Walt Whitman's Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Abstract

In this essay, I will attempt to examine and evaluate of Walt Whitman in Maxine Hong Kingston's 1989 novel, Tripmaster Monkey: Fake Book. The Whitmanian presence is discernible via a character analysis of protagonist (Wittman Sing), a study of allusive chapter titles, and an examination of overall thematic thrust of book. Such an investigation will reveal remarkable cultural interaction between Walt Whitman, nineteenth century idealist-democrat-humanist, and Maxine Hong Kingston, twentieth century Asian American-modernist. A tangential benefit of this exploration will be a partial understanding of continuing influence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a primary text/guide for American democratic experiment, with special reference to Asian American community. The plot of Tripmaster Monkey is clearly subordinate to Wittman Sing's song of himself. I quote below Tom Wilhelmus's concise plot summary: Wittman does what we suppose he would do. He cruises around San Francisco, reads Rilke aloud to passengers on a Bay Area bus, yearns after beautiful women, loses job in a department store after conferring with ex-Yale Younger Poet holed up in stock room, gets stoned in Berkeley, gets married on Coit Tower by a man who may or may not be a bona fide minister, visits parents and aunties in Sacramento, makes a side trip to Reno looking for a woman who may or may not be grandmother, and winds up fulfilling principal ambition which is to stage a play based upon epic Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms at a theater in Chinatown. (149) All this supposed plot exists to give Wittman sufficient expanse for solitary musings, an interior monologue strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. The Whitmanian content of Tripmaster Monkey is evident, to begin with, in fact that its protagonist, Wittman Sing, is named after quintessential American poet, Walt Whitman. The narrator reports of Wittman that His is America, America, province (41). Michelle Cliff observes: underline Americanness of Wittman, Hong Kingston has named him for most American of American poets. To play with name is irresistible. Whitman body electric. Wittman, hear America Singing (11). And many other word plays are certainly possible; for example, Of Thee Sing and One's-Self Sing and Ah Hear It Was Charged Against Me.(1) One might observe in passing that many of personalities invoked in this novel of 1960s are intellectual and artistic disciples of Walt Whitman, monkey spirits attempting to change American society through elaborate costuming and posturing--Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman,(2) William Carlos Williams,(3) Jack Spicer,(4) James Baldwin, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and many others. It is, therefore, Whitmanian tradition in American literature, and not merely Walt Whitman himself or Leaves of Grass alone, that predominates in this novel. But it is Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass who wrote Facing West From California's Shores (Whitman 110-11) that Wittman recites from top of Coit Tower, where he can see Alcatraz and Angel Island (places he longs to turn into theatres). The mantra is appropriate for place, and thematically it is fitting, since an awakening and discovery of a new world is announced; Wittman's car is parked next to statue of Christopher Columbus, who stands with his nose toward Golden Gate and Pacific beyond (Tripmaster Monkey 161). Thus Whitman Sing, like the poet father tried to name him after, looks toward Orient in meditation, house of maternity, where Columbus's circle would be circled; where East and West would, in fact, achieve reconciliation; where American society would achieve a spiritual unity (all this reminiscent of Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry). …