1 Fred Mason

W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe
The Fairy Tale, the Hero’s Quest, and the Magic Realism of Baseball

Baseball is probably the sport most written about by fiction writers; indeed, as David McGimpsey notes, “baseball has in fact gained a highbrow, literary reputation that no other American sport, and very few objects of American culture, enjoy” (2000, 2). McGimpsey (2000, 2) notes that the genre of baseball literature has many consistent tropes: baseball is a natural, God-given sport; it allows people to be judged on quantifiable merit; it is connected to the simplicity of childhood; it brings fathers and sons together. More cynical tropes can also be found: baseball can be corrupted by its fixed monopoly at the professional level, and its “purity” is always under threat, with a nostalgic nod to “how it used to be.” W. P. Kinsella’s novels and short stories have contributed heavily to the genre of baseball fiction, beginning with Shoeless Joe in 1982 (Steele 2011, 17), and his work almost always expresses some of these tropes.

Kinsella’s fiction, especially the novel Shoeless Joe, has received much attention from literary scholars. Historian Dan Nathan suggests that “in terms of the amount of critical attention it has received, Shoeless Joe’s only rival as far as baseball fiction goes is Bernard Malamud’s [1952 novel] The Natural” (2003, 154). Among other topics, scholars have focused on Kinsella’s writing style (Boe 1983; Easton 1999; Fischer 2000), on Shoeless Joe’s connection to other literature about baseball’s pastoral roots (Carino 1994; Garman 1994; Altherr 1990), on Kinsella’s complex portrayal of father-son relationships (Hollander 1999; Mesher 1992; Morrow 2002; Pellow 1991), and on how the novel’s nostalgia for baseball’s past is overly conservative and excludes women and people of colour (Garman 1994; McGimpsey 2000, Vanderwerken 1998). However, what sets Kinsella’s work apart from that of other baseball writers, is his heavy use of the fantastical, such as ghostly ballplayers, and his tendency to slip easily between different spaces and different times on rural ball fields. Drawing on analyses of other academic writers, this essay focuses on how Shoeless Joe employs mythical elements of the fairy tale and quest story, as well as metafictional techniques (blending elements of the real world into the fictional narrative), to portray baseball as a spiritual phenomenon.

W. P. KINSELLA AND BASEBALL FICTION

In a number of interviews, W. P. Kinsella indicated that he would be happy to be described as a “baseball writer,” even though he insisted that “the best sports literature isn’t really about sports. I, for instance, write love stories that have baseball as a background” (quoted in Horvath and Palmer 1987, 186). In addition to Shoeless Joe, Kinsella wrote five short story collections related to baseball (1980, 1984, 1988, 1993, 2000) and five baseball novels (1986, 1991, 1996, 1998, 2011). What became the novel Shoeless Joe started out as the short story “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa,” the title story of his first short story collection. Kinsella wrote the story while at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1978, intending to express his love for the land around him. The story became the first chapter of the novel. While he had had previous success as a short story writer, the novel established Kinsella’s career and allowed him to take up writing as a full-time profession.

Although Kinsella wrote frequently about baseball, it appears he had little involvement with the sport itself. Like the novel’s main character, Ray Kinsella, the writer grew up with his father telling him stories about baseball (Murray 1987, 39). However, the real Kinsella never played as a child and only became a fan as an adult (Horvath and Palmer 1987, 184). As his relationship with the sport developed, Kinsella came to see baseball as a place for myth and dreams. As he told Don Murray (1987, 38), baseball, unlike other sports, is not limited by time or space. A tied baseball game could theoretically go on forever: one of Kinsella’s novels, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, features a ball game that goes on for forty days and forty nights. Kinsella also noted that “on the true baseball field, the foul lines diverge forever, the field eventually encompassing a goodly portion of the world, and there is theoretically no distance that a great hitter couldn’t hit the ball or a great fielder run to retrieve it. . . . This openness makes for larger than life characters, for mythology” (quoted in Horvath and Palmer 1987, 188). Starting with Shoeless Joe, Kinsella, probably more than any other fiction writer to date, turned to baseball for mythic possibilities.

