It Might Get Complicated

“By the time I was about 18, somebody played me Son House. That was it for me. This spoke to me in a thousand different ways. I didn’t know that you could do that, just singing and clapping, and it meant everything. It meant everything about rock and roll, it meant everything about expression and creativity and art. One man against the world. And one song. “
–Jack White, in It Might Get Loud

“But the difficulty remains, one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister’s gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment someone’s—anyone’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles…But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.”
–Virginia Woolf, from Jacob’s Room

Earlier this summer, I took a walking tour of Denver with my friend the Kerouac specialist. He took me to a baseball field on the side of town that used to be the black & immigrant side of town. We stopped in front of the chainlink fencing alongside the foul line, and he read me a passage from On the Road (or was it the journal? I’ve forgotten) in which Kerouac talks about the feeling of elation, of immersion in the present moment and physical delight of sports, that he gets from watching young black & Mexican and “Indian” men playing baseball. He is so happy about being out on that summer night watching them that he talks about how he wants to be one of these guys, he thinks his soul might have been better off had he been poor & colored. On first read, any English major of the 2000s vintage cringes at this. Way to objectify and idealize the other while ignoring one’s own privilege, JK. On second read, as my friend suggested, we might want to ask another question–is there a more charitable way to read this passage? Is it possible that Kerouac was not just in earnest but making a point we should consider?

If there is, it has something to do with coming to terms with the free floating nature of identification and creative inspiration. I think that’s what both Virginia Woolf & Jack White are trying to describe in the passages I quoted above. Encountering both It Might Get Loud and Jacob’s Room for the first time in this past week, I couldn’t help but connect Woolf’s & White’s meditations about the fundamental strangeness of relating so profoundly to a life that could not possibly be yours that you feel driven to try to inhabit it in your work.

Woolf and White move in kind of opposite but similar directions. Woolf chooses to center JR in the life of a character who has more privilege than she does, while White passionately wants to adopt the persona of an artist with less social/political power than he as a white male has. Both of them are inspired by what life must look like in those very different shoes, and even more than that, recognize themselves and their ambitions in that other life. In doing this, they in some way transform their content beyond recognition as potentially autobiographical. In Woolf’s case, it might seem like she’s either misidentifying with a male character or not gutsy enough to make a woman her protagonist. For White, the charges could be worse, he could appropriating an aesthetic rooted in experiences he certainly hasn’t had.

I’d say they get away with it because they do it mindfully & really well, and by that I mean they do it not to get points for accurately representing how someone else lives but to get at what they themselves, as individuals & artists, so urgently had to say. Woolf doesn’t just disappear inside of Jacob even as she inhabits his world (a world of formal education and independence that was off limits to middle class women of her day)–she uses the realistic contours of his life to make us see life in general. Not only that, but her narrator never lets us forget how gender-driven Jacob’s social world is. She uses her own difference as a lens to make Jacob more complicated and his world less predictable yet even more familiar somehow.

What I like about how Woolf & White talk about their (mis)identifications is that they both use them to talk about the illusion of identification in the first place. As Woolf’s narrator points out in the quoted passage–in which she’s literally talking about which point of view to adopt to describe the scene but on another level, I think, also talking about how one organizes one’s fantasy life–whether you choose to situate yourself next to a male or female character, you are always outside of them, you are always guessing and “in exile” from the reality of their lives. You are also missing other viable perspectives. White, at another point in the film, talks about the problem of being a white suburban adolescent loving Son House–how was he going to get away with singing like him? His solution was to throw people completely off the scent by starting a band with his sister and dressing up like a kind of cartoon character. I guess the thought was people would just have no idea what to expect, so they’d have to at least listen to what came out. He had to find a way to channel the authenticity of his passion into a form that acknowledged his distance from the source. No one other than Son House can ever be him, but that’s no reason not to take your tradition where you find it.

I’m really invested in working through these questions as a critic and as a writer. So much of the time, I find myself in an awkward position of having to check my awareness of myself of a woman at the door in order to be as happy about the work of male artists as I want to be. I love a lot of what the guitarists in IMGL say about creativity, but am I even allowed to relate to them? What do I have to revise to apply their lessons? When I’m reading the work of minority (a term I’m ambivalent about but gets the point across for now) writers, how far can I go in assuming that, as artists, they must be positioning themselves not just as identity x but as creators, inspired by other artists no matter what tradition they are biographically associated with?

So, while I love that IMGL got made, there was also a frustration to watching it that I just had to kind of get past in order to love it. It’s never anybody’s intention, but when featuring “the greats” means featuring a bunch of dudes without, the idea that men make great music and women make great women’s music gets perpetuated. The musicians self-consciously position themselves in terms of race and class, but gender completely flies under their radar. (I think White was the only one to refrain from comparing or equating his guitar to a woman. And perhaps not coincidentally, he’s the only one of the three to have worked with a female performer for a long stretch of his career.)

Ultimately, I think I have to qualify my love for watching male guitarists jam over conversation until there’s a sequel in which a group of women rock artists–I don’t know who exactly, but surely one of the guitarists from Sleater Kinney would be in there–can do likewise, because I think it would be fascinating, not just fair play. But, in the mean time, I’m not going to say it didn’t inspire me, too.