Shoeless Joe American Dreams: How

Shoeless Joe

American Dreams: How Shoeless Joe Became Harry Potter

Kinsella's Shoeless Joe -- for which he was awarded both the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada Award for First Novel -- reads like a long, languid trip through the slumber of an American mid-west long past; the American mid-west. Perhaps most troubling about the work is the uncanny ability of a Canadian writer to tap so deeply into the American subconscious. For Shoeless Joe is indubitably an American work -- one can imagine the Canadian reader skipping off its surface obliquely -- and so questions must be asked: How and why did W.P. Kinsella subscribe so intimately to the American dream? In what place does Shoeless Joe stand in the culture of that foreign dream? The first twenty pages of the novel suffice to inform the reader that Kinsella was not an outsider to that dream; that it gnawed at his bowels in a way that could take no less than eighty thousand words to describe. The success of the novel -- and of the film, Field of Dreams, which followed it -- attest to both that the racial psyche of the American people was ready for such a work and that Kinsella was a man who could speak to that psyche. W.P. Kinsella, the author, like Ray Kinsella, the main character, like America, the people, is a man clinging to an ancient mythology in an atheist world; he knows -- or rather has faith -- that his old, dead gods have the power to make whole that which an emptying, technocratic culture has lost. The power of Shoeless Joe is to balm a culture that has sold out, that has bought productivity, advancement, and success at the cost of its soul; and to give it, for eighty thousand words, the soon-lost scent of a bygone dream traveling on a breeze long forgotten.

W.P. Kinsella was raised on a farm outside Darwell, Alberta, Canada, and all indications are that his was a happy childhood if a lonely one. In interviews he describes an estrangement from the organized world of life outside the farm, of discontent when, at age ten, his home schooling ended and he was thrust into the formal school system. Of the series of jobs he worked from 1956 to 1963 -- jobs which were the financial patch most professional writers find necessary -- he says "I hated everything I was doing," (Twigg / BCBW, 2005). It can be assumed that Kinsella looked back to the farm of his childhood as an idyll of early dreams and as such it manifests itself in his writing. The writing itself was another of Kinsella's childhood dreams, and his foray into the world outside of it left him bitter at that world. In another interview, Kinsella remembers that "I'm one of those people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," (Twigg / BCBW, 2005). He was published by the age of eighteen. Ray Kinsella, like W.P. Kinsella, worked his way through a series of disenchanting jobs -- both author and main character were insurance salesmen at one point and highly unhappy in their posts -- until Ray finds his way to a farm where he can love and dream. The dream is central: Ray's farm -- like Kinsella's writing at first -- is neither lucrative nor conducive to his family's financial stability, but he loves it more than any price tag could belie. The farm and the writing are set in central Iowa, a place that has no major baseball team but can be rightly described as America's heartland, the heart of America wherein her dreams, old and new, swirl like phantom colors in distilled corn whiskey.

The farm is, naturally, the central setting of Shoeless Joe; it is not just in the heartland but, perhaps, at the very heart of the heartland, and its plight is that of the heartland as a whole, and of America beyond. As Ray holds out, all around him quarter plots are being sold to a corporate farm combine.

A perusal of county maps shows why my little farm is so important. On the county map, the land is divided up neatly as a checkerboard, and when I take one of Karin's yellow crayons and color in the quarter-sections owned by Bluemark Properties, Inc., it looks like a giant crossword puzzle with only a few black squares. My farm is one of the black squares, (Kinsella, p.192)

Farmers -- men who loved and tilled the earth, men who in floods and bad times were more concerned for the land than for themselves -- are being replaced by computers and combine equipment. The soul is being drained out of the work and, in corporate laboratories, is distilled into pure profit. Ray is not just a hold out, but a resistance fighter, a man clinging to an ancient god in whom he knows there is salvation, but America is no longer interested in salvation.

The condition of the American mid-west today must be troubling to Kinsella, the author, who wrote about a time when this de-mythologizing was in process and lives now in a time when the process has been successfully completed.

The success of Shoeless Joe is attributable to America's subconscious acknowledgement that with the farms and the farmers she has lost her dream.

There can be no question: the psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence, (Campbell, pp. 86-87).

Adrift in a technocratic sea of exacting dimensions the American people have discovered that, as Eddie Scissons points out, "Success is getting what you want, but happiness is wanting what you get," (Kinsella, p. 230). The rift between the body and soul of the country results in a deep seated and consciously inexplicable depression; even as the skyscrapers pile up and the bank accounts accrue, many Americans find themselves unhappy. Psychology and counseling are today enjoying the peak of their success in America, just like the pharmacopeia of cures manufactured to treat these mental disaffections. And while the pills -- Xanax, Wellbutrin, and others -- numb the populace enough to keep it productive, the soul, buried and beset, continues to search for a way into the light and clings still to the forgotten dreams.