MAGIC REALISM AND THE FANTASTICAL

A marker of much of Kinsella’s writing, particularly in Shoeless Joe, is his use of magic realism, a literary technique that incorporates surreal or fantastic elements into an otherwise realistic, even mundane world (Hamblin 1992, 3). Shoeless Joe, mostly set on a small, simple family farm in Iowa, includes time travel, voices “from beyond,” and deceased ballplayers who emerge from a cornfield to display their skills again. The storyline of the novel is largely driven by commands given by disembodied voices. Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice that says “If you build it, he will come” (Kinsella 1982, 3). Ray somehow innately knows that the “he” referred to his father’s hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of eight Chicago Black Sox players banned from baseball for fixing the 1919 World Series. “It” is a ball field. Despite financial difficulties and ridicule from his neighbours, Ray plows under part of his cornfield to build a ballpark. After three years, he has only managed to create a small section of left field, but it is enough to get Shoeless Joe Jackson to appear. Over time, more players from the Black Sox appear as Ray completes more of the field. The voice also tells Ray, “Ease his pain,” which he interprets, with complete certainty, to mean that he should travel across the country, retrieve reclusive author J. D. Salinger, and take him to a major league ball game (Kinsella, 1982, 27-28). Salinger and Ray both see a vision on the scoreboard, and both hear a voice that sends them on a trip back across the country to investigate the life of Archie Graham, who played one inning in the majors. While Salinger initially has doubts, Ray never does, and the voice, as if from on high, always ends up sending those who hear it to do the things they need to do. While the voice is seemingly omniscient and otherworldly, the actions it calls people to do occur in very simple, everyday places, like a cornfield in Iowa, the outfield stands of Fenway Park, and a small town in northern Minnesota.

Chisholm, Minnesota is the site of a major plot turn that links to the fantastical through a form of time travel. While Ray and Salinger are in town, it seems that their investigations into Graham revive the town’s memory of him. While out for a midnight stroll, Ray encounters the elderly Doctor Graham, who is long deceased. Ray realizes that he has experienced some sort of time slippage:

As we walk, I note subtle differences in the buildings and sidewalks. Some of the newer houses on Second Street appear to have been replaced by older ones. There are business signs along Lake Street that weren’t there yesterday. Can it be that I am the one who has crossed some magical line between fantasy and reality? That it is Doc who is on solid turf, and I have entered into the past as effortlessly as chasing a butterfly across a meadow? (118)

They go to Graham’s office for coffee and conversation, and Graham admits that his one wish in life was to bat in the major leagues. Ray returns to his hotel room, thereby travelling forward in time to his own present. On their way out of town, Ray and Salinger pick up a hitchhiker, a young Archie Graham with bat and glove, headed out west to find a ball club. Ray tells him of his field in Iowa, and Archie agrees to go with them. When the ghost players appear after Ray and his companions get back to the farm, Graham is told that he has a contract with them, and he joins the players on the field. The ghostly Black Sox, like Graham, have a strong timeless quality: they appear in their athletic prime, despite the decades that have passed.

Rebirth and revival of characters are standard features in many fantasy tales, as well as in the origin myths of many of the world’s religions. In the novel Shoeless Joe, rebirth and transformation are central to everything. We see the rebirth of players, initially Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other Black Sox, and later others, including Ray’s father, who was a minor league catcher. However, their presence is largely limited, in space and time, to Ray’s field and to game time. One exception is Archie Graham whom Ray and Salinger meet in the world beyond the farm. Once Graham starts playing at Ray’s field, though, he transfers from one “realm” to another and exists only as a young player who comes and goes—that is, until he makes the choice to once again become Doc Graham in order to save the life of Ray’s daughter, Karin, when she is choking. Graham transmogrifies, ultimately choosing self-sacrifice in being unable to return to the field as a player, much like a mythical hero. Another central character who experiences miraculous transformation is Eddie Scissons, the die-hard Cubs fan who claims to be “the oldest living Cub.” One night at Ray’s ballpark, the usually wispy opponents are surprisingly visible as the Chicago Cubs from the 1910s. Scissons sees a young version of himself called in as a relief pitcher, with disastrous results. His younger self blows a lead and is pulled from the game. After some initial distress over this episode, Eddie comes to see it as a reaffirmation of his obsession with baseball as a fan; he delivers a speech to the players about baseball as a form of religion and truth for the world. Later in the novel, Scissons dies and we learn he changed his will to request burial in Ray’s field. His symbolic rebirth, though a disaster, enables a rebirth of his belief in baseball.

Mythical stories with fantastical dimensions and great heroes serve to impart life lessons and to create bonds and a sense of community (Schwartz 1987, 137–38). Sporting practices in our modern world often take on mythic dimensions, since sport is one of the few cultural practices that can regularly offer us heroes. In his baseball writing, W. P. Kinsella consistently tapped into the mythical potential he saw in the game of baseball. Shoeless Joe has many similarities to folk and fairy tales, and it contains a number of elements of the fantasy genre. In a classic essay originally written for presentation in 1939, J. R. R. Tolkien suggests that certain elements bring us into the “realm of the fairy-story,” a realm that includes the “real” by focusing on humans and what they do in the fairy realm but allows for the fantastical, like fairies, elves, dwarfs, and dragons—or in Shoeless Joe, reborn players and time slippage (Tolkien 1964, 15-16). Crucially, in such stories, magic must be taken seriously: it must not be satirical or comic; it must be presented as true, as part of the story frame itself; and it typically helps with human desires (Tolkien 1964, 17–19).

