On the Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men and Women

Essays
August 13, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 36 6 min read

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“You should sign up for this,” my sister said, showing me an article about a bookstore that doubles as a matchmaking service. At the Brooklyn indie, lovelorn bookworms choose their prospective romantic interests based on their list of favorite authors pinned to a cork board. The article went on to point out that women never wrote down Jack Kerouac as one of their coveted authors.

My decade-long enamor with the poets and writers of the Beat Generation was about to pay off. As the only woman who adored Kerouac, I would be the vixen of the literary matchmaking board.

covercoverNow, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a girly girl. My regular weekend activity includes clothes shopping, I feel naked without nail polish on, and my favorite color is pink. In fact, it was while reading the fashion magazine Seventeen my senior year of high school that I stumbled upon a mention of Ann Charters’s The Portable Beat Reader and quickly became obsessed with all things Beat related. After reading Jack Kerouac’s road-trip novel On the Road, it only seemed natural to pack my bags and move across the country for college. As Kerouac wrote, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

coverWhile attending Scripps, a women’s college in Southern California, my interest in Beat literature grew as I went on a San Francisco pilgrimage to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, infamous for its involvement in the obscenity trial over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. When I returned, diploma in hand, to the East Coast, I attended talks by Beat writers at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. I tucked Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage,” in which he asks “Should I get married? Should I be good?” into my heart. That would be the poem I want read at my wedding, I thought. When I read On the Road, I connected to Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, shambling after friends, being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening, seeing beauty in the mundane, and hitting the road in his eternal quest for meaning — topics I thought both men and women could relate to.

Until my sister showed me the matchmaking article, it had never occurred to me that the author of On the Road could be a cement divider on Lover’s Lane. I had met guys who’d been inspired by Kerouac. They thrilled at the freedom of stuffing beef jerky in a backpack, wearing the same band t-shirt for days, and hitting the road with no plan but more life experience. It’s true I didn’t personally know any women who admired Kerouac, but I figured he just wasn’t on their radar since fifty years had passed since On the Road was published. There were plenty of women I knew through books who had loved Kerouac — women like Edie Parker-Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, and Helen Weaver, who wrote memoirs about their romances with Kerouac. Overcome with his prose prowess as I was, it was easy to overlook the parts that weren’t exactly rom-com material — the failed marriages, the refusal to acknowledge his own daughter, the fact that he lived with his mother until the day he died — particularly since I didn’t read his novels as love stories but as poetic travelogues.

Then I encountered a woman who openly disdained Kerouac — and all that he seemed to represent. It occurred to me that women saw him as a misogynist vagabond, the bad boy who had left their broken hearts in a trail of exhaust fumes. He didn’t like being tied down by responsibilities, or women. Perhaps those female readers who actually did like his writing feared adding Kerouac to their list of favorite authors for a literary matchmaking board because they didn’t want to end up with someone like him: a penniless drifter, a dreamer, an alcoholic.

coverIf I am to be terribly stereotypical, I’d say the literary crush I hear most women talk about is Mr. Darcy, the cute fixer-upper worth the effort because of his money and social standing. Sure, maybe he’s a bit aloof at first, but in the end Mr. Darcy’ll put a ring on it. Of course, dating-savvy women wouldn’t necessarily include Jane Austen as their favorite author for the literary matchmaking board: they’re smart enough to know they might scare off potential male suitors if they implied they enjoy staying in on a Friday night to watch BBC films on television, possibly having to get out the smelling salts during the “pond scene” in Pride and Prejudice.

Instead, women might disclose preferences for less polarizing authors. Female authors would be perfectly acceptable to list, so long as they’re “serious” or witty authors like Toni Morrison, Tina Fey, and Jennifer Egan — and not authors whose books feature shopping bags, pearl necklaces, or candy hearts on the covers. Words like “wedding” and “feminist” probably shouldn’t be anywhere in the title either. There’s nothing wrong with reading these books — in fact, wanting to get married and being treated as equal are both positive desires — it’s just that, well, if on your first date you wouldn’t bring up the number of kids you want to have (unless, of course, you’re on The Bachelorette), then you also would probably subtly edit your reading tastes when you know you’re being judged by them. Like with clothing, it’s best to leave a little mystery.

Men’s disinterest in Austen and other female authors has, of course, been its own cause for consideration. Last year, in an article entitled “Men Need Only Read Books by Other Men, Esquire Post Suggests,” The Atlantic Wire rightly took issue with the fact that only one female author was listed in Esquire’s “75 Books Men Should Read.” However, guess which male author The Atlantic Wire specifically mentions, as if he is the driving force behind men’s exclusion of female writers: “hard-living, macho writers like…Jack Kerouac.” Interesting. I would have called him a life-affirming, sensitive author. It was Kerouac, after all, who wrote, “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

In the past few years, culture critics have speculated that in general men read less than women and that specifically they don’t read much fiction — Kerouac presumably excluded. It appears, then, that men and women read quite differently. If men are more likely to read nonfiction, it seems likely that men are reading to obtain information. In contrast, women maybe read fiction for the entertainment of a character-driven story. And this is where it gets interesting. Every so often, social debates arise whether women are more “sympathetic” than men, “sympathetic” being defined by dictionary.com as “acting or affected by, of the nature of, or pertaining to a special affinity or mutual relationship.” If it is true that women are more sympathetic, either because of their genetic makeup or because they have been conditioned to be so, then perhaps women read relationally, placing themselves within the story. It would be natural then for female readers to cast themselves as the female characters instead of the male characters. In a work written by a man, the female character is usually going to be the subject of the male gaze. If that work happens to be On the Road, you’re going to end up with women like Marylou and Camille, flat characters being two-timed by hyperactive car-thief Dean Moriarty. It’s no wonder then that many women, even when they put his personal lives aside, don’t relate to Kerouac’s writing.

I don’t believe all women — or all men — think and act and read the same way, though. I never automatically put myself in the stilettos of the female character in a book. I read On the Road through the eyes of the eager narrator, Sal Paradise. Even if I didn’t agree with his every action, I desired Kerouac’s joie de vivre.

More than that, I was also the narrator of my own story, my own life. After reading Kerouac, I became the one dashing out the door for my next adventure. If I had a week off of work and wanted to take a vacation, I packed my bags and hopped on a bus or a plane. I took a Greyhound across the United States. I saw Stonehenge. I visited shrines in Kyoto. And I did it by myself, sometimes couch-surfing with friends who lived near my chosen destination before venturing off on my own to a hostel.

I was never looking for someone to jumpstart my story, to open the car door for me, to give me permission to do something. It didn’t occur to me that I needed a boyfriend or even a friend to accompany me to art galleries or readings or to make my life full. I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac. And so I never signed up for the matchmaking board. I didn’t believe in lonely nights. I was a reader. If I wanted company, all I had to do was pick up a book — or my car keys.

Image via [email protected]/Flickr

(www.stephanienikolopoulos.com) is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Essays

Composition Lessons: Learning About Your Own Book From Other People’s Paintings

Essays
April 22, 2013 | 4 books mentioned 5 10 min read
The moment when I can work no more, when the novel or collection of short stories or book-length essay is as done as it’ll ever be, I go looking for works of art that match it tonally. I listen to music with an acquisitive ear. I watch pieces of movies whose titles intrigue me. Most of all, I scan through dozens of websites that collect images by contemporary artists. And then I try to solidify the relationship by using those works as my cover art.
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 5 10 min read
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The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic Video Games

Essays Notable Articles
February 16, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 80 8 min read

The British journalist Sam Leith recently opened a review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: The Biography with the following question: “Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders? That’s what I want to know.” The 418-page biography, which has been undergoing a sustained critical beatdown since its publication last year, contains no mention of a book Amis published in 1982, and which he has been avoiding talking about ever since. “Anything a writer disowns is of interest,” wrote Leith, “particularly if it’s a frivolous thing and particularly if, like Amis, you take seriousness seriously.” He’s got a point; any book so callously orphaned by its own creator has to be worth looking into. This is especially true if the book in question happens to be a guide to early 1980s arcade games.

