The Fool's Progress
Encyclopedia
Edward Abbey
's "fat masterpiece" and a classic of 20th-century Americana, the 1989 publication of The Fool's Progress heralded the final word (though not the final novel) of one of the country's finest prose artists and defenders of freedom and wilderness.
The Fool’s Progress could have been written only in America, and only by Edward Abbey
. A semi-autobiographical novel about a man who refuses to submit to modern commercial society, this book will be disturbing to some, offensive to others, and revelatory to a few. The author had often claimed that a book was a paper club to beat one’s enemies over the head with, and in this novel, the last published while he was still alive, he pulls out all stops to simultaneously enrage and fascinate his audience in the hope of blasting through their accumulated detritus of “political correctness
” (an inherently repressive term) to jerk alive the emotions hiding beneath.
Opening in Tucson with the enraged departure of his (third) young wife, The Fool’s Progress traces the journey by pickup truck
and through time of Henry Holyoak Lightcap, from the southwestern deserts of his heart back to his native home of West Virginia
. After killing his noisy refrigerator
with a .357 Magnum, Lightcap puts on Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at ear-splitting volume, drinks off a half-quart of Wild Turkey
, and miserably dreams of past loves and his lost Appalachian home. In the morning, heavily hung over,
“Henry eats his breakfast, bleak and lonely, and makes his plans. Plug in phone, call welfare office, tell them he’s taking another leave without pay, they won’t mind. Visit the bank, empty checking account, pick up needed cash. Load up the old Dodge with camping gear, essential firearms, spare parts, a certain few books. Write a farewell letter to Elaine. Shoot the dog [dying of lung fungus]. Get in truck and point its battered nose eastward, toward the world of the rising sun and Stump Creek, West Virginia
. Home. Only three thousand five hundred miles to go. Brother Will, I say to my shattered heart, my private little secret, here I come. Prepare thyself.”
Along the way, Lightcap stops to visit old friends from his disorderly youth (“the comforters”) in Arizona
and New Mexico
; he is asked several times to stay with them and continue his life in the West, but always he remains determined to reunite himself one last time with his estranged family. The urgency that drives Henry’s trek is finally revealed near the end of the novel when we learn that he suffers from a terminal illness, the gravity of which forgives his relentless habit of burning bridges behind him.
Throughout the voyage, “Everyman’s Journey to the East,” Henry takes in and digests—not only cheap beer—but the spectacle of what modern industrial-commercial-agricultural society has done to the country he plainly loves. The entirety of the book is suffused with a sense of the dying land, more obvious perhaps when seen through the eyes of the dying man. But Henry, though faced with a host of troubles that would drive more well-adjusted men to static despair (“I’ve lost my home, my wife and my job in the last forty-eight hours”), continues to exert an indomitably humorous approach to his plight, intimidating the pompous, challenging the ignorant, and as a philosophy major (“well, a second lieutenant”) searching always for some trace of an “ontological significance if any of sublunar existence. Such as it is. If it exists. Precisely the question.” Near Dodge City, Kansas
, Henry and his dilapidated dog Solstice (whom he declined to put down, “lacking the kindness to be so cruel”) together
“pass through a few acres of unplowed unimproved prairie
, one remnant of that sea of grass which formally stretched from the Mississippi
to the base of the Rocky Mountains
. The open range. Where the buffalo
roamed, where the deer
and the antelope
played for twenty thousand years. And then up from Texas
came the mass herds of stinking shambling dung-smeared bawling bellowing bulge-eyed cattle
. Followed by cowboys, beef ranchers, barbed wire, cross fencing, locked gates, private property, whores, bores and real estate developers.”
Despite these cranky environmental musings, Henry’s actions are not always immediately apparent as being what most would consider “eco-conscious.” Motoring along through New Mexico, Henry makes “(t)ime for my eight-course lunch: cheese, crackers, six-pack of beer. Not what the doctor ordered, precisely, but the habits of a lifetime may not lightly be discarded. ‘Dispose of Thoughtfully’ say the printed instructions on the six-pack. Thoughtfully I drop the first empty out the window two miles beyond Española
. The can bounces along on the pavement before coasting to the shoulder of the road. Some kid with a sack will pick it up. Recycle that aluminum. Give a hoot.” For reasons such as this, The Fool’s Progress irritated many in the “environmental community” as an irresponsible gesture from a man many considered to be an ecological prophet. But Abbey never willingly accepted this role, as anyone who has read him extensively must attest, and despised being packed into the “nature writer” closet by reviewers. Despite his flippant and irreverent black humor, however, Abbey’s true convictions about the real threats facing the American land and the American soul continue to shine through. (Abbey littered public roads out of a philosophical certainty that is wasn’t the beer cans that were ugly, but the highways themselves, slashed across otherwise pristine countryside.)
