In his enormously compelling and tremendously disconcerting novel, The Life and Times of Captain N. (1993. New York: Alfred A. Knopf), author Douglas Glover tells a brutally-paced, hair-raising tale of lives and cultures in conflict during the American Revolutionary War. The war zone where the story takes place is the forest lands of 1700’s New York state along the Canadian border. This forest is a borderland, a violently contested space where not just armies, but also attitudes and relationships come into blood-curdling and heart-wrenching conflict. The novel is a ruthless, no-holds-barred exploration of the archetypal space that is the Borderland. The Forest, a quintessential Place in Between, is a Twilight Zone where all humans are as aliens to one another, engaged in titanic physical, emotional and intellectual clashes.
The character Hendrick Nellis serves as the Voice of the Borderland. He is a borderlander. An American, he is fighting on the side of the British, yet is deeply connected to the world of the indigenous Indians. He is painfully aware that he himself as well as all those around him are participating in a massive collision of belief systems. Hendrick is well aware that the American Revolution is not a simplistic battle of Good agains Evil or of Freedom against Tyrrany. It is a titanic battle of archetypal attitudes. Not just an actor in this land of conflict, he is also a keen-eyed observer who perceives patterns and the bigger picture. He is an insightful narrator, commentator and analyst of the Forest. His articulate voice speaks from experience branded on upon his skin and heart.
The other two main characters in the novel, Oskar and Mary (also known as She Who Remembers) are, in contemporary terminlogy, adolescents. They have their own deeply felt experiences and understandings of the Borderland. Being younger, they do not have the distanced insight that Hendrick offers.
The Life and Times of Captain N. presents a harrowing description of the emotional geography of the Borderland. The specific terrain presented is The Forest, the place of danger and transformation in myth and fable. It is a place of dislocation. In the Borderland, no one is at home, not even those born there. As Hendrick makes clear, all facile allegiances become impossible to maintain in the borderland. The illusion of clean, clear and simple alliances and loyalties is blown to smithereens. Conflicts arise among individuals and within each person. Hendrick articulates his own sense of profound dislocation: “I am an exile making war on my own people, on my own family.“ (pg. 10) Borderlanders are refugees. The Borderland is a displaced persons‘ camp.
Of the Forest it is said, “Once they have gone there, few ever return.“ (pg. 81) Inhabitants of the forest may return to a previous, once-familiar geography, but the human features will never be the same as before. Once an individual enters the Borderland, she can never go home again.
Borderlands are inherently zones of conflict. Hendrick‘s exile is not just the loss of his physical home, but even more profoundly, that as a Tory who sympathizes with the British, he is literally at war with many of his American neighbors. Ironically, while fighting on their side, he is definitely not one of the Brits. War creates borderlands, and borderlands invite warfare. His very identity becomes conflicted.
The contested Forest is a space that roils in chaos and disorder in massive, undigestable doses. All previous norms and rules are made irrelevant. “In the no-man’s-land between peoples, languages, and customs, there is no custom, only naked desire and misunderstanding“ (pg. 80-81). Since there is nothing in the human world to rely upon, there is no safety for anybody.
The Borderland is an intensely emotional territory. Rules of rationality are swept aside irreversibly in the tsumani of emotions. “It is a childlike state, full of violent experiment – when I think of this I am reminded of the mask of the Whirlwind.“ (pg. 81) Emotions become primary, overwhelming the thin veneer of rational thought. The Forest, this Every-Man-for-Himself-Land, is a space of tremendous, nuclearly explosive energy. The released energies have atomic force and atomizing potential.
A space of stress, the Borderland erases nuances. The inhabitants of the borderland are reduced to two types: the Splintered Self and the fearful Other.
At the individual level, people feel that they belong to no one group in the borderland. Hendrick talks about the immense stress and sense of existential dislocation that the Borderland awakens in individuals like himself. There is no group in the context of which to create one’s identity. “Like me, he is between peoples and does not know who he is.“ (pg. 19)
The sense of profound alienation occurs at all levels of an individual’s being, not just in the broader political or cultural levels. The sense of being split apart between opposing beliefs and worldviews is a basic pattern of being human in the Borderland. The following is a desription of Hendrick’s son, Oskar, the Captain N. of the book’s title. “This is how he feels, split and half-blind, caught betweeen his mother’s high-strung and extravagant melancholy and his father’s stern and truculent principles.., between Tory and Rebel, between King George and General George, Catchpole and Witcacy, between English and German, between colonist and Indian.“ (pg. 87-88) The rich picture of his life has fragmented into pieces that are experienced as having nothing that ties them together. The shards are there, but there is no mortar with which to create a coherent mosaic of them.
