Race and the Infernal City in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities

Abstract

Race and the Infernal City in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities }oshua J. Masters And you, O slaves, worthless in your vileness, for now you may continue to besmirch yourselves. Let your bellies be filled with wine, your kidneys be rotted with excess, and your hands be stained with the blood of the poor, for this is your portion and your lot. But know that your bodies and your souls are in my hands and soon your bodies will be worn out by the scourges and your souls I will hand over to die eternal fire. —Savonarola Compendium Revelationum Thus I say to you, Florence, that this is the time to build the new house of God and to renew your city. —Savonarola, Sermon of December 14, 1494 In the late fifteenth century, Savonarola, a preacher of repentance and a prophet of doom, exhorted the citizens of Florence to cast off their vain personal ornaments and objects of vice—their cosmetics, cards, dice, books, and pomographic pictures—and throw them into symbolic bonfires that would purge them of their sins (Donnelly 13). Yet while Savonarola preached his message of fire, envisioning Florence as both the infernal city and the city of sin, he always imagined the possibility of redemption and renewal, that in these baptisms of fire Florence would become the new JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.2 (Spring 1999): 208-227. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Race and the Infernal City 209 city, the City of God (Weinstein 30). Thus just as Christian 'man' is figured as half angel and half beast, Savonarola's Florence is at once Jerusalem and Sodom, the City of God and Babylon, utopia and dystopia.1 The title of Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, undoubtedly refers to the urban pyrotechnic rituals that Savonarola inspired during the Italian Renaissance. This would suggest that his novel shares a similar prophetic vision of the city, one capable of illuminating the corruption and decay of contemporary American values, beliefs, and practices. However, Savonarola's message of renewal and rebirth is conspicuously absent from Wolfe's novel, for in it he denies the Christian teleology that entertains apocalypse as the prelude to utopia. Instead, we find the collapse of Christianity's "grand narrative" and the absolute triumph of the apocalyptic city: the city as Sodom, Babylon, Wasteland, necropolis, and kakatopia—the city of shit. For unlike Savonarola's Florentine bonfires, fed by the "vanities" the bourgeois citizens themselves chose to contribute , the bonfires in Wolfe's novel threaten from without, having been set by the jealous masses. In the first description of the McCoy's Park Avenue apartment, this infernal thematic becomes clear: "It was the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites the flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world" (10). According to this formulation, the "world" is dominated only by the Veblenian desire for social recognition via "pecuniary emulation" and "conspicuous consumption" (Veblen 22); thus, the "flames" in this passage are neither redemptive nor baptismal, and instead symbolize the "greed" of the undeserving, who desire, but cannot obtain, the fruits of the blessed. In typical American fashion, Wolfe rewrites class straggle as the agonistic conflict between wealthy Anglo-Americans and an increasingly racialized Other, and it is this conflict that dominates the way city-space is both imaged and imagined in the novel. To be sure, Bonfire satirizes every sector of New York society: the self-satisfied egotism and excess of the upper class, the maudlin envy of the bourgeoisie, the dogged but witless tenacity of the working class, and the brute animality of the so-called "underclass ." What interests me is the way the novel naturalizes these class tensions through its incessant, and at times gratuitous, deployment of racial stereotypes, stabilizing the fictive categories of "racial" difference and ultimately fetishizing whiteness. In order to unmask and assess the 210 JNT novel's racialization of the infernal city, a place for the "miserable and the damned" (36), my paper begins with an examination of Wolfe's narrative technique in terms of both...