At times a grimly realistic On the Road
for the 21st century, the novel is rife with unsettling observations of our love affair with spiritual ruin. Rolling across rural Missouri
Henry encounters
“…a half-mile-long feedlot in which imprisoned Herefords, Charolais, and black Angus beefburgers, on the hoof and more or less alive, standing room only, mill about under the sun on a carpet of mud, urine and manure … This is not farm country but an agricultural factory where not only the soil, air and water but living animals themselves, kine and swine, mammals like us, mothers with emotions similar to ours—love, lust, fear—are treated as raw raw-material for packaged meats. Enough to make a man a bloody vegetarian if he lets his mind dwell on it. Best not to dwell on it. Think of death not life the next time you stuff your chops with veal, sirloin, ham, bratwurst … I tremble for us Christians if there is a Christian god.
“Me and my dog. We think this way sometimes.”
It is not easy to classify this book, as it is not easy to classify the author, or anyone else of real interest. Henry Lightcap illuminates for us the best and worst potential of this country and its strange people, even as he points out the creeping perils to the land and to the human spirit. Impassively addressing the mysteriously slain corpse of his hermetic friend Morton Bildad, Henry outlines some of the troubles of our calamitous age:
“You’ll note I say nothing of the general state of human affairs. My current wife sleeping with a computer science
professor … a computer fucking science professor! My friends mired in mortgages and indoor jobs and medical insurance, the hellhole of Africa
, the black hole of Asia
, the torture rack of Latin America
, the glut and gloom and gluttony of North America
, the grimy Weltschmerz
of Europe
, the despair of the whales in Oceania
, the ghost dance of the grizzly bears, the death march of the elephants, the Doomsday
machines over our heads—I tell you, Bildad, I realize now why the universe, as the astronomers have discovered, is receding from us at all directions at near the speed of light. Why? Red shift? No! Because of fear that’s why. We are the plague of the cosmos. The stars are not merely flying away, they are fleeing away, tripping away on little starfeet at a hundred and eighty thousand miles per second, running for their lives.”
Much later, limping along with his old truck through the industrial heart of the Midwest, Henry sees
“[O]il refineries appear, catalytic cracking plants, a thicket of pipes and stacks with flare-off fires brighter than the sunlight. Nostril-prickling smells float on the air, sly and sinister. Factory buildings of rusty red sheet metal, their windows broken, stand next to foundries and blast furnaces with brick chimneys sixty eighty feet a hundred feet high. Near each clanging workshop is a settling pond, a tailings dump, a slime pit filled with oily sludge, toxic solvents, pathogenic chemicals, black tars and industrial vomit roiled together in a marbled arabesque of brilliant, unforeseeable colors … Yes, and suppose this mad environment went on forever?”
Without the wilderness, Lightcap/Abbey seems to say, without the unspoiled remnants of our native country left intact, the mad environment we have brought down on ourselves and on everything else must one day overtake us. As with Henry’s doomed journey home, there will be no ultimate escape.
Edward Abbey
Edward Paul Abbey was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental...
's "fat masterpiece" and a classic of 20th-century Americana, the 1989 publication of The Fool's Progress heralded the final word (though not the final novel) of one of the country's finest prose artists and defenders of freedom and wilderness.
The Fool’s Progress could have been written only in America, and only by Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey
Edward Paul Abbey was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental...
. A semi-autobiographical novel about a man who refuses to submit to modern commercial society, this book will be disturbing to some, offensive to others, and revelatory to a few. The author had often claimed that a book was a paper club to beat one’s enemies over the head with, and in this novel, the last published while he was still alive, he pulls out all stops to simultaneously enrage and fascinate his audience in the hope of blasting through their accumulated detritus of “political correctness
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
” (an inherently repressive term) to jerk alive the emotions hiding beneath.
