Who has unspooled thread through this labyrinthine civilization of which we are a part before us, and sought to return from the journey with valuable knowledge?
Fortunately for all of us, many have gone before us & have lived long enough to tell the tale.
From eons before Shakespeare’s quintessential architecture which constructed the modern character. The Elizabethan bard: master psychologist and dramatist who brought the Elizabethan version of our modern Techno-Hamlets to life on the stage.
In my books I go into great detail on the psychosocial foundations of us as modern human beings, here I cut to the most essential chase, cutting to the superstructure of literature as a guide.
From James Joyce’s deconstruction of the English language, to his ethereal snow which fell across all of the living and all of the dead we find faithful guides to the journey we are all on.
The map may never be the territory, but a map is mighty handy for those of us with boots on the ground.
Become the Renaissance, Chapter Three. KW Norton
Who has found a way through the labyrinth before you?
In tracing the writers who most affected my own desire to become a writer I see a thread of truth which irony brings down through the parade of human history. Truth which serves to transform the lives of young writers into crucibles where the temperature and pressure is high enough to build new ideas. The following writers provided more than enough temperature and pressure for transformation.
Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson, twins from different mothers, stood as two bookends of the so-called “new journalism” which emerged in the late 20th century.
Hunter S. Thompson: Thompson, and his wilder, less tame, more terrifying, Gonzo Journalism, handed down a gauntlet of brilliantly incendiary literary fire power - daring new writers to pick it up and win the relay race he began. Thompson infamously threw graphic art into his literary rocket ship.
Joan Didion: Didion was the composed, genteel, female version of Thompson. Like a psychiatrist who descended from the wild unpredictability of the Donner Party, she took her scalpel of a sharp mind to clinically dissect and perform a revealing autopsy on her own culture.
While some might categorize these writers as “the Beat Generation” I see them as the truth tellers who took on the mythology of California and the Golden Gate to breakdown the stereotypes.
Jack Kerouac brought a different kind of permission to young writers, introducing the removal of an inner critic, freeing them to think onto the page what thoughts took place in the mind. Kerouac broke all the rules and got away with it in spectacular fashion.
Ken Kesey lent a true west coast authenticity to the Californication of the left coast. He blurred the lines more intensively than all the other writers of the so called beat generation, merging life & writing into one bold experimental journey.
Gary Snyder brought a more serious sobriety to the wild children of the so called beat generation, taking on a more fatherly intellectual role and becoming a noted householder, lending a kind of respectability to life on the San Juan Ridge
Richard Brautigan was the true wild child of the 1960’s writers, but founded upon earlier American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne & Mark Twain. Brautigan brought true grounded American wit to the sober seriousness of the oh so hip 1960’s
James Joyce regarded literature and language as the master key to human psychology - freely rewriting the code of language by breaking the code first. Joyce considered himself a word smith, comparing his work to that of a black smith. While Pynchon, the literary engineer, used engineering to break down all the expected truisms into false choices.
James Joyce: Between his Ulysses and Dubliners, Joyce broke the code down into digestible luminous prose on the one hand and into indigestible code breaking on the other. Between Joyce’s lyrical rendition of snow and his transformation of English into a psychological treatise he introduced the literature of the 20th century
Thomas Pynchon: Pynchon took his literary code breaking seriously, taking the objectivity of an engineer to his dubious, wry portrait of what it felt like to survive the first half of the 20th century. His prose lurched between such paradoxes as paranoia and anti-paranoia. Pynchon lingered between paradoxes, as a standing wave, for long enough to hear the screaming which came from across the sky.
Eric Hoffer turned code breaking into a whole new blue-collar art. In The True Believer, Hoffer freely brutalized the language to reveal things the upper classes would rather have kept quiet about. His former work as dockworker offered muscular authenticity to literary code breaking. Hoffer, in good company here, is the first to offer the process of Californication to young writers.
This writer invokes this Merry Prankster’s Pantheon of modern literary codebreakers and academic renegades to offer a much-needed parallax identity to this crucible of modern literary engineering.
Whose thread are you following, and whose will you hand on?