For Oskar, being a Borderlander results in the feeling of having no identity whatsoever. “He cannot be who he is, exists only in the line, the trail of ink.“ (pg. 88) He cannot be who he is, because in the Forest, the hostile context offers no support that facilitates his knowing who he might be. The only things that offers him coherence is writing, recording obsessively in writing what it is he experiences and what he wishes.
The Land of In-Between is a space where there is no family, there are no antecedents, each individual is a foundling. Whether there is a physical parent or not, in the World In-Between everyone is a vulnerable Child cast out rudderless into the storming sea of worlds in collision. One of the characters is described as a “Fatherless Child, the one who lives between Worlds.“ (pg. 123)
Here is another description of the exquisitely beautiful and excruciatingly painful reality of being an In-Between-er. In describing Oskar: “He had an affinity for the edges of civilization – people at the edge are always closer to the other, more tolerant of difference; this tolerance brands them as sinful; it is a brand and a badge.“ (pg. 166) Being not-one-of-us sets a person outside. She can be seen as prophet and as outlaw. Either role arouses fear in others as well as oneself.
This sense of alienation provokes strong and explosive emotions in the borderlander. "His rage turns outward in sudden violence, while mine explodes inside my head.“ (pg. 19) The loss of Self is terrifying and results in explosive behavior.
For individuals who have lost a coherent sense of self, who feel continuously off-balance, all other people become potential enemies. And the Other cannot be avoided. In the Borderland, where boundaries are constantly transgressed, each resident is constantly thrown up against The Other. “The things I see I do not recognize and seem but a whirling chaos, like a myriad dust devils spinning in a hundred colors and shapes. This war has ruptured the pristine surface of our mental existence.“
The up-close interactions of individuals and cultures most often evoke fear and hostility. We are not able to see the other as „like me, but different.“ Rather than curiosity and questioning, interactions simply reinforce prejudices and fears. “Like us, they have completely misconceived the other. Ours is a dialogue of colliding misapprehensions.“ (pg. 44)
For the European-blooded in the novel, the Indians represent the quintessential Other. English and Americans, Tories and Revolutionaries may disagree with each other’s politics, but most perceive their similarities as being human. But the Messessagy, the aboriginals, seem to be totally different and incomprehensible. This plays out in killing and exploiting them, of course, but for true Children of the Borderland, like Hendrick, the difference is eye-openingly beautiful. “The savages are poetry come to life. Their every gesture is rhetorical. Beauty is truth to them. In order to tell their truth you have to forget the world and render everything poetical.“ (pg. 50)
External warfare is the waking-world manifestation of the internal warfare raging inside individuals. The Other most often becomes a projection screen for each individual‘s own unexamined fears and shadows Internal inconsistencies and ruptures cannot be politely shelved away, but, instead, erupt and are seen to inhabit others. “Demons and spirits swirl up through the breach. We who hold to the old will be pressed to the wall and beyond, into the marches.“ (pg. 41)
While usually negative, these projections can be positive, but they still view the other not as a human. So, for Hendrick: “The truth is I do not understand the savages. I try to say this and this, but they evade me. Difference is their primary characteristic. It envelops them in a luminous sheath. They seem marvelous, more real than real. They become everything that is not familiar, expected, and routine. They become the mystic other, the female, the child, and the self, which I glimpse only fleetingly. I invest them with all my hopes, ideals, and graces.“ (pg. 66) He is not able to access and cultivate all these positive qualities in himself, so he has the Positive Other hold them for him. This still makes the Other be Not Like Me, Not Human.
Hendrick articulates the essential questions around which the violence revolves. “This is my nightmare. Why am I here? I ask myself. Who is the other? What is he saying?“ (pg. 41) These are the profoundest of existential questions. They form the core of the dance between self and other.
The world of the Borderland is a territory where many individuals are shoved off the bank of The Known, to embark upon an Heroic Journey. The classic mythic patterns for such a journey are present in the Borderland as presented in this novel. There is a time and space of dislocation. Things have changed and cannot go on as before. An uncertain Self is confronted with threatening Others. The hero has to strike out and look for new wisdom, for the Grail with which to heal himself and his fellows.