Like most Amis fanciers, I had heard of the existence of this video game book –- the full title of which is Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines –- but knew very little about it. What I did know was that he dashed it off at some point during the time he was writing Money, one of the great British novels of the 1980s, and that it has long been out of print (a copy in good nick will cost you about $150 from Amazon). And I knew, most of all, that Amis was reluctant to talk about it or even acknowledge it. Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian once suggested to him (facetiously, surely) that it was among the best things he’d ever written, and that it was a mistake to have allowed it to go out of print. “The expression on his face,” wrote Lezard, “with perhaps more pity in it than contempt, remains with me uncomfortably.”

Invasion of the Space Invaders, then, is the madwoman in the attic of Amis’ house of nonfiction; many have heard rumors of its shameful presence, but few have seen it with their own eyes. I recently discovered a copy in the library of the university where I work, and I don’t think the librarian knew quite what to make of my obvious excitement at this coup. (“Wow,” I said, giving a low, respectful whistle as she handed it across the counter. “Would you look at that?”) It’s a deeply strange artifact: an A4-sized, full color glossy affair, abundantly illustrated with captioned photographs, screen shots, and lavish illustrations of exploding space ships and lunar landscapes. It boasts a perfunctory introduction by Steven Spielberg (“read this book and learn from young Martin’s horrific odyssey round the world’s arcades before you too become a video-junkie”), complete with full-page portrait of the Hollywood Boy Wonder leaning awkwardly against an arcade machine like some sort of geeky, high-waisted Fonz. We’re not even into the text proper, and already its cup runneth over with 100-proof WTF.

One of the most frequently remarked-upon aspects of Amis’ writing is that it’s nearly always possible to tell, within a sentence or two, when you’re reading him. (You know it when you see it, with its gimmicks, its lists, its italicized stresses. You know it when you see it, Amis’s style, with its grandstanding repetitions.) And there’s a strange cognitive dissonance that arises from seeing that style applied to what is essentially — or at any rate quickly devolves into — a player’s guide to a range of early arcade games. He starts off with a cluster of short essayistic efforts about game addiction. A few sentences in, and we’re already deep in the familiar, hyper-stylized terrain of Amis country: “What we are dealing with is a global addiction. I mean, this might all turn out to be a bit of a problem. Let me adduce my own symptoms, withdrawals, dryouts, crack-ups, benders…” It’s hard to say who his intended reader might be here. You’d imagine kids would be an obvious demographic target, but that seems unlikely given that Amis gratuitously and jarringly raises the issue of child prostitution on the very first page. (The child sex industry has apparently been given a “fillip” by arcade machine addiction. “Kids,” he assures us, “are coming across for a couple of games of Astro Panic, or whatever. More about this later.”) This slumming fascination with seediness, characteristic of much of Amis’s early and mid-period work, is evident throughout. At one point, we are treated to a series of Hogarthian prose sketches of the grotesques the author sees all around him in these arcades: “Zonked glueys, swearing skinheads with childish faces full of ageless evil, mohican punks sporting scalplocks in violet verticals and a nappy-pin through the nose […] Queasy spivs, living out a teen-dream movie with faggot overtones.” (There’s a glossary at the back that helpfully provides the following clarification: “Faggot: gay.” The word’s use in the original context makes the contemporary reader flinch, but the ugliness of the matter-of-fact definition is downright unforgivable. This is one of several potential reasons why Amis is uncomfortable enough about Invasion to want to keep it out of print.)

The medial bulk of the book is accounted for by the actual “addict’s guide to battle tactics” promised by its ungainly subtitle, and this is where it really flourishes as a bizarro-world extracanonical oddity. It’s as though Kingsley Amis’ youngest son had shied away from the family business and wound up making a living as a games reviewer with a weakness for the high literary style. Here is one of the great aesthetes of the sentence offering tips on dealing with Space Invaders’ descending alien infantry:
The phalanx of enemy invaders moves laterally across a grid not much wider than itself. When it reaches the edge of the grid, the whole army lowers a notch. Rule one: narrow that phalanx. Before you do anything else, take out at least three enemy columns either on the left-hand side or the right (for Waves 1 and 2, the left is recommended). Thereafter the aliens will take much longer to cross their grid and slip down another rung. Keep on working from the sides: you’ll find that the invaders take forever to trudge and shuffle back and forth, and you can pick them off in your own sweet time.
For what it’s worth, this is actually very solid gaming advice. I tested it out on one of those classic arcade websites, and the man knows what he’s talking about — it is all about phalanx-narrowing. (If I ever happen to pass Amis on the opposite side of the street, I’m not sure I’ll be able to prevent myself from shouting across at him like one of the garrulous yobs who populate his novels, “Oi, Mart! Narrow that phalanx!”) He’s technically correct, too, about the fact that, when the aliens descend to the very lowest rung, “you can slide around underneath them, touching them with your nozzle, and survive!” — but I’m not sure he’ll be wanting that sentence to show up in The Quotable Amis, should such a volume ever appear.

He is almost as enthusiastic about PacMan, although you get the sense that he sees it (in contrast to Space Invaders) as a fundamentally unserious endeavor. “Those cute little PacMen with their special nicknames, that dinky signature tune, the dot-munching Lemon that goes whackawhackawhackawhacka: the machine has an air of childish whimsicality.” His advice is to concentrate stolidly on the central business of dot-munching, and not to get distracted by the shallow glamor of the fruits: “Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.” Curiously, for a writer so deeply preoccupied with stylistic refinement and playful innovation — who elevates the pleasure principle to a sort of aesthetic moral law — Amis favors a no-frills approach to gaming. The following piece of Polonian advice pretty much encapsulates his whole arcade ethos: “PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.” I’m no expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a critical limb here and suggest that this might be the sole instance of the use of the mock-heroic tone in a video game player’s guide.

Aside from the off-the-charts weirdness of its very existence, the book offers a number of peripheral pleasures. For one thing, there’s a half-expected (but still surprising) guest appearance from what I would be willing to bet is a young Christopher Hitchens. In a diverting rant about the increasing presence of voice effects in games, Amis recalls his first exposure to such gimmickry at a bar in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1980:
I was with a friend, a hard-drinking journalist, who had drunk roughly three times as much Calvados as I had drunk the night before. And I had drunk a lot of Calvados the night before. I called for coffee, croissants, juice; with a frown the barman also obeyed my friend’s croaked request for a glass of Calvados.

Then we heard, from nowhere, a deep, guttural, Dalek-like voice which seemed to say: “Heed! Gorgar! Heed! Gorgar … speaks!

“… Now what the hell was that?” asked my friend.

“I think it was one of the machines,” I said, rising in wonder.

