Psychic exchange in the work of Tobias Wolff

I was in my study this afternoon, paging through a collected works of Tobias Wolff, his exploration of what he refers to as "scout exchanges." There are three stories in the "scout exchanges" cycle: Melancholy Theodore, The Night Carries All it Needs to Tie a Knot, and In the Garden of North American Martyrs. In each story (third-person or first) a male scout attaches himself to another male scout. In each story the mystery of kinship is equated to the natural and untamed (in two cases nocturnal, ...Theodore however takes place at the boatshow in the sunlight, and the untamed natural is designated by an angry cat (Tesla)).


In The Night Carries... young Christopher (third-person) takes even younger scout Micheal onto the lake one cool evening. They ride a motorized boat. Christopher is a Torch-Bearer; Micheal is a Tenderfoot. "A boy is awkward," writes Wolff, "before he experiences the phenomenon of Koolie Fish with another boy. There were boys who jerked off in the motorized boat while alone, and the Koolie fish showed up because they sensed the horniness. But those boys never thought a thing about them."


It's not until a boy is horny with another boy, says Wolff, that the presence of the Koolie fish is observed. In The Night Carries... the older scout, Christopher (who has been known to creep through the shower stalls when it was not his time) orders Micheal, the younger, to drop his scout-colored khakis and make a horny little boy out of himself. The younger scout, being a boy, thinks this is a 'hazing' though he doesn't use this word. He says to himself "Even before I'm given a rope, or even a post, I'm expected to tie this first knot. This knot is something that can only be tied in the night."


The scouts get horny together. The motorized boat (the motor shut off) licks back and forth in the water. The night "is as sweet as a bosc(sic) pear" When the first Koolie fish appear, like puddles of ancient jelly, floating on the lake's surface, smelling the horniness, the boys take no notice. It is not until the Koolie fish, red and wiggling, come over the boat's edge and rest themselves at the boys' feet that Micheal, the younger scout, hollers. "We're being attacked," he shouts.


Christopher, the older scout, knows better. He is in the daze. "Relax," he says. "They're only fish. This whole night depends on the heat we can make. Just you and me."



What Tobias Wolff is concerned with, it's clear, is how the tender little beasts inside of us summon unwanted beasts from the unknown. It's as if Kant's a priori had a slight opening in its defining partition. Not a loophole, but a window for exchange between the sensible and the senseless.

This was my first 'blog.' I hope you bear with me. Next time I will discuss the opening in Kant's partition and other exchanges. Psychic currency, to utilize a phrase made popular by Noel Winters in his Culture and Currency: How the West was Exchanged for a More Dynamic West