Shoeless Joe is a snorkel lowered to that buried soul by which it gasps but eighty thousand words worth of air. Even that air is not fresh, it is the same polluted-by-production stuff Americans breathe in the out here. Americans, despite the pills, are still searching for an escape; they recognize subconsciously that the world is more than meets the eye, but rationally they have told themselves it is simply just that, that it can be reduced to dollar signs and combine farms. Shoeless Joe provides that escape by the vehicle of baseball, a game which though changed and incorporated, still lives in part as that time-distant kernel of Americana which was part of the dream so long ago. For Kinsella, the author and the main character, baseball is a way back; Scissons advises him,

Share what you've got in common… Talk about the small ballparks he took you to as a kid, where kids played with mongrel dogs under the bleachers and farmers scuffed their boots on the boards and kept one eye on the sky… the right chemistry will be there, it can't help but be. You both love the game. Make that your common ground and nothing else will matter, (Kinsella, p. 230)

Through baseball, Kinsella, the author, finds a connection to the lost dream, finds a way to tear up the combine farms and replant them with the seeds of America's soul. So Ray's ballpark is built right where it has to be, cut out of Ray's corn field, cut out of his productivity. Were it built on an un-used plot of land, an empty lot or a place where no money could grow, he would not have come; the park and Ray's black-square farm fly in the face of the American success which has never entailed happiness.

The fact is, though, that to date that dream remains but a memory. Even baseball has become a corporate enterprise: as he travels cross-country towards New Hampshire Ray stops at famous ballparks along the way and is successively disenchanted with the parks themselves and the once great cities that house them. The only park he has a good time at is Yankee Stadium, the home of America's foremost corporate team sometimes known as the Evil Empire.

And so America continues to search subconsciously for ways back, for snorkels to lower to those buried souls. Consider the resurgence of magical literature in America over the last decade and a half. Never since Tolkien has the fantasy genre -- the Twilight books and the wealth of vampire chronicles accompanying for example -- been so widely successful. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels are a recent manifestation of that search for snorkels. What could be more escapist than to imagine being a wizard estranged and insulated from his magical heritage and forced into the mundane -- muggle -- world? As Shoeless Joe was to Ray Kinsella, as writing was to W.P. Kinsella, so has Harry Potter been to a recent generation of Americans. Harry Potter is a mythological symbol of the type Campbell knows has been lost to the detriment of the people. He is the truth Americans wish they possessed, and he too defies the whole world of productivity and bureaucrats and fixes onto what Joyce called the "grave and constant in human suffering." Novels of this sort provide a vehicle back into the heartland and so capture the imagination of a public that knows not what it searches for.

It is interesting here to note that Kinsella has himself, in these later years of life, given up on writing to an extent. After a life-threatening accident in 1997, when he was struck by a car while walking near his home, Kinsella sued the driver for damages, not just medical bills but also claiming that "injuries suffered have made it impossible to write," (Twigg / BCBW, 2005). If writing was truly the dream Kinsella always had, selling it for settlement money puts him in a distinctly American category.

This introduces the question of Kinsella's Americanism. In interviews he claims,

I would say that if it wasn't for medical insurance I would likely live in the States. it's a much more exciting place to be. Even the politicians aren't quite so stupid. All politicians are stupid and corrupt but ours are not even corrupt. Bureaucracy is so much worse here than it is in the U.S., (Twigg / BCBW, 2005).

The man himself might be described as acerbic, with a strong superiority complex and bold, outspoken opinions. In his interviews he rails against academics, which he hates categorically, and curses contemporary giants of the literary field: John Metcalf and Norman Levine to name a few. A central psychological element which Kinsella skirts is a strong anti-authoritarian streak. These are qualities more commonly associated with Americans than the more reserved, liberal, English-style, Canadian culture.

Perhaps Kinsella's identification with American culture is partly a denial of the Canadian literary culture, which he views as colonial, and partly a subconscious acknowledgement that he, like Americans, harbors that same dark desire to sell out. To begin with his view of the Canadian literary culture, one quote concerning John Metcalf should suffice:

Whereas in Canada we have this goddamned English tradition. And there is no one less imaginative than the English. Our Canadian literature is still dominated by a lot of asshole Englishmen who have the nerve to try and tell us what our literature is about. John Metcalf, of course, is the main offender. The very idea that this man, who has no background in our literature whatsoever, should try to tell us what Canadian literature should be about just makes me absolutely furious. There are ten or fifteen of his ilk floating around, (Twigg / BCBW, 2005).