In “The Zoo Story”, Jerry is trying to communicate with another human being. He has reached a point in his life where words as conveyors of thoughts alone are no longer effective. He must use words now to affect Peter emotionally. He’s not looking for acceptance, however; it’s understanding he needs. If Jerry can convey to Peter his agony of separation and loneliness, he will have succeeded and is willing to die for the achievement. Todd Andrews, in The Floating Opera, wants to communicate his lack of feeling. He has succeeded so well in donning masks along the way whenever his emotions threatened to overwhelm him, that he is terrified of having totally isolated himself. He is de-sensitized to the point of despair. Like Jerry, he thinks he would rather die now than face a lonely and uncertain future. He pursues a written “Inquiry” for years, in an attempt to understand the meaning of his father’s suicide and the reasons for their “imperfect communication” all of Todd’s life. If he can uncover the reasons, he feels, he may want to go on living. Better than that, if he can make us understand too, he may feel confident enough to rejoin the human race. He writes his book to us in an effort to make contact in a way he never could before. Quentin, in Act II of “After the Fall,” laments: “It made me wonder why I seem so unable to mourn. So disconnected.” It’s his mother’s death that fails to move him at that moment. He feels the same detachment when Maggie commits suicide. He is shut down emotionally; isolated in his mind. And like Jerry and Todd, he is struggling to correspond with the rest of the world.
Somewhere in his life, each of these men has been made to feel abandoned, so each one has repressed his sensibilities along the way for fear of being rejected again. Two choose life in the end; one opts for death. I care enough to examine why and meaning of their choices. Jerry has two empty picture frames in his room. He tells the sordid story of his parents’ deaths and says that is why “good old Mom and good old Dad are frameless.” But he suggests that Peter (and we) can perhaps see deeper meaning in the empty frames. He’s hinting, but he’s afraid. He reveals himself, however, when he allows: “I have no feeling about any of it that I care to admit to myself.” It’s an admission of a refusal to face reality. Or is it that he cannot bear to face the truth? Obviously, Jerry has been deeply hurt and suppressed the pain.
For Todd Andrews, the turning point from mere skepticism to hard cynicism came on the day he found his father hanged in the basement. That was the beginning of his inquiry into the meaning of communication in personal relationships and the onset of his despair. When Quentin was a boy, his parents tricked him by sending him out for a walk and then leaving him behind while they went on vacation. When they returned with presents and an apology, the boy refused to be comforted. There is even a suggestion, in Act II, that he tried to kill himself because of the pain of that rejection. Later, when his mother dies, Quentin cannot weep. And when Maggie threatens suicide, he reacts defensively: “It isn’t my love you want any more. It’s my destruction! But you’re not going to kill me, Maggie!” (end Act II).
Jerry’s parents were self-destructive and died recklessly. He went to live with his aunt and she “dropped dead” on the day of his high school graduation. He buries his heart; Todd dons his third mask, of cynicism, to hide his feelings from himself; and Quentin will try to mold his world to his own emotional specifications. Death could be called the supreme betrayal and suicide can seem to be the ultimate treachery; the final rejection. It’s enough to prevent some from ever committing their hearts again.
Jerry says that he has tried to communicate with the tenants in his building. But has he? When he is young, he has a homosexual encounter that leaves him doubting his masculinity. He tries to love women and does, in each case “For about an hour.” He trusts no one, claims his landlady spies on him, sneaks in and out avoiding his neighbors, and finally goes on a campaign to make meaningful contact with the landlady’s dog. Jerry tells us that he went to the zoo “to find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too.” He is not surprised to find a perfect parallel between his building and the animal quarters in the zoo: “It probably wasn’t a fair test…But, if it’s a zoo, that’s the way it is.” The animals are indifferent to each other in their cages, and people ignore each other in the world. Jerry longs to break out of his emotional cage, to touch another human being.
“He learned from his experience with the dog
That neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion.”