“I’ve had it,” said my friend with finality. “I can’t cope with this,” he explained as he stumbled from the bar.
Elsewhere in the book, he considers the possibility, raised by Paul Trachtman in the Smithsonian, of a future evolutionary strand of video games in which “You have a ten-year reign as a king and you have so much grain, so many people and so much land,” and in which “if you don’t feed your people enough, they start to die.” Trachtman is essentially prophesying the advent of hugely successful games like Civilization and Sim City here, but Amis summarily rejects the idea. “The predictions of the video eggheads are grand and stirring; at the time of writing, though, all the trends in the industry stubbornly point the other way.” Elsewhere, he rubbishes the now-iconic Donkey Kong, the first major success of Shigero Miyamoto, who went on to create Mario and Zelda. “Donkey,” he quips, “your days are numbered. The knackers’ yard awaits you.”

It’s just about possible, if you squint hard enough, to see Invasion of the Space Invaders as Money’s sickly non-fiction twin. Amis occasionally alludes to the fact that all this arcade-lurking and button-bashing is being done both as research for, and at the expense of, a novel he is supposed to be writing. And there are certain advance rumblings here of the comic juggernaut which was to arrive two years later. John Self, for instance — Money’s boorish and omnivoracious narrator — has a particular weakness for a brand of microwaved hotdogs named Blastfurters. In a desultory entry on the game Cosmic Alien, Amis mentions that he first came across it in a “kwik-food beanery on Third Avenue,” where it “looked perfectly at home among the up-ended cartons and the half-eaten blastfurters.” The novel itself features a small but crucial role for its author, whom Self first mentions as follows: “Oh yeah, and a writer lives round my way too. A guy in a pub pointed him out to me, and I’ve seen him hanging out in Family Fun, the space-game parlor, and toting his blue laundry bag to the Whirlomat. I don’t think they can pay writers that much, do you?”

Well, that would certainly be one explanation for this book’s existence; he may have been short of cash at this point, and a brief diversion into video game writing may have been an easy way to turn his coin-devouring addiction to the space-game parlor into a few quid. But there’s an argument to be made that Invasion, as powerfully strange as it looks against the setting of the author’s oeuvre, is in keeping with his perennial preoccupations. Games and game-playing are, after all, both a presiding motif in Amis’s novels and a fundamental principle of their construction. His most successful fictions are arranged around antagonisms, rivalries, and hidden maneuvers. London Fields is an elaborate trap-like construction in which three male characters (including a blocked novelist) are manipulated by a female mastermind into bringing about her own murder. The Information is about a failed writer’s increasingly malicious attempts to destroy the career of his more successful friend. The plot of Money is a Nabokovian conceit in which Self winds up the loser through failing to recognize the game. In that novel’s most bluntly metafictional moment, the character called Martin Amis lets Self in on some of the secrets of his trade: “The further down the scale [a character] is, the more liberties you can take with him. You can do what the hell you like to him, really. This creates an appetite for punishment. The author is not free of sadistic impulses.”

Amis’s characters are always playing and getting played; his books are filled with humiliating drubbings and pyrrhic victories on the tennis court, the pool table, the darts oche. Even that business about which he is most serious — the scrupulous, almost paranoiac abstention from banality at the level of the sentence — is a form of play. The title of his criticism collection, The War Against Cliché, indicates the height of the stakes, but belies the fact that it is ultimately still a game, just one that Amis is very serious about. As a reviewer, he takes a grim satisfaction in catching out his opponents in solecisms, platitudes, and pratfalls (Raymond Chandler’s celebrated hardboiled prose is actually, we are told, “full of stubbed toes and barked shins”). As a novelist, his ludic delight in finding new ways of playing with language — new ways of narrowing the ever-descending phalanx of cliché — is palpable in every sentence. So for all its contextual aberrance, this strange and disreputable book actually makes a certain kind of warped sense. And if for some reason you happen to be looking for a guide to arcade games of the early 1980s, you could probably do a lot worse.

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36 comments:

  1. Great essay.

    One thing that always seemed strange to me were the staunch defenders of Kerouac often refusing to accept his biseual relationships, and, indeed, dismissing them in order to revel in Kerouac’s (and Sal’s) multiple heterosexual affairs.

  3. I’m kind of shocked to read this, as I think every Kerouac fan I’ve ever known was female. The author might be interested in a novel released this year, “Kiss the Morning Star” by Elissa Hoole, about two teenage girls who are inspired by Kerouac to do a road trip of their own.

  4. I was shocked too when I read that article about the literary matchmaking bookstore that said women don’t like Kerouac, since I am a woman and love his writing. It’s been fascinating to discover how polarizing Kerouac can be.

    Thanks for the book recommendation, Amy. I’ll definitely check it out!

  5. Good for you, loved your independent spirit. I tried to emulate my mentor Doris Lessing, still caught up in the relationships sagas, but struggling with it, seeking and finding her independence form having to seek a match later in life.
    Johanna van Zanten

  6. I think… yes, first: all men are the same in the same way that all women are the same (or did I get that backwards?)…

    And, for what it’s worth, personally, I have read thousands of works of fiction (literally — when I was in highschool I averaged 3 books a day, for several years). And, of course, this included reading numerous books authored by women (Pat Cadigan, Ursla K Le Guin, … and many dozens of others, but you get the idea…). But I have read none of the authors you list here.

    There’s a lot of books out there.

  7. (and I forgot to announce my gender, here, but you can probably figure that out from my thinking that female authors i read were relevant but that male authors I read were not…)

  8. I suppose if you read literature in order to find people you’ll be attracted to, these issues might be interesting. But we now have Craigs List for that. What makes me respond to On The Road isn’t my opinion on whether Kerouac would be a good boy friend for me, but whether the work as a whole is of aesthetic value.

    But I guess I’m old fashioned.

    Carry on.

  9. On the Road inspired me, a woman (egads!), to embark upon a six-month “kerouaking” journey across country in an 1981 Dodge transvan. Why would any reader, man or woman, care about Kerouac’s husbanding potential? I certainly don’t base my favorite authors or fictional characters on their likelihood to “put a ring on it”. An author’s love life is just about as important as his hygiene. Wallow in your filth so long as you continue to write good books. If I made it my business to rate an author on his treatment or judgement of women, A Farewell to Arms and In Cold Blood tragically wouldn’t be on my favorite books list.

    PS – Edit your reading tastes for no one.

  10. I outgrew my Kerouac obsession a few years ago, but I’m not sure when and how… I’m still waiting to outgrow my Bukowski one (as are most of my friends who are probably tired of hearing about him by now).

    I will say that I know an equal number of men and women who are enamored with Kerouac. I always respected his prose in his early novels, even if I felt I had to ignore the fact that he was a real bastard to do it.

    On The Road also has the most musicality and moments of pure prose brilliance… probably because it was the novel he worked hardest and longest on editing. The seven years of hard work he put into it really show…

    I’m a man who reads a LOT of fiction. Comics, graphic novels, and straight literary fiction… with an occasional aside into a modern and\or urban fantasy (a la Neil Gaiman). I sometimes sigh when I look at my bookshelves and realize how masculine they are… some day I’ll even that out.

  11. I am a Kerouac enthusiast in Calcutta, India. Reading Kerouac’s books and reflecting on the large number of broken marriages, I have often wondered: Is that a critique of the American dream set in 1950s suburbia?

  12. This was so much fun to read! As a man who used to consult On the Road like a Bible every night before bed, I really appreciated your take on Jack Kerouac and his split audience. You reminded me of what may be the inverse of your own experience, in that personally I harbored a years-long crush on Maxine Hong Kingston, though I never knew another man who really liked reading her. Naturally, the book that won me over was her Tripmaster Monkey (her take on the Beats), but I felt a little changed by her writing and wished I could meet her. Thanks for the essay!

