Proceso de fabricación de los reguladores

From The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. © 1976 by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh.

of the involvement of the witness participant in this type of nonfiction novel differs from the conventional fictive eyewitness narrative situation.

In the testimonial nonfiction novel, the participation is “instrumental,” not

“projectional”: although a person participates in events and reports in his own individual voice from the inside circle of action, the ensuing subjectivity is that of the involved people themselves, not a “projection” of the writer’s personal feeling onto them for the purpose of totalizing the experience. The witness-participant-narrator is more a medium, an instrument, an articulating voice through which the interiority of events experienced by people is registered. Tom Wolfe compares such a participant narrator to a “method actor”—one who gets inside the emotions and passions of people, rather than projecting his own emotions into them.

“It is a matter,” he maintains, “not of projecting your emotions into the story but of getting inside the emotions, inside the subjective reality of the people you are writing about.” The witness-narrator usually maps the interior landscape of the psyche by means of intensive “saturation reporting” and long periods of living with, talking to, and observing his subjects. Chapter XXI of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an extended “interior monologue.” The interiority, however, is Ken Kesey’s.

The witness-narrator Tom Wolfe serves only as an instrument through which Kesey’s mind registers its feelings, fears, and flow of sensations. The chapter is “constructed completely from diaries, letters, tapes, and interviews with Kesey.” John Sack’s m is a nonfictive narrative almost entirely in the form of “interior monologue” which follows a company through its tour of duty in Vietnam. Sack also serves as a reflecting instrument which registers the soldiers’ emotions.

The degree of participation of the witness in the actions he registers varies from total immersion (The Armies of the Night) to detached observation (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test): in briefer terms, from “generator” to

“reflector” of feelings. The two roles are closely related in Armies, where Mailer is both “generator” and “reflector” of reported actions and emotions.

Significantly, the ideas and acts of Mailer the “generator” of events are registered by Mailer the “reflector” of events from a third-person point of view. This narrational schizophrenia of Armies is in itself a direct acting out of the schizoid nature of the actualities in which Mailer is trapped.

Here we see another instance of the differences between modernist and supramodernist aesthetics. Modernist poetics requires that the schizophrenic reality be stylized from a proper aesthetic distance: you do not behave like a schizophrenic if you are trying to write about the schizoid behavior of reality or its agents. In supramodern literature, Yvor Winters’s “imitative fallacy” is in fact an operative aesthetic principle. What most critics have found

objectionable in Wolfe’s stylistic devices are aspects of this principle of imitative form: attempts to approximate the haze that envelops the mental atmosphere in which persons of the book receive actuality.

The testimonial nonfiction novel, then, is the narrative of encounter between the author—the historical person whose name appears on the title page, not a fictional “second self”—and the brute psychic or physical facts.

Like other types of nonfiction novel, the testimonial too relies on public records, documents, interviews, and other information sources, but, unlike the exegetical nonfiction novel, the voice of the narrator-participant-witness is one important constituent of the narrative axis of the book. Indeed in some cases the author’s participation in and witnessing of the events forms in itself a kind of public document. The involvement of Norman Mailer in the March on the Pentagon, the culmination in the late 1960s of dissenting voices gathering momentum since the Civil War, is now an inseparable part of the history of the March. Historians will utilize the active protest of writers such as Mailer and Lowell to describe and evaluate the postwar American public consciousness. The testimonial nonfiction novel may emphasize essentially public occurrences or the primarily private domain of experience. In either case, the belief that only the reality-tested part of actuality can be trusted by the individual informs the narrative.

Ken Kesey’s bus trip across the United States in 1964 (which, as Tony Tanner observes, is in a sense his third novel, an attempt like Mailer’s New York City mayoral campaign “to move beyond writing”) forms the central episode of Wolfe’s nonfiction novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Wolfe’s transcription of Kesey’s trip represents an attempt to deal with that zone of consciousness which emerges from the tension between the “factual”

and the “fictional” levels of experience. In order to liberate themselves from the fictions imposed on their minds in the name of reality, the Merry Pranksters, as Kesey and his followers call themselves, attempt to construct a counter-reality. They neutralize a fictitious reality by releasing their wildest fantasies. The official reality in which contemporary man tries to relate to his fellows and society at large cannot endure the pressures of the live sur-fiction invented by the Pranksters. Once tested by their planned fiction, official reality collapses into fragments no less fictitious than that invented by the Pranksters. Kesey and his cohorts are aware of the nature of their actions and of the fiction they externalize with their actions. Their intention is to bring everybody into their “movie”—their own fiction—or, put another way, their own reading of reality. Once a person is brought into the “movie,” he realizes the fictitiousness of the more encompassing assumptions accepted in the outside world as reality. The two “fictions” clash, the mind is freed, and the

individual nears “Edge City”—the ever-expanding frontiers of consciousness.

Out of the tension between the two versions of reality, the “on the bus” and

“off the bus” versions, the “fictual” zone of experience emerges. Wolfe captures this area of experience in his book, which Elizabeth Hardwick calls an “extraordinary, imaginative achievement . . . one of those rare, strange books that is not like any other book.”

