Posted By BillHeise on January 26, 2011

This post is part of a series in which I talk about the serious side of my otherwise silly book, Poker Tales. If you want to read all of my individual works on my individual chapters, or if you’re coming in in the middle and want to catch up, the full listing of all the chapters (as well as some free excerpts) can be found by clicking here or by clicking on Poker Tales in the menu at the top of the page. If you want to follow along with me in my book itself, you may click on the books at the top left-hand corner of the page. It will take you to web site where you can browse my book before you buy it.

For this chapter, I wanted to give you the whole ‘Introduction’ as a freebie, as well. You can view it by clicking here.

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A Bit of Biography

My novel is about art in relation to experience. It is not autobiographical. Indeed, I think that there is too much biography in modern fiction by serious writers. Writers write about what they know, and that usually turns out to be about their lives as writers. It gets boring after a while. My book is supposed to play on that convention by starting out with a bit of autobiography before traveling outward into an increasingly fictionally-constructed world that plays with the conventions of a ‘nature-bound truth.’ This is in line with my notion, expressed several time in several different ways on my blog (as here, but search my blog for nature for more instances) for my belief that there is something wrong with the construction of the universe on ‘natural’ grounds.

That said, the bit of biography which I start out with is true. On August 1st 2004, I got up to get another cup of coffee and had a stroke instead. I was 42 years old. So now I can’t work anymore, and after a lot of therapy (learning to walk again; learning to speak, things like that), I thought I would start a publishing company and write books. I’ve written six books so far. Of those, I’ve published two so far with another two on the way this year (the other two are crap and won’t see the light of day).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was in intensive care ward for a week, in the hospital for another week, and another five in rehab after that. My wife was afraid even to let me read (they were still assessing the damage to my brain), until I begged her to bring me my book on Cicero, which I halfway through at the time. I was messed up. I couldn’t talk at all for a short while and couldn’t remember what I was saying before I reached the end of a sentence for about a year.

Now, having a stroke is a terrible thing, kids, so don’t try this at home; but though I couldn’t access my short term memory on account of a large swath of my brain having been killed, my long term memory was fine. I could remember a lot of stuff about my years as a PhD student, and one of those things was that someone had once said that aphasia was the key to postmodern mind (I think it was here). How lucky was I, because I now had it!

But, since I couldn’t talk to anybody—I was like I imagine Lou Gehrig was like at the end of his life—I watched poker on television instead. And, being a former grad student, I soon connected the dots between reading a book and reading a poker hand. In both start you out with a blank. Then you start reading, after which you know more. Then you learn more still. But the thing about reading books and reading poker hands is that you can never know everything. That is what makes reading fun for those who enjoy it, as well as making it hell for those who don’t.

But I love to read, so I drew a correlation between my English class—which, if you were in that class, I want you to know that I still feel terrible I had left in the middle of a summer semester after suffering my stroke—and poker. I thought that in both poker and English, though you can’t know everything, the more you know, the better you will do on a test.

And that is the basis of my book. No one knows everything, but the more you know, the better off you will be at the poker table, as well as in life.

Character Modeling

I took an example from one of my students and made him my main character. He was a kid who was sitting in a community college classroom, not because he was interested in what I was telling him (he wasn’t), but because he was biding his time waiting for something else to happen. There are a lot of students in college like this.

These students were among my favorites, because I always thought that there was hope for outsiders. I had failed out of school at 19, and I understood them better than many (not all) of my academic colleagues. So after dropped out of academia (the second time) after getting my PhD in English, I continued teaching part time at local community colleges and technical schools. I love academia as part time work, though I’m not cut out for full-time work in the professoriate.

Anyway, back to my student. I came to find out that he played poker all the time. He was hoping to earn enough money playing poker to go to Vegas and enter the World Series. So I modeled my character, who I named only with the generic name ‘the Kid,’ after him.

Research on ‘The Problem of Fiction’ in Poker Literature

Now, having thought of my premise of having a young kid traveling Las Vegas as soon as he is of legal age, I wanted to find out if anyone had written on this subject before. And what I found shocked me. The shelves of bookstore poker sections are filled with books that have been written by people who have experienced the real life ups and downs of poker life for themselves. They are bold and daring enough to do what the reader cannot face him or herself.

