Ken Kesey on writing

In a fascinating article by Carolyn Know-Quinn, she describes a collaborative writing class conducted by Ken Kesey and students from the University of Oregon in 1990. The collaboration lasted an entire academic year – three terms – and culminated in the publication of a novel, Caverns, published by Viking in 1990.

Kesey’s view is that he wanted to teach writing, not re-writing.

“You teach wrestling by having guys get out and wrestle. You teach basketball by having them play basketball, and you teach writing by having them sit and write. Writing and rewriting are different things. A lot of college people learn how to rewrite well, but not how to write well. I've had an interesting thought lately. You don't become Isaac Stern to make a recording. You become Isaac Stern to play the violin. You don't learn to write just to publish. You learn to write so that you can write; you can feel it flowing through you.”

And so, rather than students all working on their own material and coming to class to read and discuss it, Kesey’s class was completely hands-on. They started with character. Each student was asked to describe a character on card, looking at his needs, motivations etc. From there, once the characters were agreed, the plot began to emerge, and they started to write it, together. They wrote, edited, re-wrote, edited, then finally, in the third term, performed it. Classes were three hours long, and work was done on a computer with a large screen so that people could see it. Kesey explains:

This is how, as a professional, I can teach stuff. I couldn't teach writing without doing it. I have to be writing this stuff. People have to be looking over your shoulder [at the monitor] as you do this, as you see that this phrase here is redundant and this is bad. Outside of the context of the thing, general abstractions don't work, unless you've got something specific for it to go on.

It’s a fascinating approach, I have to say, and I can’t help feeling it would work especially well with particular groups, like disengaged young men and students on alternative key stage 4. The collaborative, participative nature would perhaps help pull them in. Certainly food for thought.

Music for Torching by AM Homes

 

Music For Torching was AM Homes’s follow-up to the daringly controversial The End of Alice, a fact which may explain much. The End of Alice was a portrait of a paedophile which presented the protagonist as a more rounded and considered individual than is normally the case for such characters, and an explosion of righteous outrage duly followed. Homes, then, is clearly not an author afraid of offending, nor of taking risks with her fiction. She is also an extremely gifted crafter of a novel and deliciously funny. Now, controversial and funny are often ideal bedfellows – think Lenny Bruce – but there are always pressures to be addressed and humour can easily slip over into fatuity.

That said, for nine-tenths, maybe nineteen-twentieths, maybe even ninety-nine one-hundredths of this novel I thought it was brilliant. It dragged me along relentlessly, and I was totally taken into the lives of these (bizarre) characters. It is the ending that causes the difficulty. More of that later.

We’re in typical Homes territory here: dysfunctional adults, behaving mostly like adolescents but on the cusp of a crisis. This is played for laughs, like something out of a grungier Joseph Connolly or Mavis Cheek, but Homes is also a serious writer, and in her comedy of disintegration there is always a tart rejoinder to modern society: Alice presented us with a disquieting mirror, forcing us to confront some unpalatable truths, while This Book Will Save Your Life asks questions about the nature of community and friendship. Music For Torching is a farce which focuses on the way we use people, take them for granted, look for our own gratification first. At least that’s what I decided at the end.

We first meet Paul and Elaine when Paul is wrestling Elaine’s pantyhose down while she attempts to wash up, and she inflicts a neck wound on him with a knife. They fuck, riotously. Not much later, they decide they’ve had enough, set fire to their house and flee the banality of their existence, with their two children in tow, heading for a nearby hotel. So, it seems, we’re in stale and jaded suburbia, midway between Carver and Cheever in the social scale, but with an outrageous quality to the plotting which is all Homes. A sexual roundabout ensues. Elaine has a lesbian tryst with her neighbour and friend, the Stepford Wife Pat, and later, unsuccessfully, brutally, with a policeman; Paul is screwing his son’s best friend’s mom, and also the passive-aggressive mistress of his best friend, a woman who, during a lunchtime rendezvous, encourages him to have his groin tattooed. Not an easy thing to explain to your wife, one would think, but given that Paul has previously shaved off all his body hair and taken to wearing sheer nightgowns, it is perhaps not surprising he gets away with it. Even the children get in on the act: the couple’s oldest son, a morose and uncommunicative boy, has a stash of fat-women porn in his bedroom, which Paul later uses himself in one of his rare moments of solitude.

All of this sounds like slapstick, and yet it works because Homes’s prose is so clean and crisp. She doesn’t play it purely for laughs and, all the while we are immersed in Paul and Elaine’s world, it feels entirely credible that someone should take an axe to the living room table or that the architects would aim a wrecking ball at the house while the family are still in it, waving out at them. The novel creates, then, a register of its own, and it seduces the reader into its strange, hallucinogenic world. Or does it?