Then I pick up my telephone and he picks up his—and this is truly Modern Times. We are all of twenty-four inches apart, but there is a piece of plate glass as thick as a telephone directory between us. We might as well be in different continents, talking over Videophone.

Here Tom Wolfe himself, not his fictional persona, registers his first meeting with Ken Kesey, the historical man who up to the time of this conversation had written One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), set up an acid commune in La Honda, California, been arrested twice for possession of marijuana (April, 1965, and January, 1966), and, at the time of the phone conversation, following capture by the FBI on the Bayshore Freeway south of San Francisco, was jailed in Redwood City, San Mateo County, California. The glass-partitioned, phone-connected, first meeting of Wolfe and Kesey gradually loses its literalness and gains a metaphorical significance. Strangely charged with the horror associated with political polemics-caricature-propaganda, the scene captures in a single visual image the life of contemporary caged man, his attempt to reach out, and his final subjugation and abandonment. It could have been lifted from plays by Adamov, Ionesco, or van Itallie. Wolfe merely records the scene, and the transcription reads like an energized fiction—an absurd playlet.

Wolfe recalls this scene while waiting at the Warehouse, the Pranksters’ headquarters, for the “Chief’s” release. The double layer of surrounding reality is signaled here by Wolfe’s disclosure that Kesey has two names: “Chief,” when traveling to “Edge City,” and “Kesey,” when operating within the circle of ordinary life. The two names are used according to the niveau of meaning he is involved in. Kesey, the “straight” successful man, and

“Chief,” the spiritual guru, work like two terms of the dialects of an identity fading into a flow of actions-thoughts-feelings, partly man, partly the projection of a mythical figure. In one of the acid festivals Kesey appears as the “Space Man” in a silver space suit complete with a big bubble space helmet.

The Warehouse, situated on Harriet Street, between Howard and Folsom, is a storehouse of objects as well as projected images and masks, a

collage of the factual and fictional, a reverse image of a middle-class house, a place in which people wearing white coveralls sewn over with American flag patches do their own things. Theater scaffolding, curtainlike blankets, and

“whole rows of uprooted theater seats” line the walls. As the newly arrived Wolfe tries to orient himself to this scene, a blanket curtain moves, and a little man wearing a sort of World War 1 aviator’s helmet vaults down from a platform about nine feet high. He tells Wolfe: “I just had an eight-year-old-boy up there.” Wolfe’s new acquaintance is the “Hermit.” All the Pranksters have allegorical names, like characters in medieval morality plays. Wolfe also meets Mountain Girl, Cool Breeze, Black Maria, and, as if to complete the range of fictual personages, Neal Cassady, who behaves as though he has just walked out of On the Road. The solidity of identity begins to crack, and the sense of “reality” recedes and merges with some version of fantasy as Wolfe discovers in the center of the room-garage a curious objet d’art: “A school bus . . . glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Leger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester school bus and told him to go to it.” This is the bus used by the Pranksters to invade towns and cities all over the country to disturb the deep sleep of the citizens.

The registration of the trip is one of the main blocks of narrative in the book. The destination sign on the bus reads: “Furthur.” From the outside, the bus looks “freaking lurid”; inside it possesses a sophisticated communications system to proclaim its message, verbally as well as visually, to the outside world. The journey acquires the form and significance of an initiation rite into a “separate reality,” a “nonordinary reality” to use Castaneda’s term. An element of playfulness, however, redeems the counter-reality of the Pranksters from becoming a self-righteous, substitute counter-reality.

The Pranksters know their version of “reality” is only another “game”;

although a dynamic and flowing “movie,” their counter-reality is a “fiction”—

another reading of reality and, as such, an imposition of a model of values on the experiential continuum. The ultimate objective is to “transcend the bullshit”—to attain self-liberation and emancipate the consciousness of others by juxtaposing charged levels of reality.

The trip moves toward the de-totalization of commonly accepted models of reality, but Wolfe’s recording of this ongoing “movie” refuses to enter and totalize its de-totalization. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test maintains a complex relationship with the experiential world. Ostensibly an intimate mapping of the contours of a particular gesture by a group of people toward

accepted reality, its actual informing theme is not the Pranksters’ “movie”

but the fictuality of contemporary experience. In the book, the two basic approaches to the external world mentioned in Chapter 1 are combined.

Kesey’s “movie”—his nonverbal, action novel—is an “over-totalization” of reality, a parallel fiction very much like the transfictions of Barthelme, Nabokov, Barth, Pynchon, and others. Wolfe’s approach to Kesey’s “movie,”

on the other hand, is nontotalizing. Wolfe’s methodology is often similar to that of the exegetical nonfiction novel. He supplements his actual witnessing of parts of the “group adventure and personal exploration” of the Pranksters, such as the acid graduation ceremonies, with a forty-hour movie, tapes, written statements, and other records kept in the “Prankster Archives.” As the book opens, the events of the past are retrieved, then the present is registered directly by Tom Wolfe, the testifier.