This is common in sports literature, so I drew on the works of some of my favorite sports authors, Steven Pressfield, who wrote one of my favorite sports novels, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Bernard Malamud, who wrote The Natural, to contrast their work with my own. In those works, some distance is required between the reader and the hero, because most men will never master either game (I talk about this aspect of disappointed dreams in the chapter ‘Interlude with an Actor’). But, as I say in the introduction about this vicarious nature-based model,

That vicarious model has its place, I suppose, but I found it odd that when poker is portrayed in fiction that it should travel so close to nature; for, unlike golf and unlike baseball, playing poker has less to do with what’s on the table than any other game in the world.

Joel Relihan’s Universe

I wanted to do something that had grown out of my own experience. Unfortunately, that was something that had to do with my experience in grad school.

When I was hiding in plain sight if graduate school, I worked with Joel Relihan with whom I have written a chapter in this book. His view of literature was close to mine. He was working on his Ancient Menippean Satire at the time. Relihan’s reading of the obscure genre of Menippean satire had an enormous influence on my development as an author. In Menippean fiction, the possibility of certain knowledge was always undermined in some way. Always.

This is important point for me. I don’t want to limit the role of art in the world, but the lessons of Menippean satire seem to be that art is always limited, and that is through liminal characters that we come to understand just how true that is. When Reason descends from her tower in the The Roman de la Rose to lecture the Lover on how he should give up his foolish quest for love and follow her, we are not to grasp on to her; we should examine her for errors that she does not see for herself. This is quite unlike the modern (or postmodern) scholar who thinks that it is by traveling to the margins (‘thinking outside the box’ for those of you who have not been trained in academic but in business lingo) that we achieve a more perfect perspective.

As Relihan points out, Menippean satire relies on multiple perspectives on experience and in particular undermines the exchange of a lower perspective for a higher. In the ‘natural’ perspective on life, used by my academic colleagues to justify their ascendancy over other, lesser men and women, I had hit upon something that people think is solid that was actually not. In going back to nature—as both Joni Mitchell and Rush Limbaugh do—I feel that both have made a mistake. I wanted to rise above their limited perspectives to attain a whole perspective that had escaped both of these seminal thinkers.

The world of nature closes experience in the guise of opening it up. In that way, it is like Joseph Campbell’s starlight perspective on symbol:

“When you see the Earth from space, you don’t see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come; this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.”

You can have it all, as long as you are willing to abandon your individual perspective, including your most deeply held beliefs, for a ‘higher’ perspective. Those of my academic colleagues who believed that what they were doing was solidly grounded believed that what everyone else in the world was doing (especially those who had been deluded by religion) was built on a false base. They were, as Marx said of them, operating under ‘false consciousness.’

The Marxists among my academic colleagues (and not all were) believed that Hegel was wrong in his Phenomenology of Spirit, where he imagined that he was approaching the ‘thing in itself’ in attempting to gain objective knowledge of the ‘Spirit.’ My academic colleagues, trained in the ‘true’ science of Marx, thought that they were restoring the true nature of experience by flipping over the ‘Spirit’ of Hegel and finding the ‘true’ drivers of human behavior in the more solid ground of economics.

Living in the Land of Opportunity and Freedom

But I live in America, the land of freedom and opportunity. And I didn’t particularly like the notion that only a few knew ‘the (Marxist) truth,’ while everyone else were a pack of deluded idiots. I had been misunderstood far too often for me to believe what they were saying about me, that there was something wrong with my perspective and not theirs (the academics, I mean).

I do not insist that I am right, but I want people to listen to me before dismissing me as an idiot. But, of course, everyone wants that, even (especially) idiots. We have to make choices in our lives about who is worth listening to and who is…well, an idiot.

I made my case that I am not in fact an idiot about this when I dissected Neil Postman’s assertion about America being a land of fools who had abandoned reason for a world of ungrounded symbol (in fact I wrote this as I was finishing Poker Tales). I went back to Postman in my post about his ridiculous and timid approach to knowledge and computers (which I wrote as I was beginning my revision of Poker Tales). My point in turning to him in the introduction was to contrast my approach with his. His is the perspective I associate with academic confidence. They are looking beneath the surface of experience for deeper and more ‘true’ meanings grounded in something ‘real.’ By their own account, they have failed. This has left them with a profound skepticism on which they hang their hat as the symbol of belonging to the select few.