  13. To me “being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening” is exactly why I stopped reading the Beats at 22. I hated that feeling of mythologizing every moment as it is happening, though it seems in line today’s Twitter/Facebook culture of constant documentation.

  14. @Uttaran Das Gupta:

    No, not really. On the Road is really more a book of the ’40s than the ’50s. It takes place from 1947 to 1950 during the Truman Administration, when a lot of new postwar housing tracts were just being built and before the concept of ’50s suburbia and the “American dream” business had really made its mark on the national psyche. (Kerouac wrote the first draft in 1951, though it took several years and a lot of revision before he could get it published.) And the Beat writers were really all urbanites, anyway — the America of On the Road (at least as I remember it) consists solely of cities and the vast, empty countryside between them.

    On the other hand, it’s fair to say the book did have that impact on many suburban kids of the late ’50s and ’60s who read the book.

  15. I am a woman with no desire to ever be married or have children, yet I love Jane Austen. Loving P& P has no basis in one’s desire for marriage. I just love Austen, and her usually well written female characters.

    I am also a woman who loves to read history books, yet I always hear about how it’s the menfolk who enjoy these. Whenever I used to get emails from Borders for Mothers Day, Borders recommended embroidery books for Mom. The following month, Borders recommended history books for Dad. I (and my female friends) love history!

    Now to Kerouac: I hate his books so damn much! So, in that respect, I do fall in with most girls, but it’s not, as you say, out of a desire to “catch” Kerouac in a relationship, nor a resentment b/c Kerouac represents all the boys who don’t want to be tied down. As I said, I don’t want to be married myself, so I should totally be on board with Kerouac, but I just can’t stand him.

  16. Pingback: Kerouac Divides Men and Women « The Floating Library

  17. On the Road is one of my favorite books of all time too (as a woman)! It was just blowing my mind away the whole time I was reading it.

  19. Stephanie, you have captured my feelings about Kerouac (an author I love) and his writing perfectly. “I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac.” Exactly right!!!! Thanks for a great read.

  20. I wonder if the author or other females have read _Visions of Cody_ and if so, how did they respond to that book? It seems to have the most misogynistic leanings of his oeuvre (which is unfortunate because so much of the writing and the experimental form is exquisite).

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  22. Hmmm. Well, On The Road is one of those books that delivers different messages depending on the age at which the reader reads it. I first read it when I was 16 or so, in England … and it was powerful enough that, at the first opportunity, I moved to America. And I’m still here at 38. I’m now officially an American citizen. I read it again in my twenties and appreciated the musicality of his irrepressible be-bop, jazz-infused, rule-breaking spontaneous prose much more. And then I just read On The Road again last year after buying the original scroll edition published for the 50th anniversary. Now that I have kids I realize that it’s Kerouac’s willingness and ability to absent himself from responsibility that is the great pounding heart of the book. At least that’s what attracts men to it because, at various times, it’s what we all want to do. But we don’t have a monopoly on that either. It just seems to be a more masculine trait.

  23. I am a graduate of UConn, where Ann Charter’s taught. I took a class called “the Beats” with her, and the composition was easily 75% female. The one person that didn’t like Kerouac? Me. Good typist, horrible author.
    Ann Charters was not upset my dislike of Kerouac, she even read bits of my essay on why I didn’t like him aloud.
    I still prefer Ginsberg anyway. I’ll still probably see the movie, too.

  24. Pingback: Clip: On the Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men and Women « Stephanie Nikolopoulos

  25. Firstly … go Nikki. A girl after my own heart. I did the same thing across Australia in a 1976 Bedford.
    I’ve always loved the hedonism of On the Road. I never bothered trying to identify with the women because Sal felt like my own alter ego. I’ve behaved in the same way on various road trips.
    BUT … you know the story, the legendary circumstances in which he wrote the book, a ream of paper fed in one of the typewriter and a novel coming out the other end three weeks later. It has always bugged me that he had a woman to feed him, look after his kids and wipe his arse during the writing of the novel and that he never properly acknowledged that.
    Can’t help it. As a woman writer with kids, it just bugs the hell outa me.

  26. I read On The Road over 30 years ago and have always felt inspired by Kerouac”s free-wheeling musical prose. The story of his (search for the) freedom of being On The Road is reflected perfectly in the poetic and, yes, crazy phrasing. When I get constricted by rules and structure in my writing I read Kerouac…and Brautigan…It always sets me free again.

    Thanks for the splendid article. Bookshop match-making is a hilarious concept!

  27. This is a brilliant essay. I’ve long been attracted to Kerouac for the musicality of his prose, never better displayed than in the story Visions of Neal and the Three Stooges from his recording Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. It inspired me to write a radio play, Neal Amid, about the last minutes of Neal’s life and how he and Jack had altered the English language, as Jackie Robinson had altered the tempo of baseball.There is much curiosity and gentleness to be read in the Beats that is far more relevant today.

  28. Kerouac’s work is not about characters, it’s about stream of consciousness where ALL fare as they should, incidental and inclusive. That is the non-linear storyline, that’s the kick.

  29. Very nice essay. Here’s what I know, though I’m not sure what it means, and I’m just going to leave it here without judgement: I am a man. My favorite contemporary prose writers tend to be men–Sherman Alexie and Tim O’Brien come to mind here. My favorite contemporary poets tend to be women–Louise Gluck and Anne Carson pop into my head. My bookshelves show the same gender bias. Am I alone? Am I wrong to believe, even if mostly subconsciously, women generally write better poems and men generally write better prose?

    As for Kerouac? I’m pretty sure he mostly just made me want to be Gary Snyder for a chunk of my twenties. At the time, it seemed to me that Jack might have wanted to be Gary, too. Anyway, you got me thinking. I’m interested in learning of other experiences that may or may not sound familiar. Thanks!

  30. However polarizing, here we are some 55 years later still talking about On the Road. So, obviously Jack did something right.

  31. I don’t know, I always thought Kerouac’s ballyhooed joi de vivre felt phony, from his novels I get the sense he (and for the most part his whole circle of friends, the “Beats”) weren’t so much overcome with lust for life as they were obsessed with trying to find it, and until then pretending they had found so as not to draw attention to their failure to do so. Kerouac’s stories are preoccupied with actual or alleged sex lives of everyone else, and he talks at much greater length about the affairs of other people as he does about his own. One book (The Subterraneans?) was about precisely that, telling the history of a doomed romance, but belaboring the circumstances that ultimately drove her to cheat rather than the acts of intimacy he shared with her in the first place – and had he been less obsessed with other people’s sexual interests and proclivities, the relationship might not have crashed so quickly.

    The reason why Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) was such a hero to everyone is that even as a kid, he was able to live out the kind of lifestyle they all tried to emulate. But even Neal, the object of the little hero-cult, was an alcoholic (ok: they were all alcoholics but that proves my point, really, doesn’t it?) and prone to impulsive and self-destructive behavior.

    All this is a long way of saying that I think people don’t dislike Kerouac’s books because he was a romantic and a womanizer and untamable, but rather that they see through the act and what’s actually there isn’t very appealing.

  32. Jack Kerouac was a real person. D’arcy is an invented character. Obviously we know more about Kerouac because he exists outside a book.

