JONATHAN LETHEM & the GOAT MAN

Nora Robertson brings back a report of his Portland appearance.

Last Thursday, the Portland Arts & Lectures series brought Jonathan Lethem to Portland. Onstage at the Schnitz, about a third of the way in, Lethem told a dirty joke. I wanted to see his face, but we were up in the nosebleeds, Tiffany muttering something about her great-great-aunt’s opera glasses sadly left behind at home. It wasn’t a really dirty joke, just naughty, told oddly in almost the same rhythm my New York Jewish grandma uses to tell naughty jokes.

A keynote speaker at a parapsychology conference asks who has seen a ghost. Easily fifty percent raise their hand. Then the guy asks of those hands, who has talked to a ghost. Still about 30-40 hands in the air. Then he asks of those people, "Who has made love to a ghost?" Only one hand remains. He asks him, "Really, you've made love to a ghost?" The guy says, "Oh, ghost? I thought you said goat."

For the rest of Lethem’s talk, there was a key figure, the Goat Man, an archetypal dude whose presence “speaks to a world in which every ghost has become a goat.”  One of Lethem’s pet themes seems to be the substitution of one thing for another, more painful thing. Similar to his notion of the beard in The Disappearing Artist, the Goat Man is a distraction, an “insteadness” subbed in for the ghost which is whatever we as a culture prefer not to look at. Examples: OJ Simpson or Don Eames instead of the persistence of racism, violence in cartoons rather than violence between nations or within families, saving whales or the unborn rather than living human beings. The goat becomes a scapegoat. Our own complicity can be overlooked.

Then Lethem had to go there. It’s not just the everyday mass-media culprits. Artists are goat people too—tricksters, interrupters, dealers in metaphors and distractions of all kinds. We’re not to be trusted. We’re addicted to symbols.  We poison our readers and audiences with madness and deliberate mistakes, a magic of making people believe this alternate world.

Mebbe so, mebbe so, but I have to agree with his later point that artists also serve as society’s neotonists, hanging on to a child’s ability to experiment and learn despite our failing and failing, repeatedly. That has to be worth something. Art may be a deep insteadness, but it also can be a way of envisioning the world in a new way, with the beginner’s mind of a child. In a world often “damaged and made insensate”, despite those black holes of loss, perhaps Goat Man can sometimes function as more than a distraction.  ---Nora Robertson