistic, but their durability is inarguable. At the end of the 1990s, Clancy began positioning his works to appeal to younger generations of male audiences. The first in a series of paperback Net Force novels bearing his name as coauthor appeared in early 1999, coinciding with an ABC television miniseries of the same title.21 Similarly, Clancy’s multimedia corporation, Red Storm Entertainment, released a computergame version of the novel Rainbow Six simultaneous with the book’s release, further asserting the author’s presence among those consumers who might not otherwise pay attention to his work. Somewhat later, his first work set after the 9/11 attacks, The Teeth of the Tiger (2003), showcased a younger group of protagonists, in particular Ryan’s son, Jack Jr. At a trifling four hundred and thirty pages in hardcover, it is Clancy’s shortest novel, another factor helping market it to younger readers. Meanwhile, Cussler’s novels continue to sell in large numbers, and abridged versions have also been produced for younger audiences.22 Narratives of lone, white, middleaged heroes’ triumphs over global threats and preservation of democraticcapitalist values still attract substantial portions of the U.S. reading public. In the post-9/11 world, the representation in both men’s novels of a smoothly functioning national-security apparatus offers new reassurances. Throughout their work, both Clancy and Cussler transform the complicated networks and institutions of military power and multinational capitalism into coherent, relatively concise systems directly linked to the concerns of a small group of heroic individuals, principally men. Both novelists offer narrative stability and closure as an alternative to local and global transformations in political-military power, corporate ownership, gender roles, race relations, and family structure. Cussler’s work in particular offers a bulwark against real-world changes in male and female social roles. In a 1996 interview, Cussler called his novels “just plain, old-fashioned adventure.”23 “Old-fashioned” is perhaps the most significant term in his formulation, since his novels present a world in which male chauvinism is consistently rewarded and rarely disputed by female characters. Cussler offers the unimpeachable male icon 154 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 154 Dirk Pitt as an object for male readers’ vicarious identification and female readers’ mobilized desire. Cussler observes further, “I think, deep down, women still like the big, strong, mysterious guy to pick them up, carry them off, and save them from disaster” (16). Cussler’s women characters illustrate his belief that women’s fulfillment occurs principally through male agency. Women in his novels display strength and independence, but they appear lonely and discontented without Pitt’s affection and protection. Comparatively, Cussler presents Pitt’s own discontent as a sign of masculine restlessness and desire for adventure. Women serve principally as rewards for successful activity, on the same order of importance as a fine wine or a sumptuous meal, rather than as essential or complementary companions. Clancy’s novels, unlike Cussler’s, present marriage and family as the motivation for male physical activity and mental effort. Clancy promotes a staunchly conservative marital and familial structure. However, he also represents communities of men and women working together—albeit in unequal roles, as with his portrayals of race—toward shared, socially constructive goals. Cussler, by contrast, depicts male heroism as self-fulfilling but principally reactive, accomplishing only immediate goals of averting some sudden threat. For all their conservatism, Clancy’s Jack Ryan and his compatriots do possess a historical awareness. They recognize, for better or worse, their national and ethnic heritages. They also look toward a more peaceful future, in political and military terms if not social ones. Cussler offers his unrepentantly individualistic hero as a universal figure, but Pitt’s lack of historical consciousness—aside from a veneration of antiquated military and transportation hardware—renders him unsuitable for social membership in any era. Pitt’s longtime individualism liberates him from the patriotic and familial drumbeating germane to Clancy’s novels. Still, such freedom does not align him with marginal social groups or discourses, nor does it link him to more progressive masculinities conceived in the wake of the women’s movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Pitt exemplifies the paradox of the mass-market hero: he is a prosocial outsider, setting himself apart from the political and economic system under which he thrives. Clancy’s Jack Ryan, on the other hand, repeatedly asserts his connections to family, friends, and nation, but these connections blind him