MYRA
BRECKINRIDGE: Myra Breckinridge is Wyatt Earp in drag, the ultimate put-down and put-on of filicidal humanity. She's a two-breasted, dildo-toting hermaphroditic Amazon whose goal is nothing less than total "power over both sexes and, yes, even over life itself." Her mission as she states it is:
Myra Breckinridge is America and her failure is the failure of this country's naive belief in its ability to control everything benignly and benevolently. She is Yankee ingenuity carried to its extreme, rigorously logical conclusion: if the world is not the way you like it, change it with whatever degree of force is necessary, but do it cleverly and with style. American tyranny at home and American imperialism abroad have succeeded so well because they are the tyranny and imperialism of panache, elan, and chutzpah. The American contribution to that process known as history has consisted of making filicide palatable. What our filicidal gods needed all along, it turns out, was a good public relations man and a well-trained, smooth-talking traveling salesman. Recapturing something of the lost vision of the ancient matriarchy, Gore Vidal at last gives America its savior--a male lesbian transsexual. Myra Breckinridge is a nonalcoholic Willie Loman who knows the value of Dale Carnegie. She is Werner Erhard with a sense of irony. In her willful, stylish attempt to rearrange the sexual priorities of an entire civilization we see reflected in a bizarre and even obscene way the end of American innocence. In God we trusted for over three hundred years, but it turned out to be not a god who had made us in his image but one whom we had made in our own image. In Myra Breckinridge our chicken-hearted, blustering bravado comes home to roost. The novel contains a mythic acting-out of why we were in Vietnam (with harmonics produced and resonances sounded far beyond Mailer's hearing) and why we withdrew from that rape before coming--a mythic acting-out of the nightmare side of the American Dream in its most basic and bloody essentials.
Myra Breckinridge yields up the last insight into the nature of fiIicidaI behavior. She is a one-person nuclear family. In her polymorphous self she embodies and acts out all the roles: mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister. Myron Breckinridge fucks himself. The offspring of that incestuous and bloody union is Myra Breckinridge. Myron is thus Myra's husband and father and brother and son. And Myra is Myron's wife and mother and sister and daughter. Myron/Myra is a Victor Frankenstein who creates the monster directly out of himself. And we see at last that filicide is an on-going, internal process. Whatever agents may be involved in the original incident of filicide, however neatly we may isolate initial filicide in a proto-scene, filicide must finally be seen as an internal event. The force and habit of tradition, along with the supportive filicidal input we get from our families and friends and the society, lend great sustaining impetus to our filicidal behavior. But each individual's continuation in the old ways is--if the concept of adult responsibility mans anything at all--finally a matter of choice. We are all Myron and Myra Breckinridge. Each of us is a walking nuclear family. So thoroughly have we learned the filicidal lessons and imperatives that we have internalized the roles completely. As an adult, I am my father and my mother, my husband and my wife, my son and my daughter, my brother and my sister. Like Myron and Myra Breckinridge, I shift quickly--though not entirely without pain--from role to role in my incessant search for absolute power over both sexes and indeed over life itself. Myron Breckinridge knows and lives the failure of modern masculinity. Then he emasculates himself, has his breasts pumped full of silicone and his veins filled with hormone shots--and lives out the failure of modern femininity. Myra, with an almost mystical vision (her great insight is: "Nothing is what it seems and what nothing seems is false") and with a genuinely mythical fervor, sets out to become Woman Triumphant, the new Magna Mater, Kali incarnate, only to have her best-laid, rationally calculated plans reduce her to a man again--such is her tragedy--who plays out an empty life of mock masculinity in the suburban wasteland of California. Filicide, and with it, history, begins and ends at home. Before George Washington was, Myra Breckinridge is. END
Editor's Note: Taken from Vrana Hempstead's Filicide, which you'll find elsewhere in Magellan's Log. And yes, Myra does have her own website:
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