Through meticulous recording, the book reveals how Kesey and the Pranksters transform the trip into a collective parable. As the parable progresses, the bus, its riders, the space in which they move, all become metaphorical components of an “action allegory.” Each person is fully aware of his part in a parable—not only have they gone through a baptismal rite of adopting new names, but they behave and talk as actors of the ongoing movie, literally shot by Hagen “like this was some crazed adventure in cinema verite.”

Kesey is the psychic force which animates the Pranksters’ counter-environment. His statements, as the events unfold, become more cryptic, metaphorical, and aphoristic: “You’re either on the bus or off the bus,” “feed the hungry bee,” “Nothing lasts,” “See with your ears and hear with your eyes.” Gradually they form an elaborate interpretative pattern for a metaphorical ordering of reality approaching the complexity of Yeats’s extended metaphor, A Vision. The key concept in Kesey’s thought system is

“fantasy.” The aim of the “fantasy” is to actualize the allegory of the trip to reach Edge City. One of the Merry Prankster signs reads: “Hail to the Edges.”

It symbolizes the quest for the absolute NOWwhich the Pranksters are trying to achieve through drugs. The only authentic mode of being is existence in the moment itself, for “any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reductive value.” But Kesey admits there is always a sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and your reaction—one thirtieth of a second, if you’re the most alert person alive—and he acknowledges that “. . . we are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives—we are always acting on what has just finished happening.” He accepts that NOWis always a movie of the past, but sees the destination as “Furthur,” toward a liberated consciousness, away from one’s own “snug-harbor dead center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz

alive, the middle-class intellectual’s game, and move out to . . . Edge City . . . where it was scary, but people were whole people.”

Those moving toward Edge City are “on the bus”; those trapped in what Kesey has called (in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) the “combine” or

“system” are “off the bus.” The last phrase need not be taken literally. Sandy, one of the Pranksters, is physically on the bus but reserved, detached, not

“out front,” and therefore “off the bus.” The allegorical quality of the trip and the significance of the bus metaphors are most clearly revealed in what might be called “The Boy and the Bus” exemplum:

And in Boise they cut through a funeral or wedding or something . . . and a kid—they have tootled his song, and he likes it, and he runs for the bus and they all pile on and pull out, just ahead of him, and he keeps running for the bus, and Kesey keeps slowing down and then pulling out just out of his reach, six or eight blocks this way, and then they speed up for good, and they can still see him floating away in the background, his legs still running, like a preview—

—allegory of life—

—of the multitudes who very shortly will want to get on the bus . . . themselves. . . .

Those “on the bus” can formulate their own version of reality and protect themselves from other people’s “movies.” The term “movie” refers both to the literal forty-hour film shot by the Pranksters on their trans-American trip and to various metaphorical readings of reality. The collective parable works here too: the Pranksters try to absorb all America into their movie (the literal-metaphorical movie) before America puts them in its movie (the metaphorical movie). The refusal to play other people’s games, to let them entrap him in their movies lies behind Kesey’s “fouling up” of a Vietnam rally held at Berkeley. While awaiting his turn to speak, Kesey becomes convinced that the antiwar rally is modeled on a war rally, and that the rhetoric of the pacifist is patterned after the rhetoric of the warmonger. He decides that the peace people are actors in the military’s movie and, once on the platform, urges them to free themselves: “You know, you’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching. . . . That’s what they do. . . .They hold rallies and they march . . . and that’s the same game you’re playing . . . their game.”

And he takes out his harmonica and plays “Home on the Range.”

To invent one’s own “fantasy” and to shoot one’s own “movie” is the route to “Edge City,” an expedition into the innermost circle of one’s unique reality—to move with its “flow.” “Going with the flow” is the ability to

“transcend the bullshit,” to see through the surfaces and discover the movement of reality behind appearance. The Pranksters are reluctant to verbalize the meaning of “flow” and other concepts for fear of limiting their meaning: Mountain Girl at the annual California Unitarian Church Conference at Asilomar shouts at the minister: “Do It!” She expresses the basic Prankster outlook—don’t explain it; do it!

This firmly rooted belief in action rather than explanation is embodied in the Pranksters’ most famous reality-disturbing device—the Prank. The idea behind the Prank is to perform great public put-ons to dislodge the established official reality and project a liberating fiction, which will enlarge people’s concept of the real. The Pranksters’ clothes, their Day-Glo colors, their behavior at the Vietnam rally and the Beatles performance, are all part of this great public put-on. The Pranks should shock and free observers and actors, since the very process of performing pranks is in itself emancipating.

This double liberation of observer and actor is one of the differences between the Prank and the Modernist efforts to shock the dull middle-class, épater le bourgeois. The latter is usually a one-way affair, with the artist firmly convinced of the superiority of his own values. The Pranks reveal how much the consciousness is inhibited by societal conditioning, and how much Blakean innocence has been lost. To overcome the damage, one must act, be

“out front,” confess “hang-ups.” To remain inhibited and to think rather

“out front,” confess “hang-ups.” To remain inhibited and to think rather