to the differences that exist outside his narrow parameters of social value. Superficially, Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels offer simple, unconflicted notions of male social roles. Yet both writers carefully negotiate opposition to their heroes’ masculinities. Both rhetorically link men to military activity and capitalist enterprise even while disavowing aspects of both systems (e.g., violence and greed). Both too construct a managerial masculinity AIRPORT FICTION 155 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 155 adaptable to countless situations, and both introduce superwoman figures to show their male heroes’ tacit support of feminism’s broadest principles. Their strategic configurations of contemporary masculinity differ in many ways as well. Cussler celebrates male physical activity and posits cerebral skills as a component of innate male resourcefulness. Clancy represents mental acuity and analytical skills as the product of rigorous training, as indicative of a professional orientation closely aligned with masculine agency. Cussler’s protagonist manages his physical environment through force of will. Clancy’s hero manages psychological space as well, exercising restraint and maintaining his humanity in all but the most stressful situations. Clancy’s emphasis on restraint and humaneness allows his protagonists to manifest a sentimental streak that in Cussler’s novels would connote weakness or femininity. Dirk Pitt is a caricature of traditional masculinity that succeeds in part through its very brazenness. Jack Ryan represents a slightly more nuanced model of manhood, contradictory yet versatile. For Clancy, male sentiment provides a reserve of psychological strength that elevates worthy men above their cold, amoral adversaries. Cussler’s protagonist, on the other hand, draws from a well of cruelty and hardness to accomplish his fantastic deeds. Both writers, though, privilege militant, prosocial formations of masculinity that successfully accommodate the prevailing U.S. political, economic, and social order. Cussler uses his protagonist to proclaim the ahistorical quality of U.S. values. Clancy’s Ryan, who venerates work and family while demonstrating individualism and proficiency in armed combat, serves as a standard-bearer of contemporary U.S. conservatism. In their most recent novels, both Clancy and Cussler shrewdly reshape their milieus for the emerging world order of terrorist threats and global economic realignment. Significantly, both novelists rely on a legacy of masculinity transmitted through paternity as a means for renewal and retrenchment. With Jack Ryan Jr. and two of his cousins as its protagonists, Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger constructs a younger man’s world of covert intelligence activity. The codes of mature masculinity inform the narrative, but the faces are younger, the bodies more agile, and the crosscutting among plots more rapid than in previous Clancy works. Cussler, meanwhile, favorably complicates Dirk Pitt’s world with the surprise introduction of two adult, fraternal-twin children—Summer and Dirk Jr.—in the final pages of the 2001 novel Valhalla Rising. Their mother is revealed as the disappeared love of Pitt’s life, who had survived a catastrophic underwater earthquake but been horribly disfigured, given birth to Pitt’s children, never contacted him again, and finally died (so Cussler rescues his hero from potential deadbeat-dad status). The children, both marine scientists (and the son a virtual clone of his father), aid Dirk Sr. in Cussler’s 156 ACTION FIGURES 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 156 following novel, Trojan Odyssey (2003). At the surreal end of that novel, set in 2006, Dirk Pitt marries Loren Smith, and Pitt again encounters the author Cussler. (The death of Cussler’s own wife in the interim between the two novels may have contributed to the presentation of a happily married Dirk Pitt.) Whatever motivates Clancy’s and Cussler’s narrative decisions, both writers engage the post-9/11 world through heroic families—for Clancy, the nuclear unit of the Ryans, with the parents in the background; for Cussler, the patchwork family of Pitt, Smith, and the autonomous twins. The generational narrative celebrates the male lineage in particular. In both novelists’ work, paternal influence strongly overrules that of maternity. Moreover, the fathers’ examples prove exceedingly useful. Both Jack Ryan Jr. and Dirk Pitt Jr. take up their fathers’ professions and contribute to international security. Meanwhile, Cussler explicitly extols the male role in marriage and parenting, simultaneously crippling and killing off the mother of Pitt’s children. Even Trojan Odyssey’s marriage is balanced by Pitt’s preceding defeat of the novel’s villain (a megalomaniac industrialist), ostensibly