Opening in Tucson with the enraged departure of his (third) young wife, The Fool’s Progress traces the journey by pickup truck
Pickup truck
A pickup truck is a light motor vehicle with an open-top rear cargo area .-Definition:...
and through time of Henry Holyoak Lightcap, from the southwestern deserts of his heart back to his native home of West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
. After killing his noisy refrigerator
Refrigerator
A refrigerator is a common household appliance that consists of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump that transfers heat from the inside of the fridge to its external environment so that the inside of the fridge is cooled to a temperature below the ambient temperature of the room...
with a .357 Magnum, Lightcap puts on Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at ear-splitting volume, drinks off a half-quart of Wild Turkey
Wild Turkey
The Wild Turkey is native to North America and is the heaviest member of the Galliformes. It is the same species as the domestic turkey, which derives from the South Mexican subspecies of wild turkey .Adult wild turkeys have long reddish-yellow to grayish-green...
, and miserably dreams of past loves and his lost Appalachian home. In the morning, heavily hung over,
“Henry eats his breakfast, bleak and lonely, and makes his plans. Plug in phone, call welfare office, tell them he’s taking another leave without pay, they won’t mind. Visit the bank, empty checking account, pick up needed cash. Load up the old Dodge with camping gear, essential firearms, spare parts, a certain few books. Write a farewell letter to Elaine. Shoot the dog [dying of lung fungus]. Get in truck and point its battered nose eastward, toward the world of the rising sun and Stump Creek, West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
. Home. Only three thousand five hundred miles to go. Brother Will, I say to my shattered heart, my private little secret, here I come. Prepare thyself.”
Along the way, Lightcap stops to visit old friends from his disorderly youth (“the comforters”) in Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
and New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
; he is asked several times to stay with them and continue his life in the West, but always he remains determined to reunite himself one last time with his estranged family. The urgency that drives Henry’s trek is finally revealed near the end of the novel when we learn that he suffers from a terminal illness, the gravity of which forgives his relentless habit of burning bridges behind him.
Throughout the voyage, “Everyman’s Journey to the East,” Henry takes in and digests—not only cheap beer—but the spectacle of what modern industrial-commercial-agricultural society has done to the country he plainly loves. The entirety of the book is suffused with a sense of the dying land, more obvious perhaps when seen through the eyes of the dying man. But Henry, though faced with a host of troubles that would drive more well-adjusted men to static despair (“I’ve lost my home, my wife and my job in the last forty-eight hours”), continues to exert an indomitably humorous approach to his plight, intimidating the pompous, challenging the ignorant, and as a philosophy major (“well, a second lieutenant”) searching always for some trace of an “ontological significance if any of sublunar existence. Such as it is. If it exists. Precisely the question.” Near Dodge City, Kansas
Kansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...
, Henry and his dilapidated dog Solstice (whom he declined to put down, “lacking the kindness to be so cruel”) together
“pass through a few acres of unplowed unimproved prairie
Prairie
Prairies are considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the dominant vegetation type...
, one remnant of that sea of grass which formally stretched from the Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
to the base of the Rocky Mountains
Rocky Mountains
The Rocky Mountains are a major mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than from the northernmost part of British Columbia, in western Canada, to New Mexico, in the southwestern United States...
. The open range. Where the buffalo
American Bison
The American bison , also commonly known as the American buffalo, is a North American species of bison that once roamed the grasslands of North America in massive herds...
roamed, where the deer
Deer
Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...
and the antelope
Antelope
Antelope is a term referring to many even-toed ungulate species indigenous to various regions in Africa and Eurasia. Antelopes comprise a miscellaneous group within the family Bovidae, encompassing those old-world species that are neither cattle, sheep, buffalo, bison, nor goats...
played for twenty thousand years. And then up from Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
came the mass herds of stinking shambling dung-smeared bawling bellowing bulge-eyed cattle
Cattle
Cattle are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius...
. Followed by cowboys, beef ranchers, barbed wire, cross fencing, locked gates, private property, whores, bores and real estate developers.”
Despite these cranky environmental musings, Henry’s actions are not always immediately apparent as being what most would consider “eco-conscious.” Motoring along through New Mexico, Henry makes “(t)ime for my eight-course lunch: cheese, crackers, six-pack of beer. Not what the doctor ordered, precisely, but the habits of a lifetime may not lightly be discarded. ‘Dispose of Thoughtfully’ say the printed instructions on the six-pack. Thoughtfully I drop the first empty out the window two miles beyond Española
Espanola
Places called Espanola or Española include:* Espanola, Florida, United States* Española Island, one of the Galápagos Islands* Espanola, New Mexico, United States* Espanola, Ontario, Canada* Hispaniola, an island known in Spanish as "La Española"...
