Nelson Denoon From Norman Rush\'s

¶ … Nelson Denoon from Norman Rush's novel Mating with Lewis Moon from Peter Matthiessen's novel, at Play in the Fields of the Lord

Mating and Matthiessen

Both Norman Rush's novel Mating and Peter Matthiessen's novel, at Play in the Fields of the Lord are set in villages or lands that were colonized by whites, but are now in a state of flux or turmoil. Rush's novel is set just before the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Matthiessen's at Play in the Fields of the Lord takes place in the indigenous areas of South American Peru. Both tales boast white characters in the form of Nelson Denoon and Lewis Moon, who aspire to, respectively, undo or profit from the great crimes perpetuated by white civilization upon the African and Latin American subcontinents. Both pursue their missions with a religious zeal that ultimately seems misplaced, however much one might admire its fervency. Denoon strives to create an ideal matriarchal community. He is an academic who wishes to justify his existence by seeing his ideals realized in the flesh. In contrast, Moon sees himself as a realist and a materialist who attempts to make good upon the suffering his own Native American people have endured by using his past as an excuse to exploit the local Peruvian populace's instability and violence.

Mating is set in the Botswana village of Tsau. There, Nelson Denoon has attempted to create an asexual and utopian society run largely by and for disenfranchised and abused African women, who willingly participate in his society because they believe they have no other likely recourses. Denoon is an American rather than a native African. He comes as an outsider to Africa, and his scrubbed idealism and difficult personal past seems to have produced his enforced chastity as much as the abuse he has witness, although the women have suffered greatly. This suggests that few come to a different land without some personal 'axe' to grind from their respective pasts.

True, when Denoon states most of the women in Tsau are celibate thus so is he, and the narrator approves of this fact, the narrator's unreliability causes the astute reader to suspect the main protagonist's motivations. The narrator's carefully controlled prose and obsession with personal perfection and hygiene cause her to grow enamored of Denoon, for she too is an idealist who rejects the realities of the human character and the material world, that others are inclined to accept.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord deals with the efforts of an equally zealous American missionary family. but, of a different ideological stripe than the leftist intellectuals of Mating, they have come instead to convert the Amazonian Indians of Peru. They soon come into contact with Lewis Moon, a Native American from the United States who has been living with the Niura for some time. Moon is an outsider and stranger from a strange American place who has found a home in a formerly colonized non-white area, like Denoon. The missionary family of the Quarriers and the anonymous narrator of Mating provide, by virtue of their recent entry into such societies, an outsider's view of such insider figures as Denoon and Moon.

In at Play in the Fields of the Lord, evangelical missionaries are attempting to spread their religion to the Indians, much as Denoon wished to spread the gospel of self-empowerment and chastity to the abused women of Tsau. But like Denoon's anthropological community, the missionary work and zeal of the missionaries proves be a mistaken example of artificial cultural tampering, and is destructive to both the missionaries and the Peru Indians' ways of life, just as Denoon's chaste utopia, however attractive to the narrator, is not really workable in reality.

Denoon's tampering is intellectual while the missionaries of Matthiessen's novel are morally rather than cerebrally driven in their quest. But both groups end up in states of despair. Likewise, much like Moon, Denoon leaves his original environment to seek healing for himself in another land, in the hopes that this other land can provide him with sustenance, solace, and comfort that his lacking in his current environment. But this is not the case, for the 'native' people of Peru are anything but perfect -- for example, Moon often takes the Indians to task for their wasteful practices, even though the Indians hardly care about his chastisements.

Also, not all of Denoon's subjects are equally enthusiastic about his gospel of chastity, beneath the surface. "One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see," says the narrator, words that become unwittingly prophetic as she becomes simultaneously enchanted with, and than disenchanted with Denoon, especially after he relationship does become physical. (44)