  33. Stephanie … YES !! … Think NOT of Kerouac as “male” or “female” but simply as a Compassionate Creature of the Cosmos reporting back to us all on what is being seen / heard / felt / thought … He was a master movie-camera! … A movie-camera with a non-stop commentary on the images in the lens / brain / mind. … Jack could write like only he could write – because only he could think of the things he thought of when inspired by what he experienced. He was empiracle to the max – and damn good at it. He captured the beauty in everything, and he instinctively knew to the core of his being that: “ALL IS ONE.” … Read THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY !! … THis was a GREAT article on Jack Kerouac. Truly great! … Come to Lowell and talk with Uncle Billy !! – George Koumantzelis / The Aeolian Kid

  34. I always enjoyed Ti Jean, as a youth growing up in Providence RI I could relate to his descriptions of the local area, of the sorrowful working class men walking slouched hands deep in pockets. Dr Sax & Visions of Gerard being my favs. As a girl friend at the time (who introduced me to the Beats) said On The Road is a book better to have read than to read.

    Yes he was a jerk as a person, even more so as the alcohol slowly killed him, But I see him not as a jerk, but as another lost soul shattered and splintered by a brutal system of wealth and things.

    War is Over

  35. Kerouac (the man and his works) misogynistic/sexist – how? Can anyone reference me some passages in his books which show him to be thus? I maintain it’s a total myth dreamed up by Kerouac haters. I don’t like the writing of Ernest Hemingway but I’ve never bothered to go on a Hemingway site and say as much. Yet Kerouac haters pour onto onto any web article about Jack proud to proclaim that they don’t like/read his works and go on to attack his character. Strange. I suspect a conspiracy, and who by? probably a far right religious group, or people in that way minded. I repeat give me a reference where Jack is being misogynistic in a book?

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Essays

Bookjacked: Why We Can’t Have Arabic Books in America

Essays
March 14, 2016 | 4 books mentioned 11 6 min read

1.
Saudi writer Abdo Khal’s novel, Tarmi Bi-sharrar (Throwing Sparks), is about the torture and depravity underlying one man’s attempt to create a literal Paradise on earth. It won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010 — called “the Arabic Booker” — and was subsequently translated into English. Around December 25, 2015, I decided to give a surprise gift of the Arabic version of the novel (not the translation) to a writer friend in New York.

This is the story of the impossible journey I have been on since then, one that hasn’t just ruined the surprise, but also tells us something about the nature of distribution of literature in the world, where Western literature can easily traverse East, but the reverse seems impossible.

2.
The idea for the gift came to me last fall when my writer friend was trying to improve her Arabic by reading Arabic novels and asking people how she might get a hold of Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabic novels in Manhattan. I thought that giving her a surprise copy of Abdo Khal’s book would be a great gift idea and set myself to the task of procuring a copy.

The first thing I did was to check out online bookstores carrying Arabic books. Long story short, most online stores that carry Arabic books really only carry The Quran and Hadith and assorted theological stuff. There is very little there in terms of anything else. When I typed “Abdo Khal” in the search bar of one of the stores marketing itself as a major source of Arabic books, the search gave me the names of Ibn Khaldun (a 14th-century dude), of Khalil Gibran (mid-20th-century dude), and Amr Khaled, lots and lots of Amr Khaled (a major televangelist dude in the Middle East).

I immediately lost all faith in these online bookstores and decided to go straight to Abdo Khal’s publisher, a reputable press called al-Jamal Publications, Beirut/Baghdad. When I searched for the press, however, I couldn’t seem to find a web presence, ending up instead with al-Jamal sanitary ware; al-Jamal jewelry; also a guy named Khalil al-Jamal.

This dead end wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Because of the spelling of al-Jamal, I discovered a promising online bookstore with a similar name, which is described in the press as “Arab Amazon Built on Cash-on-Delivery.” In fact, the website is a plucky little start-up founded by a determined under-30 entrepreneur who has been featured in Forbes for creating a library of 10 million books and his willingness to ship censored books all over the world. “We keep facing trouble because of what we do,” he told Forbes. “But I feel happy when I get people to read or get books.”

“This is who I want to give my money to,” I thought, and quickly found the Arabic version of Abdo Khal’s novel on the Arab Amazon. Not only that, but I bookmarked the website to come back for future book purchases. I considered my future patronage similar to when we decide to buy from independent bookstores. It made me feel good. On the side of the little guy and all that.

Except the Arab Amazon couldn’t process my order. My order kept getting stuck on the payment page due to some kind of postal code error.

I describe the problem below via my Facebook conversation with the website. The ordering problem strikes me as precisely the sort of problem confronted by start-ups, especially start-ups that are trying to process monies from across the world. It is the kind of problem that makes me feel bad for the sheer magnitude of the minutiae that the website’s founder is trying to overcome.
December 25, 2015, 4:18pm — Ali Eteraz:

Hi, I am trying to order Abdo Khal’s book from the United States. Every time I get to checkout it says, “PayPal gateway has rejected request. A match of the Shipping Address City, State, and Postal Code failed (#10736: Shipping Address Invalid City State Postal Code).” I am not sure what that means since the checkout page does not have a place to enter the US Postal Code (Zip Code). Please help.

December 26, 2015 5:05am — Customer Service:

Hello Mr. Ali, We apologize for this inconvenience, we will check the issue with the meant department and will contact you back so please stay tuned. Thank You For Contacting Us.

December 27, 2015 2:33pm — Ali Eteraz:

Thank you. Let me know when I can order.

January 2, 2016, 3:23pm — Ali Eteraz:

I still cannot order. I keep getting the following error. “PayPal gateway has rejected request. A match of the Shipping Address City, State, and Postal Code failed (#10736: Shipping Address Invalid City State Postal Code).” This is strange as there is no place to actually enter the Postal Code. I need to order the Arabic version of Tarmi Bi Sharrar by Abdo Khal. This is urgent. Please assist.

January 2, 2016 3:33pm — Ali Eteraz:

PLEASE IGNORE THE ABOVE. I FOUND THE BOOK ON AMAZON.
That’s right. Because I could not get a simple order processed, I abandoned the Arab Amazon and went to the original Amazon. For a brief moment I even thanked the stars for Amazon’s hegemony (I promise it is the only time I have thanked a hegemon).

Although Amazon proper didn’t have the Arabic novel in its reserves, it could identify that the book was available through its “alternative buying options” route. Excited by the prospect of my journey coming to an end, I went and paid whatever I was charged, including an exorbitantly high shipping rate. Money is no consequence when you are trying to surprise someone, right?

Little did I realize that I had just been “bookjacked.” What is bookjacking? From what I have been able to understand, there are some “sellers” on Amazon and other online portals that don’t own their own stock; rather they simply take legitimate listings from other booksellers from other websites and then sell those books with inflated prices to people like me. I am not sure if Amazon knows about this problem or turns a blind eye.

Regardless — at the time I made my order via Amazon, I knew nothing about bookjacking. In fact, because of my willingness to pay anything, I was a willing mark.

My order got processed on January 2, 2016, and the expected arrival date for the book was set between January 11 and January 29. I waited for the book to get delivered, and for my friend to send me confirmation of its arrival. Because my surprise doubled as a thank you for something she had done for me last year, I kind of avoided talking to her until the book reached her.

January passed: I didn’t hear from her. February passed: I didn’t hear from her. I started to grow concerned. I tracked the book online, but it said that it was still in-transit. By the beginning of March, I couldn’t believe a book could be in transit that long, because I’ve seen full-length novels get edited faster. I assumed that what happened was that the book got delivered but my friend just didn’t see it.

By this point I was very embarrassed because the only way I could find out if the book had been delivered was to ask my friend. In other words, to figure out the mystery of the missing book, I had to ruin the surprise I had set up.