The splintered self encounters the Other: this is the essence of journeying through the Borderland. The journey involves dealing with Difference. It is a dialectical process, one of opposition. “If disintegration is my disease, then I caught it from the world. Everything splits, or doubles, and splits or doubles again and again, then whirls and whirls. I am at the heart of the whirlwind, the moment of storm. It is unnerving and unnatural. (pg. 154-155) Everything familiar and seemingly true breaks apart and disfigures, recombining in troubling patterns.
Change is inevitable, once the Journey has started. How its meaning plays out is up to the journeyer. What is gained from the trip depends on how the hero perceive herself, the Other and the purpose of the journey.
Hendrick describes how contact with the Other can open the door to profound change. One can leave one‘s old sense of self behind. But this is not an easy process. “Once I said that becoming an Indian was like unto entering a swarming madness, but it might redeem you. I mean going out of yourself, abandoning the structure of mind which is peculiarly white, entering that area where, because it is neither one nor the other, you are nothing.“ The Indians, too, can meet Europeans only in the same area, where everyone is nothing - or everything.
Border crossing can also afford opportunities to learn new tongues, to translate. Oskar wonders: “Did he mean that all languages which are foreign are sacred? Did he mean that difference itself is sacred? That my savior is the other, whoever he is? (pg. 120) Rather than a source of terror and violence, difference can be what tears apart our own narrow boundaries of self-perception, affording us new knowledge that can save us. Each interaction with the other is an opportunity to translate ourselves into someone larger.
The act of translating the other is not always (or ever) a smooth or easy process. It is a struggle to illuminate. “He said what is important is to grapple with the other. He said the other is always a man or a woman, an Indian, a child, someone who speaks another language – that we are all darkened rooms to one another.“ (pg. 168)
The other way of dealing with the Other, the much more common way, is through Warfare. The Other is believed to be „not like me,“ not truly human, and therefore the task is to subdue or destroy him.
The warfare is not simply a collision of the machinery of war. It uproots absolutely everything for everyone touched by it. “The war is like a whirlwind, and the structures of our lives (army, Indian, colonist) have been upended.“ (pg. 79) Further, “everything is strange. Our former gestures, habits, customs, and beliefs seem inappropriate and wooden. We are automatons acting and thinking in set ways which no longer fit our circumstances.“ (pg. 79) Everyone becomes a victim to their own particular patterns of habit, which the Borderland shows to be eminently not useful.
The novel graphically and brutally depicts all sorts of levels of violence and destruction that play out in warfare. Battles are waged internally within each individual, as well as at the group and cultural level. “In the forest, civilizations clash, just as in my head, humors, ideas, and words contend willy-nilly till my skull feels like a bucket of raging demons.“ (pg. 60)
Finding oneself in the war zone that is any Borderland, even the relationship with war and the inevitable reconfigurations that it brings can change. Hendrick muses: “I believe now that war is a constant, that all is flux, that existence is defined by opposite polarities, which lead to yet other polarities – each signified by a mark or mask – which gives the world a splintering or lightning-bolt pattern.“ (pg. 106) Not just a meeting place of boundaries, the Forest is a place of fiercely contested beliefs.
However, violence that occurs in the process of trying to grasp the other is not meaningless. ‘He said violence has its own strange and perverse beauty – at least it makes you pay attention. You get to know a man when you’re a-killing him, or when he’s a-killing you.“ (pg. 168) The key is to pay attention.
All of human existence is comprised of polarities. In the dialectical process of two realities in conflict giving rise to a third reality, which then will come into confict with yet another, the Big Truth is that all of existence is movement, the dance of opposites. This is The Grail that is gained, the goal of the Journey.
There is great value in the possible apprehensions of the other, the other’s reality, the expansion of mind and heart this allows. The final synthesis of Warfare in the Borderland is expressed by Oskar. “This is what I think – The War has taught me a Grammar of Love. We – Rebels & Tories & Whites & Indians - are having a violent Debate whose Subject is the Human Heart, its constituent Elements & Humors, it hidden Path. (pg. 162) The Wasteland that so often is made of any Borderland can be transformed by the Grammar of Love into a land of fertility. Or perhaps it’s that the Wasteland is transformed into a Grammar of Love.
The world of the Borderland is very much a Dream World. Both are spaces and times where worldviews come into contact, contact that often becomes conflict. Dream interactions, like borderland friction, have the goal of radical change. The more mindful and heartful individuals are, the less violence that may be required to make manifest the changes demanded. The less Dreamful individuals are, the more violence that is required to get our attention and, hopefully press us to participate in necessary change. In either case, the question, the fundamental question is: are we willing to spin conflict into Gold?