“Je est un autre”: David Guterson's The Other

David Guterson's novel The Other could well be this generation’s Narcissus and Goldmund, a beautifully written book that feels like a conversation between a man’s ego and his more rigid superego. It’s a conversation that perhaps most of us middle-agers have had, between imagining how things might have been had we followed our youthful ideals to their fulfillment, and reviewing the bargains with life we’ve made. Guterson has cited The Other as his most autobiographical novel, and his two characters do indeed reflect many of the details of his Pacific Northwest upbringing.

The first is John William Barry, a wealthy scion who’s drawn to esoteric philosophy and the natural world. To say that he is principled is to say that the Dalai Lama is a bit of a Buddhist. Fierce, stubborn, and brilliant, he harbors such strong resistance to American society (“hamburger world”) that he can relate to just about no one. Except his friend, Neil Countryman, who, while no ugly American, has opted to lead a more traditional life: wife, 2 kids, teaching job. These two first connect as teens at a track meet, becoming fast friends in their desire to explore the outdoors, play chess, discuss philosophy, and smoke weed. Neil, who comes from a blue-collar, public-school background, is somewhat awed by John William’s wealthy family and golden boy aura, which seems to predestine him for greatness.

But while Neil attends college, John William quickly drops out to hunker down in a remote patch of woods near Olympic National Park. Of traditional education, he remarks, “The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you.” Despite his intellectual prowess, he’s more keen to learn primitive survival skills and to practice his spiritual views. After spending months carving a cave from a large hunk of rock in the woods, he moves in. Neil frequently makes the arduous trip, visiting and providing food and comforts from the outer world.

While Neil often tells us that his life’s course sits more toward center, his superego remains a demanding taskmaster, goading him about the life he could have led in the woods. His deep feelings for his friend are mixed to no small degree with awe and envy. And of course, Into the Wild’s popularity has shown us that there’s something quite compelling about a person who can live out their principles to the nth degree in this culture that so often insists on compromise.

But while John William and Chris McCandless are soul brothers in their resistance of the mainstream, Guterson is clear that his character is not simply a fictionalization of Chris. He notes, “…McCandless is very much in what I would call the mainstream romantic tradition, which includes wanderlust—he wants to move around the world and meet people. [But] John William is a morbid Gnostic. He has no romantic impulse. He’s too much of a dark realist to embrace the world the way that Chris McCandless did.”

It’s striking that the two critics who wagged their fingers at Guterson for copying Chris’ character hailed from NY and LA—where obviously all young men who go live in the woods are alike, so foreign a concept is that to their urban sensibilities. Here in the Pacific Northwest, I encounter dozens of such young men every summer—and while they’re undoubtedly familiar with Krakauer’s book, they’re certainly not all trying to be Chris McCandless.

Guterson begins The Other with a fascinating quote by Rimbaud, “Je est un autre,” which translates as, “I is another.” Expounded on by philosophers including Hegel, Sartre, Lacan and Derrida, this concept posits that the self requires an other to define itself. (This notion will be clear to anyone who has shopped at any New Mexico Walmart, after which a bout of self-delineation spontaneously emerges.)

A writer’s writer, Guterson understands that much of the story is in the details—and the details he chooses to include are pure genius. Of John William, Neil says, “With his head coarsely sheared, his foot-long beard, his buckskin shirt, and his rudimentary moccasins, he was so flagrantly absurd, so filthy, so post-apocalyptic, and at the same time so evocative of the early-nineteenth-century American West as portrayed in a bad museum diorama, that anyone with the poor luck to come across him could not be blamed for assuming he’d gone comically mad, or maybe dangerously mad, or, if seeing him distantly, through trees, say in mist—say while crouching fearfully behind a log—that he had to be a figment or a flashback.”

Anyone who’s had a dream has spent time chasing it to its denouement, wondering what it would turn into if lived purely and without compromise. Guterson offers us one version, though it’s ultimately a pessimistic one. As he aptly suggests, whenever principle becomes overly rigid, we set ourselves up for a fall. He later spends many postgame pages trying to deconstruct from multiple perspectives how Neil's friend became who he was, introducing a spate of developmental psychology and attachment theory in the process. This feels a bit tacked on to me, and the fact that the narrator suddenly becomes a very wealthy man also seems somewhat unnecessary. It’s the kind of detail that makes for compelling jacket copy, but doesn’t seem to really matter within the context of the book.

Guterson interjects a fair bit of Gnostic philosophy into the story of “the Hermit of the Hoh.” But this may be lost on the average reader, and required me to do a little admittedly superficial Internet research. Gnosticism is a path of transcendence through interior means. It encourages nonattachment and nonconformity to the world, a “being in the world, but not of the world.” But it acknowledges that not all humans are ready for Gnosis and liberation. Some are earthbound, materialistic beings (hyletics), who recognize only physical reality. Others, such as Guterson’s hermit, live largely in their psyche (psychics). Interestingly enough, Gnostics believe that the world is flawed because it was created by a flawed creator. This correlates directly with John William’s personal history, growing up with an insane mother, whose deep flaws seriously impact his development.

Whether to live out one's ideals as a hermit or to learn how to compromise in order to live within the world we inhabit is a longstanding debate. In Asian cultures, long periods of hermitry are accepted for those who feel drawn to an introspective path. It’s unfortunate that in American culture following such a path is discouraged in us from an early age, and there is no real mechanism in place to accommodate such a desire, other than completely dropping out. With few available options, we can end up as Neil and John William, at either end of a spectrum that seems to lack a middle ground of integration.