I profoundly disagree, not only about their view that they are among the select few who know something that the rest of us are ignorant of, but also in their general skepticism, which I wrote my dissertation in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to combat (I make my case, which every teacher should read, here). In returning to fiction after 15 years in the wilderness of business, I hope to be better able to make my case again.

The Basis of My Fiction

My fiction is not built on any solid foundation. I am the poet of the superficial surface who has come along after the search for a solid foundation for that deeper ground has failed to produce any more permanent result (as predicted by Relihan).

My ‘Introduction’ then turns to some of the works that I base my own fiction on. They are works that undermine confidence in looking for certain truth beneath experience. The first of these is Hermann Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. I will deal with his work when I get to the tale of ‘Pecos Ernie’ on Day Three, so I won’t talk about that book until then. But I will point out the riverboat on which Pecos Ernie sets up shop is called the Séance (from the French for ‘meeting,’ but in Enflish it refers to a (usually fraudulent) meeting with spirits when applied to mystical ascent). This is deliberately in contrast with Melville’s riverboat, which is named Fidele (Faith). Underneath Melville’s fiction is the sense that there is an underlying Christian faith that ultimately will serve as the ground of his faith.

There is no such faith underlying my novel. And I want to clear as a bell here. Though not particularly religions myself, I have nothing against the exercise of faith. I am married to a church-going lady and I am happy to have my kids enrolled in a Catholic grammar school. I will make that point more clearly in the centerpiece of the novel, the tale of the ‘Four Parisians.’ My point is that there is a certain amount of faith involved in anyone’s decision to believe anything. But, according to St. Augustine, there is an irreconcilable break between our human reason and our faith. We cannot use our reason to ascend the heights of heaven (as Campbell attempts to do). Doing so only gets us father away from our individual lives in exchange for a starry night that may not reveal deeper truths but may be an invitation to pure madness without giving the offered gift of a more solid ground.

In my novel, faith is not the construction on which poker hands are evaluated. To substitute faith (Fidele) for the real source of knowledge is to delude yourself and to operate under a delusion (Séance). On the other hand, fleeing faith for the surer comforts of reason is equally delusional.

The second major acknowledged source for my book is P. G. Wodehouse’s Golf Without Tears (see my first posting on Wodehouse here). I will get back to this when I get to Day Two, where I have two chapters on the role of women. I based my two stories about women on his story ‘The Heel of Achilles,’ in which I imitate Wodehouse’s playfulness with the heroic model by which Campbell resolves the picture of the universe. Wodehouse hits on the one weakness in the hero of Campbell’s heroic model.

In Wodehouse’s story, the author describes a businessman who is the master of his own domain (not like that!). He masters business with ease, and so he decides to take up golf, which he also masters with an unbelievable and totally unrealistic ease, as well. But ‘The Heel of Achilles’ comes when his wives show up and throw his game into confusion.

Modern and Medieval Feminism

The reason I chose this to most people obscure work of literature is that it feeds into my general experience with a long line of literature going back to The Canterbury Tales (from which I derive the title of my own book Poker Tales. Get it?). In ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ Chaucer cites the phrase Mulier est hominis confusio (‘woman is man’s ruin”). In Chaucer’s comical work, the appearance of women in a man’s world is both an obstacle to perfect knowledge and a guide to more satisfying and complete knowledge at the same time.

I will deal with the implications of that phrase when I deal with the last of the Day Two chapters, which deal with the legacy of the legacy of the ‘modern’ discovery of this ancient idea in Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s telling and retelling of the ‘Tale of Griselda,’ which I continue in the marriage of another Walter to another Griselda.

This caused me a lot of grief when I was thinking about how I was going to market my book. As I’ve said many times, I was cowed by my academic experience. In particular, feminism has taken the tact that it is anti-authoritarian. Whereas men are authoritarian figures, women work under the surface, as it were. They work their wiles on men from positions that lack authority.

