Regiment of Women

by Thomas Berger

Twenty-nine-year-old Georgie Cornell, the hero of Thomas Berger's new novel,was born in 2096 and lives in New York City. The doorwoman of Georgie'sapartment house, "in the jungle of the East 70's," womans the front-door anti-pollution airlock with a shotgun. Georgie's psychiatrist, Dr. Prine, wears a self-adhesive nylon beard and has been treating Georgie for frigidity with a dildo. Shetells him his complaint that it hurts is merely a "defense"—as Dr. Daisy Rudinexplained so well in her new book on the superiority of the anal orgasm, recentlypublished by the giant firm where Georgie works as a secretary, unsuccessfullyavoiding the attempts of his bald-headed boss, Ida Hind, to steal glances intoGeorgie's blouse at his newly siliconed breasts.

Through such details of satiric reversal, parallel, and extension, Berger firstsketches in the background of his future America. The novel's title is taken fromJohn Knox's 1558 attack on "Bloody" Mary Tudor, The First Blast of the Trum-pet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and quotations from Knox, MartinLuther, Christabel Pankhurst, Grover Cleveland, Olive Schreiner, Confucius, Vir-ginia Woolf, and others, including a final comment from Friedrich Nietzsche("Woman was God's second mistake"), preface each chapter.

Georgie Cornell's America is governed entirely by women ("regiment" in Knox'stitle means "rule"); and in Georgie's New York men swear by Mary rather thanChrist (whether Bloody or Virgin is unclear), admire Leonarda's Mono Liso, cel-ebrate Columba's Day, and look forward patriotically to their six-month serviceat Camp Kilmer, where they are milked daily by sperm machines to insure thecontinuance of the species. (Normal intercourse in Georgie's world involves womentaking men anally with dildoes, and the troubles for which Georgie is seeing Dr.Prine seem to have begun during a disastrous Junior Prom date when he was 18.)

The ruling women of 2125 haven't done very much better than the ruling menof today. The city and the society in Regiment of Women are basically chaotic andinefficient rather than inhumane or totalitarian. The George Washington Bridgecollapsed years before into the Hudson Sewer during a rainstorm, and the generaldecay of 22nd-century America seeps into every part of the novel. Unlike theantiseptic dreams or nightmares of the future usually displayed in science-fiction

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novels, the atmosphere of Regiment of Women is incredibly seedy, as if Bergerenvisioned the world of the future as an extension of the back alleys of DashiellHammett and Mickey Spillane, or of Ross Macdonald's decaying southern Cali-fornia towns.

But Regiment of Women isn't merely an extended tour through a turnaboutworld that readers will view with disgust or approval according to their prejudices.To paste up a collage of the details of Regiment of Women falsifies the actualeffect of the novel, which convinces almost in spite of the details. In Berger'snovel Little Big Man Jack Crabb tells how he first couldn't stand the smell of theIndian village: "But, like anything else, living in it made it your reality, and whenI next entered a white settlement, I missed the odor of what seemed to me lifeitself and felt I would suffocate."

Berger's imaginative power makes us live in Georgie Cornell's reality until itbecomes our norm, and the arbitrary rigidity of the sex roles in Georgie's worldmakes us aware not of our "normality," but of our own arbitrary distinctions.There is more compassion than bitterness in Regiment of Women. Berger's subjectis not so much the specific nature of sexual roles as the categorical severity withwhich roles are enforced and deviations punished. The decay of Georgie Cornell'sAmerica implies that the more politically and socially fragile a society, the moreseverely it attempts to police and define individual nature.

Berger's settings and characters in all his novels are plausible rather than apoc-alyptic. His satire refuses to make an alliance between reader and author againstan oppressive, ugly "them." Paul Krassner once wrote that "the ultimate objectof satire is its own audience," and Berger's integrity arranges that no reader—male chauvinist, militant feminist, or anyone in between—can emerge from Reg-iment of Women unscathed. All of Berger's main characters—Georgie Cornellhere, Jack Crabb in Little Big Man, Carlo Reinhart in Crazy in Berlin, Reinhartin Love, and Vital Parts—are moved more by circumstances than by some pas-sionate belief. Berger's clearest outrage is reserved for anyone who presumes tosit in moral judgment on another, and his central characters are all slammed aboutby beings more certain than they about the location of truth.

Consequently, there is little ideological significance to Georgie's journey fromthe New York in which he is a brow-beaten secretary to the Maine lake where hediscovers he can put his penis into a woman's vagina without killing her. Alongthe way Georgie is manipulated as much by the underground men's liberationmovement as he is by the female government. "Everyone he encountered was amonomaniac of some sort, working compulsively to affect someone else: to altertheir personality, change their mind, catch them out, set them straight. Everybodyelse always knew better about sex, society, history, you name it." Georgie'sresolution of his problems is purely individual, the affirmation of personal identitythat for Berger must precede the definition of sexual identity.

Like all great literary satirists, whose art gets at the root of imperception andself-delusion, Berger is concerned with the way language can falsify reality. ("Iwas never an aggressive boy," says Georgie. "I certainly don't think I could becalled effeminate.") By disorienting us through its language, Regiment of Womenindicts the society that uses language as a tool of oppression, making purely verbal

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differences into codes and categories—rhetoric asserting and experiencing itself astruth.

Berger's own style, with its tendency to absorb the speech rhythms of his char-acters and its unwillingness to stand apart from them, is especially suited for suchthemes. Since Little Big Man, especially, he has concentrated on exploring thepossibilities and revealing the secrets of everyday language with a deep wit andfeeling that transform our awareness of the language we really use much morethan does the flamboyance of a writer bent on asserting his personal style. KillingTime may be Berger's most successful effort to engage in this most truly poetictask of renovating the language we speak. But Regiment of Women is a flamefrom the same sources of energy.

Regiment of Women is in many ways a difficult book to talk about because, likethe popular novels it imitates, it has few of the philosophical nuggets or technicaltricks that professedly serious novels kindly include for the reviewer's conve-nience. But Berger doesn't use popular forms archly, as does, for example, Don-ald Barthelme. He finds in them energy, action, and simple decisions that aremotivated more by self-preservation than by abstract moral or intellectual imper-atives. Berger also concocts this combination gothic-horror, science-fiction, anddetective story to explore and reveal a theme such works have always been fasci-nated by—the masculine fear of the domination of women. Berger uses theseforms in the service of what I think is a compelling and finally humanizing fictionabout male and female weakness perceived as human weakness, and about thepotential strength of individual identity that the official and underground institu-tions of society equally ignore.

Regiment of Women is a brilliant accomplishment by one of our best novelists.Little Big Man, and perhaps Killing Time and Vital Parts, are among the bestnovels of the past 10 years. Next to these larger achievements, Regiment of Womenmay be more a fable, a deceptively simple romp through current prejudices. Itisn't great in the way greatness has been defined by the novel since Joyce: eachone a block-buster containing, as far as possible, all knowledge and experience.None of Berger's works is suitable for taking to the moon with matching tooth-brush. They are novels that help you maintain a fresh response to the world aroundyou.

With Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey seemingly stilled—and Richard Condonplunged into self-parody—Kurt Vonnegut may be closest to Berger in style if notsensibility; but Vonnegut lacks the edge of Berger's wit and the variety of hisinsights. Each of Berger's novels is an expression of an esthetic presence thatcontinues to grow in strength and importance. Regiment of Women, for all itsexaggeration and grotesque parody, has been imagined with such ferocity and gleethat we assent to it almost in spite of ourselves, celebrating with Berger thatanarchic individuality that outlasts all the forms that language and society attemptto impose upon it.

[1973]