It took me a few days to muster the courage to ask my friend if she had gotten something from me. She immediately became ashamed because she thought she must have missed something and went rummaging through months of her own mail. In fact, her exact words were, “I will be very embarrassed if I got it and did not realize it was from you.” That’s how we are, us book lovers, we always believe we are responsible for the crimes of others.

As my friend searched her archives, I decided to send an email to the bookjacker. Below is my question and their response. Short version: they lost the order and did not bother telling me.
March 4, 2016 — Ali Eteraz:

Can you confirm if this package [from January 2] was delivered? It still says “shipped” in the dashboard.

March 5, 2016 — Bookjacker:

We are sincerely sorry that you haven’t received your package. It seems to have been lost in transit. As the item is currently unavailable in stock, your order will be now fully refunded. Please allow 2–3 business days for processing. If the package eventually arrives, please contact us so we can reverse the refund or make the arrangements to get the package back.
To assure my friend that she was not responsible for misplacing the book, I shared the above conversation with her and offered the sheepish postscript: “I am going to need to reorder [your gift]. This is the least surprising and bureaucratic gift ever.”

All in all, surprise ruined, months wasted, money that may or may not come back, and disappointment all around.

Of course, the irony is that when I reordered the book, I went right back to Amazon’s “alternative buying options” and ordered from another vendor. This time I paid even more.

In other words, I got bookjacked a second time.

3.
As a book lover, I feel compelled to draw a lesson from my struggle — because, at this point, drawing lessons is all I’ve got left. What I see is that I live in a world where you may need to wait half a year, and be extorted, to get a novel that won the “Arabic Booker.” This is disastrous and shameful, because the flow of books in the other direction is so easy and direct.

In my opinion, the fault for this lies with the following parties. In no particular order:
A. The Western publishing regime, which purports to serve the entire world, but gives preference to English over and above all other languages, as if people in the West do not hunger for stories in other languages. The inability to procure books from other languages probably explains why our translation industry is so small.
B. The Middle Eastern and Asian publishing regimes, which have not invested in people like the Arab Amazon guy, either financially or legally, so they can have the resources to make their technology cutting edge.
C. The Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants in the West, who seem to be interested only in religion and do not have functional institutions that serve art, literature, or music from their lands of origin. How many copies of The Quran and Hadith do we need?
D. ISIS and/or Donald Trump.
As for the once-a-surprise book, the expected time of arrival is between March 31 and April 19.

Of this year, I think.

Essays
| 4 books mentioned 11 6 min read
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Essays

Geoff Dyer, Gate-Crasher and Dragonfly

Essays
June 3, 2011 | 4 books mentioned 5 7 min read

1.
When I was about halfway through Geoff Dyer’s bewitching new collection of essays and reviews, Otherwise Known As the Human Condition, I dropped by the Phillips de Pury auction house in New York to peruse a hangar-full of contemporary art that was about to go on the block.  I couldn’t afford to buy any of the stuff, but I try to keep up with how the other half lives.  The big sale of the two-day auction turned out to be Andy Warhol’s 1963 painting of Liz Taylor, “Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz)”, which went for the queenly sum of $27 million.  And here I thought we were still grinding through the worst recession since the Great Depression.  Try telling that to the other half.

But it wasn’t the big names like Warhol and Basquiat and Lichtenstein that caught my eye that day in the auction house.  Rather, it was two lesser-known artists who, by pure chance, I had just read about in Dyer’s book, the photographers Richard Misrach and Edward Burtynsky.  I had been unaware of Misrach’s work – just one of many lacunae in my knowledge of art – but I was well acquainted with Burtynsky’s.  Stumbling upon them together in the revealing light of Dyer’s essays was, to borrow a Dyer formulation, like being summoned to a rendezvous.  It was as though I’d been drawn to that auction house to visually complete the circuit of learning begun by Dyer’s revelatory writings.  Which is not to say I wound up agreeing with everything Dyer had to say about these two very different artists.   Far from it.

2.
Misrach, as I’d learned from a Dyer essay that originally appeared in Esquire magazine in 1993, is best known for Desert Cantos, his ongoing, 30-year project of photographing the American desert, its military bombing ranges and air bases, its atomic testing sites, its emptiness and its silence.  While cruising around the desert with Misrach, Dyer hears “a silence so extreme that the slightest sound receives maximum amplification: a fly buzzing, a lizard scuttling drily, grit crossing the road…  Sound here is the red surf of blood in your ears.  The trick is to subdue the clamor of thought, to let your head become as empty as what surrounds it.”

Indeed, silence seems to be the subject of the first Misrach photograph I happened upon at the auction house.  “Black Line” is a large image divided evenly between a pearl-hued sky and the vast white platter of the Bonneville salt flats.  The two halves of the image are split by a thin horizontal band of sere, purplish mountains.  A black line runs from the center foreground into the middle distance, like the mark of some pitiless god.  And that’s it.  This stark world is unpeopled, seemingly unfit for human habitation.  Thanks to Dyer, I found myself listening to the photograph.  “In the hands of some photographers,” Dyer writes, “film becomes as sensitive to sound as it is to light.  The best photographs are to be listened to as well as looked at.  Misrach is the great photographer of silence.”  I had never thought about that before reading Dyer’s words, and I had never experienced it until I saw one of the photographs he was thinking about when he wrote those words.  I felt an electrical tingling as the circuit was completed.  That tingling, in turn, reminded me of a remark Marilynne Robinson made about Raymond Carver’s fiction: “His impulse to simplify is like an attempt to create a hush, not to hear less, but to hear better.”

On the wall next to “Black Line” was a Misrach photograph called “Danny Boy”:


Richard Misrach – Danny Boy, Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992; Courtesy of Phillips de Pury & Company

The title refers to the object positioned in the middle of another bleached chunk of the salt flats – a long sausage of silver stainless steel with a cockpit and a single tail fin, one of the screaming, otherworldly machines that come to the salt flats every year to wind out to speeds approaching 500 m.p.h.  Two men in cowboy hats stand beside Danny Boy, whose skin is adorned with the names of his sponsors, including High Mountain Hardware, Quik-E-Mart, Hamilton Farm Equipment and Harper Auto, a litany straight out of smalltown gear-head America.  The scene, unlike the bleached world of “Black Line,” is brushed by peachy sunlight.

What makes this picture so alluring to me is its embrace of contradictory elements – a machine that seems to have come from outer space, those sponsors who come from the sticks, those cowboy hats that come from the Wild West, and that warm light on that icy platter of salt.  In this impossibly forbidding world, anything seems possible.

So why is Misrach attracted to such places?  And why should we be?  Dyer answers with a deft little history lesson: “American landscape photography…fed directly into the cult of Yosemite, which culminates, photographically, with the work of Ansel Adams.  Increasingly, however, it is the sun-scorched emptiness of the desert, a place that is at once pre- and post-historic, that exerts a hold on us.  Don DeLillo has described the desert as ‘a container for emptiness’ and, in a world stripped of transcendent values, we are drawn increasingly into that vacuum.”

3.
On a nearby wall I came to a picture called “Shipbreaking #31 (Chittagong, Bangladesh)” that I recognized instantly.  I’d seen it at “Manufactured Landscapes,” a jaw-dropping exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005.  That show included his large-format photographs of marble quarries, tire dumps, baled scrap metal, discarded circuit boards, oil fields, and the Third World business of dismantling the First World’s decommissioned oil tankers, an oddly beautiful bit of ugliness known as “shipbreaking.”  A press release from the museum stated, “Burtynsky’s photographs are not intended as a political statement against the devastation caused by industry, nor are they meant to celebrate the achievements of technological progress.  They serve merely to draw attention to aspects of manufacturing and technical production that are usually overlooked.  At the same time, these photographs challenge viewers to redefine their concept of what constitutes a landscape.”

