May 5, 2016
Ken McGoogan's Kerouac's Ghost
Ken
McGoogan's novel Kerouac's
Ghost is about passing the
baton. You know that scene at the end of The
Tempest when Prospero hands his magic wand to the next generation. As does Morag Gunn at
the end of The Diviners?
In Kerouac's Ghost,
it is ten months after Jack Kerouac has died (in St. Petersburg,
Florida, October, 1969). Kerouac has been researching an acceptable
biographer and now his ghost, like that of Hamlet's father, visits
young Frankie McCracken. "I am not happy," he implies.
"There is something I want you to do for me." An
annunciation, of sorts, up there, in a fire lookout tower in the
Canadian Rockies, where the ghost Jack explains to Frankie all the
reasons why he is "the chosen one."
Personally,
I was a few years too young to have been bitten by the Kerouac bug,
the groupies hitching to Haight-Ashbury with battered copies of On
the Road in their
backpacks, stumbling towards ecstasy--physical, pastoral, sexual,
chemical. Nor have I ever been enamoured by the romance of addictions
or substance abuse. And I confess to being a bit judgemental about
"men" who tomcat, assuming as I do, that it is really just
a case of being stuck in adolescent self-centredness, evading adult
responsibility, denying any mutual respect towards fellow human beings. So this
recreation of the hippy cosmology of hope-free love-faith is for me
an interesting bit of historical fiction to begin with. The
exploration of hero worship, mental illness, religious fanaticism,
stoner oblivion, and Kerouac's self-referential editorial commentary
is interesting. As is the depiction of the heavy load carried by the
children of addicted parents.
In
style, McGoogan moves back and forth in setting, in time, and in
realities. I enjoy the literary allusions, the name-dropping, the
philosophical fusion. For me, explication is helpful. I'm not big on
abstractions. I never assume that what I think something means
will match what anyone else thinks something means, or how anyone
else interprets something. So I appreciate the guidance the
omniscient writer puts into the mouths of characters. Although some
editors would be screaming: "Don't tell them; trust your
reader."
As Shaw
says, the goal is not to "find" yourself but to "create"
yourself. Neither Jack nor Frankie accept this ideal of
responsibility, of internal rather than external motivation/control.
They are addicted to "waiting for the signs". They seem
content to be that pinball in the machine, enjoying the propulsion
while someone else, some unseen other, plays the arcade game.
