Panning for Gold as Reading and the Creativity of Outsiders
Sculpture by Kohei Nawa
Four years ago, in the back of the top deck of a commuter rail train traveling from the Ukrainian Village to Deerfield in suburban Chicago, a nice enough looking middle aged man started raving about his plan for the “Imperial City of Chicago.”
At first he just started yammering — about city sewage systems, train schedules, etc — like a cranky grandfather, to no one in particular. It was strange certainly, and mothers were gripping the hands of their children tighter as he did this, some people took the steps to the lower level of the car, but in the initial minutes, nothing was yet out of the ordinary.
Then he raised his voice even louder. He said it was time to “gentrify Cottage Grove! New industries! Get rid of the white trash there now and bring back the locals like George Wendt. Bozo’s a local. He needs a new show. Make him a newscaster. Co-anchor Victoria Principal. Make every girl in Chicago look like Victoria Principal. No one’s better looking than the next, all women will be beautiful. All the girls in Chicago will look like Victoria Principal and Morgan Fairchild. And teach them all to speak proper English like in London. A distinct accent for every neighborhood!
[Cockney voice] ‘ello i’m from the Southside of Chicago! This is BBC Chicago!’
“One of these days Southside Chicago will look like Switzerland. Take out the weeds, the garbage, the graffiti. Replace with tall buildings, with ribbon windows like in Italy. Buildings with ribbon windows or buildings that look like Buckingham Palace. Beautiful concrete, beautiful limestone. There will be two Whole Foods in Southside Chicago. one at [names street intersects] Another down on Ashland past the B Dalton. A little bit further down there.”
[He starts singing this in a Frere Jacques-like melody:] “No graffiti, no abandoned buildings in the Imperial City of Chicago!”
“Yes, yes my friends! [points to a woman sleeping] See her? Her with her eyes closed. She’s dreaming of a better Chicago! Lady, thank you for dreaming. Thank you for believing in the dream. We’ll have mauve and pink letters on these trains. German trains. There are 14 German offices in Chicago. Let there be twice as many. Let there be Mercedes Benz buses. Chrome buses. Mauve and pink letters that say ‘Deus servious imperios chicago…deus servious unum imperios chicago.’ We Shall Serve the Empire of Chicago. Mauve and pink the correct color scheme. A crest on the front of the train. We’ll take a steam ship–one of the 27 that arrive at the Chicago Port every day–and take all the bureaucrats into the ocean. Things will get better. We’ll change the weather and make it better, like San Diego’s weather. I will be in charge [He points to a young black man sitting in the
back] That’s Reginald Ferdinand Maxfield the Fifteenth. He’s my second in command in the Imperial City of Chicago.”
I cut and pasted this from an old email to someone I used to know. I transcribed all that I could, as quickly as I could in the front and back covers of Philip K Dick’s “Counter-Clock World.” Later I gave the book to him as a gift. I sometimes wonder if he sold the book to a used bookstore and maybe the next person to own that book is shaking his head and thinking, what sort of crazy person wrote this shit?
But back to the crazy man — his racism is contemptible and his story wasn’t exactly Gormennghast, nevertheless, his ranting revealed a highly involved fantasy world, the kind of imagination that too few contemporary novelists even exhibit.
There was a fascinating panel at Readcon a few weeks back about “outsider writers.” The central question: why is Henry Darger’s art found in mainstream museums and the subject of a documentary, but his 7 million word novel has never been published in any form?
At one point Elizabeth Hand, the moderator, compared Darger with JRR Tolkien as someone singularly obsessed with the world he created. Apparently Tolkein was a terrible speller and his grammar and syntax were always a mess (embarressed to admit, I’ve never read him, and can’t verify this.) You have to wonder….what if Tolkien’s work was recieved by the most type-a editors imaginable — the sort who mistake such errors with limited intellectual capacity? (Slight digression here: I found this wonderful hundred year old article in defense of poor spelling, I keep meaning to share it.) How, as critics do we determine what is Middle-earth and what is the world of the Vivian Girls?
I hate the term “outsider art,” as some touch of mental illness is a necessity for creative genius, and stigmatizing those who fall to far on the spectrum is done so, at the perpetuation of the literary careers of well-groomed perfect i-dotters and t-crossers, whose banal fiction is the real reason (not the Internet, not the Kindle, not the recession) publishing is in such desperation.
Writing a novel is hard work. I’m trying to remember now a quote from Haruki Murakami about writing novels, something about how the the dream must be vivid and continuous, and you have to actually see the hallway and the door in your mind if you write about such things or else you aren’t going to take anyone else there. (A quote I pinned to my wall when I worked on my — regrettably — long abandoned novel.)
Fiction writing requires two primary skills that are often at odds with each other — focus and fantasy. The Clear Channel-ization of fiction means we fail to see much of either. If you are never in the “hallway,” as Murakami may or may not have ever put it, the author of the book you are reading was probably checking his Facebook while writing that passage. And the lack of fantasy, the failure of imagination, goes without saying. Few people can manage to tell a story better than boy grows up in upper-middle class suburbs, goes to college, meets girl, gets married, has child, the end.
Without having looked it, I’d be willing to bet Henry Darger’s seven million word novel has focus and fantasy in spades. So what is missing from it? Cohesion. In addition to focus and fantasy, cohesion is needed or a novel tests a reader’s patience. It’s that whole cliche about how you need to know the rules first in order to know how to break them. Technique matters. But then there’s that other cliche: do you long for “technically masterful” sex?
Now to use that wretched term just one last time, “outsider artists” and “outsider musicians” — like Darger, Freddy Johnson, Roky Erickson — don’t require the same amount of attention as an “outsider writer” would. While I’m certainly not weighing the medium as better for this reason, reading a novel requires far more persistence and patience from the audience than listening to a song or looking at an illustration,
But maybe to enjoy that book by Darger I’ve never read and probably never will, and all those other crazy person-pened works of fiction like it, one has to do an entirely different kind of reading. Instead of line by line, maybe we should skim this kind of work to find gems. Panning for gold as reading. As web surfers we are already used to this kind of semi-engaged reading. It’s what I do from time to time with my unabridged copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy (a great sprawling document of the author’s madness.)
I’ve picked up a number of little self-published zine-like novels from gutter punks, homeless persons, other displaced, society-rejected persons and usually found at least a line or something that had stayed with me. In those kind of texts, you find a lot of repetition; grandiosity or obscenity or cliche or “Imperial City”-like tegious fantasy. The bulk of the text will not connect. It may as well be in another language. Glossolalia as writing. But sometimes you skim and you find just one line that gets right to the heart of the human condition.
That brief eloquence is the pain that only an amateur can exhibit. Your average best-selling novelist knows his mom is reading. He’s afraid to say a lot of things. And when it comes to emotions he never gets… to that hallway I probably imagined Murakami once talked about. (By the way over the course of writing this post I’ve combed through dozens of Murakami interviews and still can’t find that quote. Found this though: “Many readers assume that I enjoy writing such sexual scenes, but that’s not true at all. When I’m writing such a scene, I’m so embarrassed and ashamed that I don’t know what to do with myself. But each time, I say to myself: Haruki, this is your duty! You must not stop!”)
Previously: Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered.
-
aamonty
-
aamonty
-
24ondemand
-
songsbuildingsfood
-
songsbuildingsfood
-
Simen
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
Sponsors