. The can bounces along on the pavement before coasting to the shoulder of the road. Some kid with a sack will pick it up. Recycle that aluminum. Give a hoot.” For reasons such as this, The Fool’s Progress irritated many in the “environmental community” as an irresponsible gesture from a man many considered to be an ecological prophet. But Abbey never willingly accepted this role, as anyone who has read him extensively must attest, and despised being packed into the “nature writer” closet by reviewers. Despite his flippant and irreverent black humor, however, Abbey’s true convictions about the real threats facing the American land and the American soul continue to shine through. (Abbey littered public roads out of a philosophical certainty that is wasn’t the beer cans that were ugly, but the highways themselves, slashed across otherwise pristine countryside.)
At times a grimly realistic On the Road
On the Road
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
for the 21st century, the novel is rife with unsettling observations of our love affair with spiritual ruin. Rolling across rural Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
Henry encounters
“…a half-mile-long feedlot in which imprisoned Herefords, Charolais, and black Angus beefburgers, on the hoof and more or less alive, standing room only, mill about under the sun on a carpet of mud, urine and manure … This is not farm country but an agricultural factory where not only the soil, air and water but living animals themselves, kine and swine, mammals like us, mothers with emotions similar to ours—love, lust, fear—are treated as raw raw-material for packaged meats. Enough to make a man a bloody vegetarian if he lets his mind dwell on it. Best not to dwell on it. Think of death not life the next time you stuff your chops with veal, sirloin, ham, bratwurst … I tremble for us Christians if there is a Christian god.
“Me and my dog. We think this way sometimes.”
It is not easy to classify this book, as it is not easy to classify the author, or anyone else of real interest. Henry Lightcap illuminates for us the best and worst potential of this country and its strange people, even as he points out the creeping perils to the land and to the human spirit. Impassively addressing the mysteriously slain corpse of his hermetic friend Morton Bildad, Henry outlines some of the troubles of our calamitous age:
“You’ll note I say nothing of the general state of human affairs. My current wife sleeping with a computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
professor … a computer fucking science professor! My friends mired in mortgages and indoor jobs and medical insurance, the hellhole of Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
, the black hole of Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
, the torture rack of Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
, the glut and gloom and gluttony of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
, the grimy Weltschmerz
Weltschmerz
Weltschmerz is a term coined by the German author Jean Paul and denotes the kind of feeling experienced by someone who understands that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind...
of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, the despair of the whales in Oceania
Oceania
Oceania is a region centered on the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Conceptions of what constitutes Oceania range from the coral atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific to the entire insular region between Asia and the Americas, including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago...
, the ghost dance of the grizzly bears, the death march of the elephants, the Doomsday
Doomsday
Doomsday may refer to:* End times, a prophesied time of tribulation that would precede the Second Coming of the Messiah in Abrahamic religions-Fiction:* Doomsday , a 1927 novel by Warwick Deeping* Doomsday , a DC comic book character...
machines over our heads—I tell you, Bildad, I realize now why the universe, as the astronomers have discovered, is receding from us at all directions at near the speed of light. Why? Red shift? No! Because of fear that’s why. We are the plague of the cosmos. The stars are not merely flying away, they are fleeing away, tripping away on little starfeet at a hundred and eighty thousand miles per second, running for their lives.”
Much later, limping along with his old truck through the industrial heart of the Midwest, Henry sees
“[O]il refineries appear, catalytic cracking plants, a thicket of pipes and stacks with flare-off fires brighter than the sunlight. Nostril-prickling smells float on the air, sly and sinister. Factory buildings of rusty red sheet metal, their windows broken, stand next to foundries and blast furnaces with brick chimneys sixty eighty feet a hundred feet high. Near each clanging workshop is a settling pond, a tailings dump, a slime pit filled with oily sludge, toxic solvents, pathogenic chemicals, black tars and industrial vomit roiled together in a marbled arabesque of brilliant, unforeseeable colors … Yes, and suppose this mad environment went on forever?”
Without the wilderness, Lightcap/Abbey seems to say, without the unspoiled remnants of our native country left intact, the mad environment we have brought down on ourselves and on everything else must one day overtake us. As with Henry’s doomed journey home, there will be no ultimate escape.