That’s exactly right.  And it brings to mind another artist who has found a sort of ethereal anti-beauty in the most overlooked – or, rather, the most reflexively ignored – landscapes.  I’m thinking of the great, under-appreciated Rackstraw Downes, who has produced a stupendous body of onsite paintings, without the aid of a camera, of such things as oil fields, lumber yards, landfills, housing projects, construction sites and the underbellies of bridges and highway overpasses.  (A retrospective of Downes’s career is on view now at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C.)

But back to “Shipbreaking #31.”  At his best Burtynsky is a superb colorist, and that gift is on display here.


Edward Burtynsky – Shipbreaking #31, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001; Courtesy of Phillips de Pury & Company

There are dozens of colors in the rusting steel of the ship’s hull.  Sunlight catches the orange cranes on the deck, sending their reflections wiggling on the water, which is a glassy lake of used motor oil, plummy black.  The shore is oozing muck.  An eggplant-colored chunk of the ship lists in the water, a limb sliced from this awful beast.  The scene, like Misrach’s desert, is at once pre- and post-historic.

In his essay on Burtynsky, written in 2009, Dyer finds much to admire.  “Like Richard Misrach,” he writes, “…Burtynsky produces images whose beauty is freighted with a political/ecological purpose that is unavoidable and unobtrusive.  The pictures can never be reduced to a polemical message, are always compelling – often puzzlingly so – in and of themselves.”  After citing such influences as Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson and Charles Sheeler, Dyer concludes, “Burtynsky, then, is an original artist in exactly the sense described and prescribed by T.S. Eliot: part of a tradition that is actively extended and reconfigured by his contribution to it.”

But when he considers a later Burtynsky show called “Oil,” which includes some images of tire dumps and shipbreaking from “Manufactured Landscapes,” Dyer begins to turn sour: “Burtynsky offers a vast portfolio of images, from oil fields to refineries, to highways, cities, and industries, to recycling and eventual waste.  It’s an obviously admirable, important, and well-intentioned project by a serious and committed artist.  Why, then, does one balk at it?”

Dyer offers many reasons, including “the uncomfortable sensation of bloating” and “a lurking potential for self-aggrandizement” and “too much of a messianically good thing.”  He concludes that “once the doubts start to seep in – the suspicion that Burtynsky is photographing the crisis of peak oil and climate change like someone fluently producing company reports – they prove dangerously corrosive…  One gets the sense, in fact, that this may be as close to stadium rock as a landscape photographer is ever likely to get.”

Stadium rock?! To excoriate an artist for daring to take on a big subject and present it on the grand scale it deserves – especially in this age of attenuated artistic ambitions – this strikes me as almost criminally unfair.  To liken Burtynsky’s work to…stadium rock.  The words actually made me angry.  No, they made me furious.

4.
That I could agree so completely with Dyer’s take on Misrach and disagree so completely with his take on Burtynsky was not, in the end, a fatal turn-off.  Quite the opposite.  In her perceptive review of Otherwise Known As the Human Condition here in March, Jessica Freeman-Slade aptly likened Dyer to “a dragonfly hovering above the surface of a pond” because “his criticism skims across a subject rather than diving in.”  Dyer himself freely admits in the introduction that he sees the book as “proof of just how thoroughly my career had avoided any focus, specialization, or continuity except that dictated by my desire to write about whatever I happened to be interested in at any given moment.”  He is a self-proclaimed “gate-crasher,” which is to say he’s Nietzsche’s kind of guy – someone “who never penetrates into the depths of a problem, yet often notices things that the professional with his laborious poring over it never does.”

There is a bit of Montaigne in this approach, this willingness to follow the mind as it flits from one subject to the next.  As a result of this approach, Dyer’s writing is so whimsical, so free-wheeling, so eclectic and unfettered that no reader could possibly agree with all of his opinions and critical assessments.  To his credit, Dyer appears to have no interest in winning agreement or praise, or even so much as a pat on the head.  He is, instead, interested in sharing the way his mind works and, in doing so, spurring us to think for ourselves.

Is it possible to ask more of any writer?

Essays
| 4 books mentioned 5 7 min read
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Essays

Experimental Champions: Three European Masterworks Worth Reconsidering

Essays
March 9, 2011 | 4 books mentioned 8 8 min read

Not many readers are in doubt that more than cold water separates America and the UK from Europe. Rediscovery of three European masterworks of the relatively recent past demonstrates one of the key aspects of this perennial cultural divide-the ability (perhaps freedom) of writers on the Continent to be applauded as experimentalists, while also being championed by the literary establishment. There are very few American or British writers who have managed this feat.

1.
“The rocks do not need my memory or not.”

Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch: We begin with the German-writing Swiss author Max Frisch.  Born in Zurich, the son of an architect, he worked as an architect himself (winning a commission for a major public swimming pool) before a meeting with Bertolt Brecht sparked a change of direction.

Like his countryman Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Frisch initially achieved national and indeed international fame as a dramatist, but today he’s best remembered by English readers as a novelist.  In books such as I’m Not Stiller, Homo Faber and Montauk, he explores his signature themes of the crisis of personal identity, the inescapability of guilt, the possibility of innocence, and the inevitable disintegration of self—or what one reviewer describes as, “The tragedy of the Swiss penchant for precision colliding with the organic chaos of life and love, which it so desperately, secretly seeks.”

His most significant creation, however, may be the finely faceted gem Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, Man in the Holocene.  Published in its entirety as a piece in The New Yorker (to my mind the most interesting thing they’ve ever done), it was counted by the New York Review of Books as the single most important work of 1980.

In an age of epic fat books frantic to spin out multiple plotlines to demonstrate recommended retail value, we often forget the crystalline beauty of the tight, short novel… the apparently quiet story… the genius of simplicity.  And, in terms of plot, nothing could be simpler than this architecturally refined parable (which I liken to a mutation of James Purdy’s elegiac In a Shallow Grave and the elegant cytoplasmic wisdom of Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell).

Herr Geiser is an old man (or at least a man who’s old in habits and mind) who lives alone, which is to say in a hermetic state of intimacy with his total detachment from others, in a scenic but socially sterile Swiss valley inundated with rain and threatened with being cut off from all transportation and communication.  So, what does he do to pass the time?  He meticulously categorizes the nuances of the thunder and builds an infantile but intricate pagoda of crisp bread, while taking his scissors to his encyclopedias and reference library, pasting the pages on the walls around him like an externalized inventory of his own brain—the paper thin structure of beliefs his delicate grasp on truth and sanity has been.  These scrapbook images and excerpts are actually reproduced within the text, drawing us deeper into Geiser’s obsessive solipsism, while at the same time, calling us to search with him for our own place in the “grand scheme of things.”

The novel thus has an immediate graphic design interest that rivals anything William Burroughs ever did with his cut-up methods.  But the compulsive, kaleidoscopic anxiety of Geiser has a poignant degenerative end point.  As the storm intensifies, and the valley becomes more remote from the outside world, Geiser’s memory begins to fail.  Eventually, cerebral apoplexy strikes like the lightning outside, and his surgical quantification of data loses all coherence.