As I said, the ending of the novel is a difficulty for me. Without wishing to give much away, the register I referred to – of barely restrained, comedic hysteria – slips entirely into something else. The shift is extraordinary. It is a slap in the face. It is so unsubtle it must surely have been deliberate, because Homes is a superb writer, but why? After reading the ending, I had the horrible feeling that I had completely misread the preceding 350 pages and that this novel has a much more malevolent soul than I had imagined. Where This Book Will Save Your Life ended in the same hopeful joi de vivre that had inhabited the rest of the novel, here the similar tone of much of Music For Torching is not replicated in the ending. For me, it doesn’t work; it feels cold and manipulative, out of sympathy with what had gone before. It tries to pack an emotional punch, but nothing has set up the reader for that punch so, when it comes, it feels only dull rather than exerting any power. The characterisation has, throughout, been of a kind which does not engage the sympathy of the reader so much as his or her support. There is a big difference. When the crisis comes at the end, the reader is not prepared for it and not able to respond appropriately. Quite simply, I hadn’t been led to care enough, and it all fell flat.

Harbinger

A flash piece, "Harbinger", adapted from my first novel Cloudland, has been accepted by Palm Sized Press for their latest edition.

The treadmill (2)

Another day, another rejection. Plus another two submissions.

A 4000 word story edited to 3500 to fit a forthcoming competition, but only one darling killed in the process. A glass of wine being drunk to compensate.

The treadmill

Figures for the past two days:

Rejections: six
Queries to agents abandoned with no reply: two
Submissions: thirteen

And I still have a few sub-3000 word stories without an obvious home.

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

 

 

For some time in Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears, it is quite difficult to identify the precise theme. Near the end, however, it is made clear in a key conversation between the main protagonists (held, significantly, over the telephone rather than face-to-face – the problem of communication is a secondary theme in the novel).

Catherine Gehrig, a conservator of horology at the Swinburne Museum in London and the narrator of half the story, calls her boss, the avuncular Eric Croft, for advice. It is specific advice she seeks, on a Latin translation, although it is clear that Catherine really needs an outlet for her emotions. Eric says to her: “I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic.” He goes on: “Every curator finally learns that the mysteries are the point.” Aha! So we’re in the field of mysteries, then, we’re in metaphysics, we’re confronting the eternal questions. “Why do we always wish to remove ambiguitity?” Eric continues. “Without ambiguity you have Agatha Christie, a sort of aesthetic whodunnit. But look at any Rothko. You can look and look but you never get past the vacillations and ambiguities of colour and form and surface.” How very Careyian, you have to say, to distil the mysteries of the universe into a single Rothko canvas. On this occasion, however, it is a weak image. It is a typical of Carey to invoke high art to bestow gravitas on a concept and, in most instances, it works: when that concept is the nature of existence itself, however, the conceit comes close to bathos.

However, that is to quibble. The significant thing is that here, it seems, the novel is taking us into theological territory. This is somewhat surprising, as it is not traditional Carey material, and we shall return to this point later.

Catherine is grieving after the sudden death of the museum’s Head Curator, with whom she has had a thirteen year affair. Her boss, Eric Croft, the only person who knew of the affair, tries to help by assigning to her a new and prestigious project. Consequently, she begins conservation work on what appears to be a spectacular automaton duck. Packed alongside the automaton’s machinery are the notebooks of Henry Brandling, the Victorian patron for whom the automaton was built as a play-thing and health-aid for his consumptive son. Brandling’s notebooks form the second strand of the narrative. It is clear that the automaton – which Catherine discovers is actually a swan, rather than a duck – is of exceptionally high quality and technically it is remarkably advanced. It is designed to move around in a water-filled hull, eating fish and grain, digesting it and and finally defecating the excreta. What we have, then, is a mimetic representation of the natural life-cycle, inevitably suggesting notions of a creator and the created, what it is to be alive, ideas of free will and control, life and death and so on: the mystery of life recreated, in other words.

There is more. The novel explores surfaces, truths. Written on the automaton, in Latin, is the inscription “What you see cannot be seen.” Again, this takes us to the sense of mystery. Nothing we know in life is truly known to us, because we do not – cannot – know what comes after: there is never any clarity or truth, no matter how close we feel we may be to understanding something. Again, the automaton is a powerful image here: it is in poor repair, its parts disarticulated and stored in eight wooden tea chests. Many years later, conservators try to rebuild it, not understanding what it is for, not knowing the story behind its creation. That story is gradually revealed to us through Brandling’s notebooks but, once again, truth serves only to obscure: the final answer is, as it must always be, elusive. Mystery remains.

As a meditation on what it means to be human, then, for that is what the novel is, The Chemistry of Tears has all the necessary elements for a persuasive study. It almost comes off. In Brandling’s notebooks, he describes the work of Sir Albert Cruikshank, a pioneering inventor on whose work much of the technology behind his swan is based. Cruikshank, it transpires, is something of a visionary, residing somewhere in that debatable land between genius and lunacy.