He applies the technique to Peter, first by appealing to his kindness, then to his baser instincts: “You’re a vegetable: Go lie down on the ground.” He demands Peter’s place on the bench, and there follows a primitive battle. The victory is Jerry’s, as Peter is reduced from cool, rational, ordered, and vapid man to an angry, sweating, aggressive and more animalistic being. Peter directly experiences Jerry’s hostility and confusion, and ultimately, after the killing, I am sure the same frustration and loneliness. Because Peter feels what Jerry has felt, Peter understands, and what’s more, will carry the message of Jerry’s agony to others.
Todd Andrews writes his message directly, in bitterness and irony, but with floating humor. At the beginning of his story, he is convinced that suicide is the only solution to his problem. He is not unlike Jerry in that respect, except that he must intellectualize his pain, to try to find answers that he can verbalize. He reasons too much, perhaps which is what keeps him isolated emotionally. He explains at the end of chapter XV: “Things that are clear to me are sometimes incomprehensible to others—which fact occasions this chapter, if not the whole book.” Not that Todd was always more cerebral than visceral. Once in that foxhole in the Argonne, he had felt “intense intimacy” and “the purest and strongest emotion” he had ever experienced (Ch. VII).
It was with the German soldier who had become a companion in the confusion of hand-to-hand combat. He was emotional, personal, and even intimate with the man, but finally doubt and fear drove him to bayonet the soldier. From then on, Todd could not regard people as higher beings. In fact, he would never again be able “to oppose the terms man and animal” nor “to regard their accomplishments except as the tricks of more or less well-trained beasts.” If a man can understand his own emotions, he has a chance of understanding his existence. Todd’s problem becomes his inability to feel freely; to be involved emotionally. Perhaps he would like to recapture what he had for a short time in that foxhole: “For the space of some hours we had been one man, had understood each other beyond friendship, beyond love, as a wise man understands himself.” He had found himself there and left himself behind. It’s not surprising, then, that when he discovers his father’s body hanging in the basement, Todd remains objective. He is aware above all that Dad’s hair is neatly combed and there is “not a smudge of dirt anywhere on him.” That day marks the beginning of his reasoned inquiry, a cool and lifeless exploration of the ultimately vital and burning question: ‘What is the value of life?’
Todd never finds the answer. His father’s death was meaningless, therefore “Nothing has intrinsic value” (Ch. XXV) and no one and nothing is to be trusted. From the day of his mother’s death, Quentin has had a similar problem. Remembering their desertion of him when he was a boy, he muses: “I see, yes—to break through, to truth” (Act II). He trusts no one, not even himself. He is unfaithful to his first wife, confesses, and then never hears the end of it: “Maybe I don’t speak because the one time I did tell you my feelings you didn’t get over it for six months” (Act I). He has never really communicated with her: “Quentin, you think reading a brief to a woman is talking to her?” (Act I). She is painfully aware of his inability to relate, and pinpoints one barrier: “But I think now that you don’t really see any woman. Except in some ways your mother.” (Act I). Later when he marries Maggie, he knows he is wanting her for the wrong reasons. He thought he could change her and strives for the power “To transform somebody—to save!” (Act II). And toward the end of their relationship, he weeps: “Maggie, we…used one another!” (Act II). At least he is trying. “Maggie, a human being has to forgive himself! Neither of us is innocent!” (Act II). Nothing is certain, but we can choose to live with doubt, at least wanting to, if not being able to love: “And I wanted to face the worst thing I could imagine—that I could not love” (Act II). Acceptance is the answer for Quentin: “To know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed.”…but that we can forgive each other our worst faults.
Three lonely men. Three orphans. Three people incapable of loving, but trying to understand and to be understood. Jerry’s plight seems hopeless. His is a crusading self-destruction that spreads its own news. At least he’s made contact. Todd is self-centered enough to want to publish his purpose. He leaves us with a sense of futility, a ‘What’s-the-use?’ attitude that will keep him alive, but hardly living. Quentin may be fine. He’s faced his guilt and separateness and confessed to those closest to him, which proves that he cares to try to work out his dilemma instead of to run from it. He enlists our sympathy, but he does not beg pity. It’s mutual understanding he craves, and with Holga, he has a chance.