Read Online Outside of a Dog by Rick Gekoski - Free Book Online

self, also uses it, because he has to: it is built into the psycholinguistic structures we are stuck with: ‘I am
unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon my self the joke of a self.’ There’s no way round it – a process that Jacques Derrida calls using concepts ‘under erasure’
– at the very moment at which we disallow a concept we may be obliged to employ it.
    Charles Lamb, in a much quoted phrase, claimed that he loved to ‘lose himself in other men’s minds’, and that is what I did, though not in the sense that Lamb intended. He
thinks there is something comfortable about the process, something seamlessly enhancing. But my assimilation of the Caulfield and Ginsberg voices had something spurious about it – I
didn’t simply learn from them, I appropriated a whole series of attitudes and beliefs which were neither warranted nor engendered by my own experience: I despised phonies! I wanted to be
lawless and to embrace all!
    Perhaps, though, that is the point, and what poor frustrated Miss Wyeth was trying to teach us. That literature offers us foreign voices, and enables, even urges, us to assimilate them. How we
do that, of course, is up to us. You have to be careful whose company you keep, and how. Matthew Arnold recommended ‘the best that has been known and thought’ as internal models,
without remarking, too, the concomitant danger of what Jung calls psychic inflation. I suspect that he thought the process would make one humble, but identifying with and appropriating views of the
world that one might not have come to on one’s own does not necessarily lead to humility.
    Therein lies the paradox: we cannot form our views of the world without exposure to ‘other men’s minds’, yet in doing so we risk something second-hand, inauthentic. Literature
becomes both our experience and our substitute for experience. There is, after all, a crucial distinction between actually being on the road, being Kerouac and Cassady, and reading about it,
identifying with them, and regarding oneself as, similarly, an outlaw. To be outside the law you must be as honest as Jack or Neal, and not like their many admirers and wannabes.
    Allen Ginsberg’s valuation of spontaneity, his desire for sexual freedom and loathing of the conventions of the political process and of petit bourgeois life, moved and convinced me, and I
have never entirely freed myself of these attitudes, nor entirely wished to. But they have left me with a lifetime disposition to seem to be, to pretend to be larger, more interesting and important
than I really am. Like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, without a self that is anything more than a vast echo chamber, with resonating voices, intertwined, from any variety of sources. Is this why we
sense, in people who are steeped in literature, a kind of intractable pomposity, as if they are swollen by voices not legitimately their own? ‘As Charles Lamb was fond of remarking,’
they say, remarking it themselves. Charles Lamb, c’est moi .
    I cite therefore I am? There is something compellingly ridiculous about the process. Even in its most distinguished examples, compulsive quoting always suggests something second-hand to me. Take
Joan Didion’s moving account of her response to the sudden death of her adored husband, John Gregory Dunne, The Year of Magical Thinking . The text is littered with references to those
writers Didion most admires, and who may be able to offer insight or consolation. And, reading, I was irritated by this: can’t she grieve, even, without this plethora of literary citation?
But there is nothing second-hand about the process, not to Joan Didion: these voices, these authorities, these friends are part of what and who she is. What is this, this chamber of citations, but
the self?
    Whatever self I was beginning to form in high school sought eagerly, if not for a genuine escape, at least for some radical way of marking my difference and disaffection. It would have to be