We are presented with Cruickshank’s great invention, the Mysterium Tremendum. Clearly, since most critics agree Cruikshank is based on Charles Babbage, this wooden counting machine appears to be the precursor of the modern computer. The Mysterium Tremendum, therefore, is the key to the two principal strands of philosophical thought that the novel seeks to explore and it is these two strands or, more importantly, the interconnectedness of these two strands, that leads to the ultimate weakness of The Chemistry of Tears.

Mysterium tremendum is a phrase coined by Rudolph Otto to explore the mystery that must pertain in religion, through which rational thought must be submerged beneath a sense of awe at the numinous nature of the deity. By numinous, Otto means the religious experience itself, and the response it invokes in us. There are different ways the numinous can affect us, one of which is a sense of dread, or the Mysterium Tremendum, a sense of fear of a completely different order from any mortal fear. CS Lewis describes it thus:

Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room" and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous.

That Carey has chosen to call Cruikshank’s instrument the Mysterium Tremendum, something evoking a sense of awe in the deity, is clearly not accidental. Therefore, we must suppose that he is using his novel to explore the tension between our mortal lives and the awful uncertainty about what comes before and beyond. The spectre of death hangs over both narrative strands – Catherine’s dead lover and Brandling’s dying son. In each strand, neither protagonist is in control of their lives and, for neither, their final destination is what they would have wished. Linking them both is the swan, the beautiful and mysterious symbol of the numinous, that awe-inspiring representation of a created life.

But, having taken us on this journey towards (but never into) the unknown, the novel loses impetus. Why? Because of the second thematic strand in the narrative.

This is a jeremiad about the power and inherent dangers of technology and progress. We have Cruikshank’s machine, the Mysterium Tremendum, of course, and all that must follow from the digital revolution we are still living through. But, more than this, Carey dilutes the impact of his narrative with a very contemporary but wholly inappropriate environmental theme. Alarm bells ring early on when Amanda, a (none too convincing) secondary character, is fixated on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. At first, one wonders whether this was happening as Carey was writing the novel, and he slipped it in for verisimilitude but, it becomes increasingly obvious, this environmental disaster is a central element of the plot.

And as soon as this happens the novel loses its gravitas. The mysterium tremendum, the mystery of the before and the beyond, is relegated into a trite argument about environmental stewardship. Catherine concludes, near the end, that Brandling’s notebooks are “a critique of the Industrial Revolution”. And so the mysterium tremendum, the awe in the face of the unknown, is reduced to a hollow and secular complaint about the nature of modernity. This, to me, is absurd. If you are going to invoke the ultimate questions, don’t weaken the argument by shoehorning them into something less significant. Global warming may be a genuine concern, mankind may well be on the road to destroying the planet but, in metaphysical terms, these developments are inconsequential. Ultimately, they make no difference. They might to us, poor bloody humans, for sure, but if, in your novel, you are raising the question of there being something more significant than human beings, some motivating force, divine or otherwise, then to hook the novel’s conclusions on the fate of humanity is to completely fail to develop the point that you have elaborately tried to establish. This is bathos writ large. And this is exactly what happens to the narrative of The Chemistry of Tears.

It calls into question the whole environmental movement at present, the way it is being turned into a secular religion. Humanity has a habit of doing this, elevating whatever the principal concern of the day might be into a position of such import it becomes all-encompassing. It led, in Victorian times, to science and rationalism being bastardised into the ugliness of positivism. Now, the perfectly sensible desire to secure effective stewardship of natural resources is elevated into a whole new religion of nature. There is so much self-serving nonsense about this. The environmentalists are “saving the planet”, man is evil, the environment is everything, the environment is God. But this is essentially hypocricy: the planet existed for millennia before mankind first took its breath and it will survive for millennia after we’re gone: it needs no worship, it needs no saving. The only thing that needs saving is big, bad mankind, the very thing the environmental movement purports to oppose. There is something obscene about the way environmentalism is being turned into a religion. For that reason, I no longer like the term that William Golding coined for Jim Lovelock’s inspirational theories, Gaia. It invests a religious sensibility in something that should be secular.

The concept of a mysterium tremendum is, even for an atheist like me, a worthwhile area of study. Eric, in The Chemistry of Tears, is right: some mysteries do not require resolution, the mystery is all. The before and the beyond of our lives cannot be explicated: that is what religion is, whether or not one subscribes to the notion of a god. There must be some element of transcendence, whether that be a divine transcendence into the company of God, or a rationalist transcendence into nothingness. The environmental cause is by its nature, immanent, irrevocably rooted on this planet, this time, this realm of understanding. Why make it more mysterious? The Chemistry of Tears begins to explore fascinating territory but, somewhere along the line, it runs out of confidence and thematically it slides into disappointment. This is a great pity because, stylistically, as you would expect from any novel by the brilliant Peter Carey, it is a very fine piece of writing.