What he’s built with his slicings of store bought information is just another kind of crisp bread edifice… a jigsaw shrine of relics of human knowledge, which are supposed to be a tribute to man’s understanding of the world—an expression of security—some platform of factual certainty.  But how fragile this house of cards seems in the barren isolation of age and physical / mental infirmity.  Man in the Holocene, with its exacting line drawings of hypothetical dinosaurs and recitations of empty materialist schoolbook facts, is in the end a clinically lyrical poem about the futile heroism of our cultural narratives of evolution and history.  It’s also, and more importantly, an eloquently forensic portrait of profound personal loneliness and our hopeless dependence on memory to shape experience and to define meaning.  The result is a uniquely compelling fragment—a shred of the much-too-tiny shadow we’re all afraid we cast in time.

(For instructors in the field of 20th century literature, or for book clubs interested in this work, I highly recommend pairing with it Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper, which is available from New Directions.)

2.
“On the polished wood of the table, the dust has marked the places occupied for a while—for a few hours, several days, minutes, weeks—by small objects subsequently removed, whose outlines are still distinct for some time, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple shapes, some partly overlapping, already blurred or half obliterated as though by a rag.  When the outline is distinct enough to permit the shape to be identified with certainty, it is easy to find the original object again not far away.”

In the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet: There was a period (in fact about two decades) when Alain Robbe-Grillet wasn’t only one of the most famous writers in France, but in the whole world.  Born into a family with a technical and scientific background, he trained as a chemical engineer, until like Frisch, he found his true calling, writing Les Gommes (The Erasers).  On the surface, and surface is the key word with this author, The Erasers is a mystery story, where a police agent named Wallas stalks an unknown assassin through a nameless puzzleboard Flemish town—although it may be that like Winnie the Pooh and the Woozle that wasn’t, he’s really tracking himself.  Nothing is certain.  The only thing the reader can be sure of is the laser precise detail in which all that isn’t clear is described, catalogued and analyzed.

Robbe-Grillet would go on to write such works as The Voyeur and Jealousy, along with the script to the notoriously formless avant garde film Last Year at Marienbad (which draws on the haunted novella The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, referenced tellingly in the television show Lost).

But perhaps his greatest influence was as a scientist of the nouveau roman in For a New Novel:  Essays on Fiction.  It’s here that he articulates his “theory of pure surfaces,” a radical rejection of conventional characterization that emphasizes instead an obsessive phenomenological objectivity.  As Roland Barthes put it, “Imagine the motionless changes of orientation produced by a mirror-image as being somehow decomposed and distributed throughout a certain period of time and you have the art of Alain Robbe-Grillet.”

The impact was powerful in both the world of literature and popular culture.  On national radio, sections of Robbe-Grillet’s seemingly manically fastidious descriptions of apparently banal objects and scenes were recited for humorous effect.  Yet, no one could deny the hypnotic nature of his language or the sincerity of his assault on traditional narration, and its distorting (or revealing) effect on our sense of time and animacy.

I find the best introduction to his work (and therefore his distinctive point of view) to be In the Labyrinth, which picks up on several of the themes as well as the fraught mood of The Erasers.

It’s the story of an anonymous soldier who wanders wearily after a lost battle through a shadowy unnamed city on a mission given to him by a dying friend to deliver a package whose contents he doesn’t know.  Plagued by fever and the imminent arrival of enemy forces, disoriented and alone, the soldier’s confrontation with the maze of the city becomes the structure of the book, and the city takes on a sense of ominous character of its own.

As readers will perceive, there are more than a few echoes of Kafka, Beckett, Camus and Borges…but what distinguishes Robbe-Grillet’s story is his style and vision, with its relentless examination and prosecution of minutiae.  This short, disarmingly seductive novel is a remarkable example of suspense created while defying all its usual mechanisms, and a crispness of prose that crackles and rings while blatantly opposing all the assumed notions of poetic writing.

(I recommend reading Robbe-Grillet in conjunction with Harold Pinter’s early, career-building plays and some of his extremely lucid remarks on his process of writing—a philosophical approach to character and the nature of drama arising from all that is unsaid and only partially seen.  Both writers are published by Grove Press.)

3.
“He does not know any more about the rules of the game than they do, but he feels they are in the process of being born from every one of the players, as on an infinite chessboard between mute opponents, where bishops and queens turn into dolphins and toy satyrs.”

The Winners (Or the Biggest Losers) by Julio Cortázar: Julio Cortázar, the polymath hipster, should’ve won the Nobel Prize in my view, but he was always too cool for school.  Some will argue with me for including this Argentinean author in the European category, and insist on classifying him as part of the Latin American revolution in literature.  I defend my position by pointing out that Cortázar was born in Brussels, spent his early childhood in Switzerland and produced all his major works in Paris, where he finally died.  What’s more, although he wrote about South America, his key influences were surrealism, the nouveau roman, American jazz and Lawrence Durrell—and he was deeply admired in Spain.

Later renowned for the novels Hopscotch, 62: A Model Kit, and the collection of short stories Blow-Up (which inspired the Michelangelo Antonioni film), his first work translated into English was Los Premios (The Winners).

I found this book at a garage sale and I earnestly encourage you, if you don’t know it, not to leave your discovery of it to such random circumstance.  (Although, as the story gives sinister suggestion to, just how random is anything?)

This wasn’t Cortázar’s first novel, but it was his first novel translated into English, and it has some of the sprawling ambition of the young writer.  The amazing thing is the degree of polish and confidence it displays in the face of its own complexity.  To quote from the book’s jacket:  “A luxury cruise ship sets sail from Buenos Aires.  The passengers are a lively and unlikely mix who have all won their trips in a national lottery.  At first the mood is festive.  But all is not well on board the Malcolm.  No one will reveal the boat’s destination; the crew barricades itself behind locked doors in the stern and a looming sense of menace gradually builds to an explosion.”

The Hospital Ship… Das Narrenschiff or the Ship of Fools, has been a staple allegory of Western literature for a long time.  The dramatic potential of a group of strangers in a confined space cut off from the rest of the world is rich.  But Cortázar more than exploits the obvious, and insinuates that which is decidedly not obvious.  Consider this suspiciously graceful remark from not quite the half-way point in the book:  “I don’t think there’s really any joke being played, but that we’re simply the victims of a swindle.  Not just an ordinary swindle of course, but something more…metaphysical, if you don’t mind that awful word.”  Indeed.  The passengers of the Malcolm may not have any choice in the matter.

Just as Frisch’s work captures our contemporary fixation on trivia, and Robbe-Grillet the almost brutally democratic indifference of the camera eye and the paranoia of surveillance, Cortázar shows us the sweepstakes frenzy of reality TV well ahead of his time.  Imagine The Poseidon Adventure written by a first rate mind, or Lost without the grievously disappointing finale… and you have some idea.

(For readers with a musical background, I can’t recommend highly enough some of Cortázar’s journalistic pieces on jazz.  Some of what may seem elusive or obscure in his fiction has an immediate clarity of intent and delivery when seen from this vantage point.)

Summing Up
There are certainly many other European (and world) writers who have managed to earn reputations within the literary establishment while innovatively pushing the boundaries of style and structure.  To some extent my larger point here is that we rather expect this of European authors and do a great deal to inhibit it in Americans.

In singling out the particular (or peculiar) writers above, I don’t mean to elevate their work over others, merely to highlight three decisive, accessible and accomplished novels of exploration that deserve rediscovery.

Essays
| 4 books mentioned 8 8 min read
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