While I completely support this position, it was at the heart of my experience as a Nazi (in my rhetoric professor’s mind). I, who outlined my thoughts in advance, was trying to gain to stricter control over my environment in an environment where no one could gain complete control. She was attempting to loosen my iron grip on my students. She was wrong about what I was doing and why, but when I went into explain my position to her, she could see no more than that she was flexible and that I was not. My unwillingness to bend my position into alignment with hers served only as further proof that I was wrong. That’s how it was for the entire time I was in graduate school (though there were a few blessed exceptions). I was posited as a male authoritarian (usually a Nazi) who had to be put in his place in a world in which women were gaining new and previously unheard of power.

I actually had no problem with that. I have never been interested in the feminist grab after power, which according to Lord Acton corrupts people. They could have it, as far as I was concerned. I was looking for something else in my engagement with art. But the fact that no one could see anything other than a grasp for control using a thoroughly discredited conservatism continues to rankle me. I became a convenient bad guy. No one had to listen to my arguments; they knew on the basis of my making them that I was wrong. So they invoked me whenever they needed a paper tiger to knock down, and if I tried to defend my (then only partially-understood views) they would silence me. No one wanted to hear from such a backwards thinking thinker as me.

In any case, (no doubt on account of my medieval training) I have always tended to ascribe this anti-traditional position to Ovid, who said such things 2,000 years ago in opposition to the authoritarian poet Virgil and who is listed here as #8 on my all time favorite books of all time.

When it came time for me to write my own literature, I wanted to follow Ovid in my approach, drawing on my deep knowledge of literature but doing it in a way that was deceptively easy to follow. After all, I was hoping to sell my book to the mass of uninterested community college students, not a precious few academics. And I wanted my book to read like a work of a moment, much like The Canterbury Tales, which, between a serious beginning and a serious end comes a baldly comical middle in which things get blowed up real good. That’s my sort of movie book.

Comedy of Tragedy?

This leads me to my last point: is it comedy or tragedy? Well, in my opinion the book is pure comedy. For a sample, read the other free chapter for my comic explanation of love in Las Vegas, “‘Knuckles’ and ‘the Louse’”, and you’ll see what I mean.

But that perspective comes from your perspective as a reader who stands outside the book. From within the book, the experience of my main character (known as ‘the Kid’ on the basis of my having used Wodehouse’s abstract allegorical story in which a young man who is never named comes into a golf club and listens to stories told him by ‘The Oldest Member’; that, too, sprang from experience writing on allegory in my dissertation) who shows up at a club and listens to stories told by an ‘Old-Timer’ is far more tragic.

I make that point in the final paragraph by citing a Malamud quote about life: “Life responds to one’s moves with comic counterinventions.” But I don’t actually cite it. So my question about my own work is whether I expect my reader to understand that that is what I am citing. And as a writer who wants to have his work read critically, my answer is ‘yes, my reader should know the full range of my knowledge.’

But a better question for you my reader is whether you do you know it? And the answer to that is ‘Probably not.’ (Okay, who am I kidding; it’s ‘No.’) The difference between our actual knowledge of our situation in the world, even of ourselves and the contents of our own minds, is cast in doubt by the difference between ‘knowledge that we should know’ and the actual and far more limited knowledge that we do in fact possess.

That’s why people rely on critics telling them things they don’t know rather than deciding that what they don’t know won’t hurt them and adhering to their own limited experience as the judge of all. And that is why I am writing this series of interpretive articles on my silly book. I didn’t want to actually make people who read my light work of fiction struggle with the mountain of knowledge that I have built my picture of the universe out of. It would completely ruin the effect that I am aiming at, which is more like the Renaissance doctrine of sprezzatura (hiding your work behind an easy facade).

But be careful about following me too deeply into the rabbit hole of knowledge in my critical articles which I will continue to post once a week on my blog for free until I am done. Next week in my essay on ‘In the City That Never Sleeps,’ I will explore my belief that too much knowledge is a bad thing anyway (yes, I actually believe this). If you get too serious about knowledge, you will miss its comic aspect.

That would be the greatest tragedy of all.

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