Thoughts on Mike Perry's Population 485 as a Mystory

    My friend just glanced over at my mostly bare screen and commented on its few words of text:  Pabst, Goldsmith, lawn art, eureka. He looks back at me with eyes begging for an explanation, but I only shrug.  How do I explain, especially to a math major, the process of redefining one’s self-perception of privilege and culture, and beyond, through literature? Michael Perry is a writer of Mystory; throughout his 2002 memoir Population 485 he shares how a collection of texts has helped him construct his identity.  In Textbook, Scholes defines a Mystory,   

“a cognitive map by means of which one locates one’s position within the ‘popcycle’--the set of institutions and their discourses that constructed one’s identity. [O]ne juxtaposes the products of the different discourses in one composition. The repetitions or correspondences that emerge in the intertext among one’s different experiences produce a eureka effect--the epiphany. [...] What is new here is the application of the research to emotional and poetic rather than strictly informational ends (246, 282).  

To better understand the genre of Mystory, I will analyze some passages from Perry to uncover his Mystory’s crucial parts. First, I will identify some of the “juxtaposing” texts through which he complicates his ideologies. Next, I will find points of “epiphany” in which Perry expresses a clearer vision of how he redefines himself. In the end, I will have a better idea of how one writer belnds his emotional, critical, and sometimes conflicting, beliefs, which will help me as I consider topics and forms for my own Mystory.

    In his chapter, “Tricky,” Perry explores his relationship with his hometown New Auburn, Wisconsin and how this constructs his current identity, as both a townsperson and as an outsider. Perry offers the town’s name’s origin story. “New Auburn” comes from “an eighteenth-century elegiac pastoral” called “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith (37). While some readers might expect Perry to continue his memoir sanctifying the peaceful pastures and the simplicity of sleepy, grazing sheep from Goldsmith, Perry makes a point to show the town’s grit and honesty, which Perry finds depicted, in particular, in his neighbor house’s display of lawn trash: “rust and desperation are never more than a backyard away” (38).  Here, Perry begins to uncoil a thread he will use throughout the chapter to address the classist tension between the social expectations he must negotiate as a citizen of New Auburn and as a worldly, acclaimed writer.  Perry continues,

“Someone calls you white trash, you go with it, and fight like hell to keep your trash. You understand it is only a matter of distinctions: yuppies with their shiny trash, church ladies with their hand-stitched trash, solid citizens with their secret trash” (38).

In this way, Perry juxtaposes the texts of Goldsmith’s eighteenth century poetry with the unconventional text of neighbors’ lawn trash. Through this comparison, Perry is commenting on how possession and ownership are important to the townspeople, despite social class, especially because such ownership can work as a tangible, visual marker of self-representation.

Perry extends his analysis of lawn trash as self-representation to reclaiming lawn trash as art: “Rearranging the detritus covering their law, my neighbors become curators of found sculpture. Because I am rooted in this place, it does not strike me as absurd to love the junk.” (44).  Here, Perry is commenting on the importance of perspective when defining something like cultural like art, which is traditionally thought to be defined by the timelessness, universality, and critics, such as the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s C. Colston Burrell who gives permission for collectors of lawn ornaments to “lighten up and fret less about being tasteful” (44-45). But Perry reclaims it as New Auburn’s own: “Grab yourself a Pabst and a pack of string cheese, Mr. Burrell, and welcome to our garden party [...] The wooden tulip, the plastic sunflower, the bergonia-filled toilet? [...]The miniature Green Bay Packer on a rope swing? Armed with jigsaws and leftover house paint, we have been expanding the boundaries--and plumbing the depths--of yard ornamentation for decades,” which also includes plywood cut-outs of granny-behinds and little boys peeing (45). Here, Perry redefines the texts of lawn ornamentation, which he seems to read both ironically and unironically, as evidence of New Auburn’s culture, and not to be looked down upon by purveyors of supposed high art. Perry concludes, “Then, reading the encyclopedia one day, I hit on it.  The most popular tourist attraction in Belgium is a sculpture dating back to the fourteenth century. IT was a bronze statuette of.. a little boy peeing” (47). Perry has the last word here, and these examples make for strong evidence in building his case that “the remnants of aesthetic,” which is important to him as a writer, exists in his hometown, and while “not immediately evident in our detritus” is “ours to claim, nonetheless” (51). Thus, through his rereading of lawn objects, Perry redeems the lawn art of New Auburn to be just as culturally significant as the high art of Europe’s museums.

