Reality through a Gunsight

Page 28 American Book Review Lain continued from previous page K. Dick. Certainly, these Wakelin Hotel scenes are reminiscent of the threadbare realism and ontological uncertainty of Dick’s most formally adventurous efforts, including his novel VALIS (1980), though of course Gerdes is working in a much different formal register. Gerdes also shares with Dick a deep feeling for humanity as displayed in the sympathetic treatment of his characters in the abject hopelessness of their situations and their striving to find and create authentic meaning. But perhaps most importantly, Jim the Innocent allows us to appreciate fandom as social phenomena, as a way in which consumers might violate their assigned, passive roles, and thus disrupt and perhaps reclaim the processes of objectification that locate celebrities as beyond the reach of merely human desire (in Jim’s case, a desire literally beyond life and death). Paradoxically, fandom in its most extreme forms, in the violation (and ultimate sanction) of social boundaries in the service of a real and intensely human proximity to the star, in its transparent power relations of devotion and submission, and in the strongly erotic nature of these attractions, also serves as a perverse model of contemporary social relations and their mediations. Paradoxically, fandom serves as a perverse model of contemporary social relations and their mediations. We should pause here to note, however, that Wakelin/Morrison’s relationship to the Romantic tradition as suggested in the above passage is itself complex and merits further examination. Certainly, during the course of Morrison’s own college education (this would be the early sixties), literary studies especially were still dominated by readings of the Romantics; this would support the rather banal claim that Wakelin/Morrison employs the discourse of Romanticism because this is what he learned in school, but perhaps more interesting is the continuity between the ideologies of Romanticism and of rock culture (and of sixties dissident culture in general). Terry Eagleton, in his Literary Theory (1983), locates Romanticism as historical dynamic: The literary work itself comes to be seen as a mysterious organic unity, in contrast to the fragmented individualism of the marketplace: it is “spontaneous” rather than rationally calculated, creative rather than mechanical.The word “poetry”…has deep social, political and philosophical implications, and at the sound of it the ruling class might literally reach for its gun. Literature has become a whole alternative ideology, and the “imagination” itself, as with Blake and Shelly, becomes a political force. Its task is to transform society in the name of those energies and values which art embodies. During the climax of the cultural revolutions of the late sixties, of which rock music and its players were an integral part, similar claims were made: the demands for the repayment, as Greil Marcus puts it, of a historical debt. However, by the mid-seventies, the period of The Million-Year Centipede, the failure of these revolutions, in terms of radical politics, was a depressing reality, and the inward turn of rock’s concerns (and its overt institutionalization) was in some way curiously similar to the eventual predicament of the Romantics, as Eagleton indicates: Art was becoming a commodity like anything else, and the Romantic artist little more than a minor commodity producer ; for all of his rhetorical claim to be “representative” of humankind, to speak with the voice of the people and utter eternal verities, he existed on the margins of society…deprived of any proper place within the social movements which might actually have transformed industrial capitalism into a just society, the writer was increasingly driven back into the solitariness of his own creative mind…Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish. This implied continuity is important, I believe, because it puts Wakelin’s desperate introspection into a literary and political context rather than one of the pathologies of addiction and madness, that is, into a context of historical agency deferred rather than of the contemporary culture of therapy. Therefore , Gerdes’s major themes here locate Wakelin’s desperation as essentially existential, and his art as making an implicit social...