a 400-pound man but climactically revealed as a slim, beautiful woman in an elaborate disguise. The image of this monstrous female masquerade ushers in Pitt’s wedding; he patrols against a simultaneously aberrant masculinity and femininity before conceding to a conventional social arrangement. In the 1990s, major film studios produced numerous successful films in the cinematic subgenre that might be termed the mature thriller. In addition to the film adaptations of Clancy’s novels, films such as In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, The General’s Daughter (1999), and The Rules of Engagement (2000) featured middle-aged male protagonists who alternately support and challenge the beliefs of the political, military, and intelligence institutions they represent.24 These films, like Clancy’s novels and those of other thriller writers who narrate the exploits of men beyond their physical prime, offer visual spectacle principally through atmospheric tension rather than representations of excessive violence or destruction. Moody, low-key lighting, displays of small-scale military and surveillance technology, and close-up views of actors’ solemn, grizzled faces predominate. (Air Force One does feature fistfights and explosions, but these elements do not motor the narrative as they do in action spectaculars such as The Rock and Armageddon.) In these films, as in Clancy’s novels—and to a lesser extent, Cussler’s as well—male protagonists engage in physical violence only after exhausting other means of conflict resolution. In contrast to spectacle-centered action films, mature thrillers grant their protagonists moral and intellectual victories over their adversaries, much like the genre’s novelistic counterparts. In the crudest terms, action films (of the not-mature variety) often present their heroes as supremely unreflective, AIRPORT FICTION 157 06_Markher_04.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 157 while novelists such as Clancy offer their protagonist’s interior monologues as a barometer for the character’s actions. Both strategies renew and complicate conservative versions of male heroism. While Clancy’s and Cussler’s novels reaffirm the validity of archaic or fantastic formations of masculinity, they also participate in a larger ideological project. The novels’ representations of heroic masculinity, like those of cinema’s mature thrillers, demonstrate the intransigence—and the corresponding versatility—of patriarchal beliefs. In Cussler’s world, men best earn women’s respect and affection when they resolutely refuse to modify their actions and beliefs to accommodate women’s desires. Clancy provides a similar if more detailed model of gender interaction. He champions heterosexual institutions of marriage and family while depicting women as extrinsic to the male world of action, diplomacy, and physical and mental labor. Cathy Ryan’s character functions primarily to affirm her husband’s lifestyle, beliefs, and charisma. Clancy refers frequently to Cathy Ryan’s good looks, but her husband’s ordinary appearance does not diminish his physical appeal in her eyes. It is not important that an influential man be handsome, but it is essential that his wife be beautiful. These novels and mature thrillers partially counter the blockbuster action film’s pervasive images of youthful, indestructible, emotionless masculinity. At the same time, they suggest that ideal middle-aged men are for the most part slightly warmer, less spry variations on their younger counterparts. Films featuring such aging heroes as Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford— for example, the Eastwood of Unforgiven (1992) and Absolute Power (1997) and Ford in Air Force One and Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)—call viewers’ attention to the actors’ younger personas while providing assurances of the older men’s continued physical and sexual capabilities. Unforgiven reminds viewers of Eastwood’s past roles as a matchless gunfighter, while Air Force One assures viewers that the U.S. president can handle himself aboard a flying craft, because he was Han Solo in a previous incarnation. In popular novels and films featuring middle-aged male protagonists, physical strength figures centrally in definitions of masculinity. Even when writers and filmmakers represent a hero’s physical strength as diminished from some earlier peak, the character’s mental acuity and tactical skills tend to compensate for potential imbalances, enabling his physical triumphs. Constructions of mature masculinity depend on wisdom and professionalism as well, particularly since women characters rarely possess these attributes. The popular thrillers studied here judiciously manipulate the social roles their male heroes play, reconfiguring traditional masculinities in response to a changing social order.