In his chapter, “My People,” Perry continues to address how self-representation, even in New Auburn, works to “negotiate the terms of belonging,” including Perry’s own sense of inclusion (108). He offers a discussion of texts that range from a Sheryl Crow music video celebrating Americana to the store-brand condiments offered at New Auburn’s smelt feed. Perry beings, “I consider my loyalties divided between the Gun Rack Crowd and the Pale and Tortured Contingent.  Commonalities of spirit and pretension abound.  The man in the Hooters cap and the woman with the NPR tote bag are not promoting restaurants and radio…[but] are tools of the proselyte pushing orthodoxy via aphorism” (108-109). Here, Perry juxtaposes the texts that define his own identity as a hunter and poet, with these political examples. As both a writer and farmboy, Perry finds that when introducing himself as a writer to members of his hometown he must preface his chosen career with the metaphor for writing as cleaning out calf pens: “That is, you just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice” (110).  While some members of the literary crowd might find this comment self-deprecating or even offensive, Perry is skillful in the way he navigates both identities and bridges the two. He describes how this social navigation is challenging: “I returned, and the land felt right. The land takes you back.  All you have to do is show up.  Finding your place among the people, now, that is a different proposition” (111).

To continue to place himself as both an insider and outside of New Auburn, Perry compares his work as an author to the work of the town’s founder, bestselling 1875 author David W. Cartwright, whose Natural History of Western Wild Animals, is now catalogued as a historical artifact. Cartwright’s text, which Perry respects, was also created with the help of a ghostwriter, and would not score as highly in literary value, yet it is perhaps a text the people of New Auburn today, Perry suggests, are more likely to appreciate than his own essays and poetry. But Perry takes ownership: “Overtly and covertly, we stake out our persona” and continues to make connections between his two identities rather than viewing them as mutually exclusive (116).  Perry creates another metaphor that links the creation of art to the hard work of a hunter, but still the prejudice against those who don’t earn a life through manual lingers: “In my experience, art is not to be awaited; it is to be chased down, cornered, and beaten into submission with a stick. This belief correlates to Tom McGuane’s and my worrying about our hands.  Working-class prejudice never quite shakes the idea of art as frivolity, and frivolity has pink palms” (119). Here, Perry suggests that this prejudice is something that has challenged him and continues to do so, especially as he works to make a life in New Auburn. But Perry continues to offer his quiet epiphanies throughout: “The studio sits at the edge of an abandoned farmstead, a lily amid a stand of pulp.  It is an anomaly only if you think art belongs somewhere else” (119). Thus, Perry makes peace with his dual identity and offers the common goal of finding “hope...to reconcile the dichotomies and negotiat[ing) a position of comfort” (123).

    In the book’s final chapter, “Penultimate ,” Perry continues his pattern of using land, and his yard, as a metaphor for shaping identity. Perry tells the story of the underground of his backyard, which he suggests is a symbol for how our histories can inform how we come to live and act out our ideologies.  Underneath the surface of Perry’s backyard he finds glass, charcoal, rusted nails, and litter. But during his research he also finds evidence of the elm trees that used to grow there (200). Upon reflection, Perry realizes that “if we’re going to settle in a place, we like to dig around a little, get a sense of what came before us [...] we dig for threads and echoes, all correlating past to present” (200-1). In essence, this is what a Mystory can do for its writer. It can collect the “threads and echoes” of identity into kaleidoscopic from which we can examine, in shifting and prismatic patterns, how texts continue to shape and reshape our lives.