The MacGuffin by Stanley Elkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Motivational People

What is the relationship between literature and life? Or for that matter between spirit and matter? Is the answer a critical philosophical one or a doctrinal religious one? And do these questions and answers intersect with what most of us would call reality? If you’re more or less permanently high on coca leaves like the protagonist of The MacGuffin, both the questions and the answers as well as reality get a bit fuzzy, producing a kind of anti-Freudian psychology which doesn’t so much provide a theory of the case as describe the complexity of the situation.

The MacGuffin is Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the motivating force of a story: The non-existent George Kaplan for whom Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken in North by Northwest, the eponymous Maltese Falcon, and Scottie Ferguson’s (Jimmy Stewart’s) vertigo in the film of the same name. Although central to the narrative plot, the MacGuffin becomes subordinate to character and action in the story, a hidden force located outside the lives of those touched by it.

The MacGuffin, however, is something more than a literary device. In Elkin’s construction it offers a kind of worldview which is fundamentally opposed to that of the modern world, particularly the world of psychoanalysis. Unlike the Freudian id, the MacGuffin doesn’t arise from within, it arrives from elsewhere like a Lutheran vocation.

The MacGuffin has a life of its own that may come and go and mutate without permission or license. It can even become an interlocutor with whom to consult and negotiate if we take it seriously enough. In short we, as human beings, are its partner rather than its Freudian slave. It is a friendly force, there for us to make sense of our lives but it doesn’t demand or force action on its own behalf. And it of course collides frequently with other MacGuffins.

So, Bob Druff, City Commissioner of Streets in a medium sized, undistinguished American city, husband of the physically flawed but loyal Rose Helen, and father to the autistic but loving 30 year old, Mikey, sets forth on his MacGuffin-led adventures. Channelling both Homer’s Ulysses and Homer Simpson, Druff investigates the hit and run death of his son’s purported girl-friend, the apparent MacGuffin of the piece.

But as Elkin reminds us frequently: “life goes on, even during the chase scenes.” So the MacGuffin has to contend with all sorts of memories, neuroses, and physical failings. The most important contribution of the MacGuffin is to get Druff to stop thinking about himself, or at least to stop thinking about the world in terms of himself. Since “You learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin”, Druff learns, but not about some sort of psycho-analytical core of himself; rather he learns how he fits in the scheme of things – family, history, career. There is no fixed point to ‘himself’ because there is no stable scheme in which he, or anyone else lives.

Elkin concludes on a note that is both theological and psychological:

"If MacGuffin was the principle of structure to Druff, of pattern, of shading, and all the latent architecture of the old man’s life, what was Druff to MacGuffin? Why, raw material like pitch, like tar, like clay or sand or silica, like gravel and the trace elements of all the asphalts."

Not a bad alternative starting point really to an alternative theology and psychology.

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