Prompted by the question of whether heroism can exist in the age of technology, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff narrates an exposé of America’s 1960s heroes: the NASA astronauts. Wolfe turns the well-known history of America’s first journey through space inside out to reveal the astronauts private lives: their relationships with each other, their families, and the plexus of career aviation at large. In the book, Wolfe paints the group of seven astronauts as individuals with a few universal commonalities. All macho men, the group feels (but never speaks of) an undeniable fraternity amongst, though their careers rely on fierce competition. To their wives and children, these astronauts communicate but do not make themselves vulnerable. These boys’ boys funnel all of their awe, adoration, and commitment into their craft, the flight, the thrill. However, to address the possibility of heroism in the modern age, Wolfe unveils another relationship: that between the racksack group of national heroes and their fans, the American public. Wolfe, when he explore this relationship, illuminates the boys’ rather un-heroic behavior, which the press adumbrates, to show the discrepancy between how the American public views these men, and how they actually act:
Yeager and the rocket pilots who soon joined him at Muroc had a hard time dealing with publicity. On the one hand, they hated the process. It meant talking to reporters and other fruit flies who always hovered, eager for the juice . . . and invariably got the facts screwed up . . . But that wasn’t really the problem, was it! The real problem was that reporters violated the invisible walls of the fraternity. They blurted out questions and spoke boorish words about . . . all the unspoken things! — about fear and bravery (they would say the words!) and how you felt at such-and-such a moment! It was obscene! They presumed a knowledge and an intimacy that they did not have and had no right to. Some aviation writer would sidle up and say, ÔI hear Jenkins augered in. That’s too bad.’ Augered in!- a phrase that belonged exclusively to the fraternity! — coming from the lips of this ant who was left behind the moment Jenkins made his first step up the pyramid long, long ago. It was repulsive! But on the other hand . . . ones healthy pilot ego loved the glory — wallowed in it! — lapped it up! No doubt about it! The Pilot Ego — ego didn’t come any bigger! The boys wouldn’t have minded the following. They wouldn’t have minded appearing once a year on a balcony over a huge square in which half the world Is assembled. They wave. The world roars its approval, its applause, and breaks into a sustained thirty-minute storm of cheers and tears (moved by my righteous stuff!). And then its over. All that remains is for the wife to paste the clippings in the notebook. (50)
In this passage, as with the numerous other scenes in which the paparazzi overwhelm the astronauts with questions, Wolfe hints that the glorified men might not in fact fill the heroes' shoes that the public wills them to. He suggests that lopsidedness exists between the men in public and the men in private. For one, as we see here, the mens’ egos dominate them more than their humility does. Though they see the press as violating panjandrums ripe to desiccate the rich silence of their brotherhood, their egos overcome their responsibility to protect the fraternity, and they gladly saturate in the royalty of the attention despite its destructive implications. The boys’ larger-than-life egos only begin the list of flaws that these men possess outside of the public eye, and Wolfe takes care to show it. He repeatedly notes the astronauts lack-of-cool when he repeats their plea, “please, dear God, don’t let me fuck this up.” Similarly, Wolfe consistently brings to light the astronaut’s anxiety about “getting left behind,” should they make a small mistake. However, for all of their fear, Wolfe paints the boys as a stupidly reckless bunch, always “Flying and Drinking and Drinking and Driving.” On the domestic front, Wolfe readily exposes the men’s difficulty in “keeping their hands clean and their peckers stowed” as women made themselves available to America’s hotshots. He even mentions one astronaut who “talked a rope” to reunite with the woman from whom he’d separated for the sole purpose of qualifying for a NASA selection process. Ultimately, Wolfe takes care to show us that though the public aims to dig into the personal lives of “the sort of mortals who brought tears to other mens eyes,” they might find there pulsating egos, reckless instincts, and infidelity. However, Wolfe’s attitude towards the astronauts’ private lives does not remain consistently acrimonious. In fact, he devotes an even larger portion of his descriptions of the astronauts to genuine awe. He exposes the flaws of the men and confirms their genuine bravery interchangeably throughout the course of the work. Thus, Wolfe neither explicitly confirms nor denies whether he believes a hero can exist in the technological era, though his dubious ending sentence does eerily reflect the reality of the current-day public’s conception of those 1960s heroes:
It would have still been more impossible for his confreres to realize that the day might come when Americans would hear their names and say, “Oh, yes — now, which one was he?”
No, Wolfe never explicitly affirms whether a hero can exist in the technological era, but by the end of the work he does establish a character with certain heroic qualities, those of omniscience and credibility — a character who understands every angle of the story: himself. Though he does not confirm the existence of heroes in the modern-day technological age, Wolfe does prove himself as the modern-day hero’s literary equivalent: a modern-day sage. Because Wolfe assumes the voice of the pilots himself, as we see in the paragraph above, he establishes himself as privy to both sides of the story: the inner life of the astronaut world and the American publics interpretation of that world. As a back-stage VIP, Wolfe assumes sage-ship in his expose of these astronauts because he crosses the line that the public cannot cross, and he establishes himself as the sole person to understand both the astronauts and the public conception of the astronauts. By means of adapting different voices throughout the work, Wolfe gains credibility to attest to the private thoughts and feelings of all of his characters, and accordingly assumes his own omniscience, and in effect, the all-knowing ethos of the modern day sage.
References
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Bantam Books, 1979.
Last modified 7 April 2011