The plot of Shoeless Joe is propelled by magic: several times in the novel, Ray refers to the idea of feeling “the magic” growing before crucial events happen (Kinsella, 1982, 10; 115; 187; 202). But for others to participate in the magic, to see the ghostly players and the ballpark itself, they must believe in the magical possibilities of baseball. While Ray’s immediate family members, Salinger, and Scissons experience the ballpark in its full dimension—with announcers, crowds, sights and sounds—others, such as Annie’s brother Mark and Ray’s brother Richard, initially see only the onlookers, the “real” people, sitting in a ramshackle bleacher on a ballpark surrounded by corn. Richard Schwartz argues that because some characters can see the ballplayers and others cannot, readers of Shoeless Joe have to be willing to accept that the phantoms are on the same level of reality in the narrative as the other characters, or the story falls apart. He suggests that “by leaving open the question of the phantoms’ reality, Kinsella extends the opportunity for experiencing faith to the readers themselves,” requiring that readers take “a leap of faith” (1987, 145).

Writing on the importance of belief in relation to the genre of fantasy and fairy tales, Tolkien noted:

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief rises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. (Tolkien 1964, 36)

Tolkien put the onus for creating belief on the author, the “sub-creator” of the story. Other scholars, such as Neil Randall (1987) and Donald Morse (1998) argue that fictional works with fantastical elements like Shoeless Joe make demands upon readers, demands for a willing suspension of disbelief, for cooperation in sustaining belief (Morse 1998, 352). Since readers are required to accept such things as a magical ballpark in the cornfields of Iowa on the same level as the more realistic events in the novel, they must, in some sense, become co-creators of the narrative (Randall 1987,175). Belief is multi-layered in Shoeless Joe. The novel criticizes belief in organized religion as being self-serving, and insists that characters must believe in baseball and its possibilities to become full participants at Ray’s field. Similarly, the novel demands that readers suspend disbelief in order to enter the story fully. I might suggest that some critics, such as Bruce Brooks (1983, 22–24), or other readers who do not like the novel, may be unable or unwilling to maintain the required suspension of disbelief when faced with such fantastical elements in what is ostensibly a baseball novel.

METAFICTIONAL TECHNIQUES IN SHOELESS JOE

To complicate the question of what is believable in his writing, W. P. Kinsella often enters into metafiction, where fact and fiction are blended together so that the reader has difficulty knowing where one ends and the other begins (Morse 2004, 309). Shoeless Joe includes a number of real-world people as characters (Salinger, Graham, and Jackson himself) but fictionalizes them in the narrative and places them in all sorts of fantastic situations. Kinsella also incorporates “facts” that turn out not to be true at all. The blending and blurring of fact and fiction so that they are difficult to distinguish is a key feature of the novel.

The most obvious real-world person in the book is the title character, Shoeless Joe Jackson. The Black Sox scandal of 1919, the fixing of the World Series, Joe Jackson’s implication in the events, and the subsequent banning of the eight players for life are all historical facts. However, once Joe Jackson steps out of history and onto Ray’s ball field, he becomes a fictional character. Kinsella’s version of Jackson’s past is almost entirely based on the stories told by Ray’s father, which sympathetically frame Jackson and the other Black Sox as so-called “victims of the system.” Ray’s ball field is a place where the players are all absolved of their transgressions and are known simply for their love of the game (Nathan 2003, 155–56). As Joe says, “I loved the game [. . .] I’d have played for food money” (Kinsella 1982, 8). It is notable that Ray avoids actually asking Jackson about his guilt; indeed, he only thinks of it once, on the first night Jackson shows up (Steele 2011, 115). In his cultural history of the Black Sox scandal, Daniel Nathan notes that Shoeless Joe was at the forefront of a number of literary works and films in the 1980s that re-envisioned the scandal and shifted the public perception of the players in a much more positive direction (2003, 153–56).

The reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, the author of the classic coming-of age novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is, of course, also a real-world figure. Like he does in Shoeless Joe, the real Salinger stayed out of the public eye, refused interviews, and threatened to sue those who wrote about him (Cutchins 2002, 74). Donald Morse suggests that since Salinger was so reclusive, he was more “real” in the imaginations of fans than he was in reality (2004, 312). Similarly, most of the rumours that Ray uncovers in his research on Salinger were made up by W. P. Kinsella, as was the interview Salinger gave about baseball that convinces Ray to go to him (Boe 1983, 181; Murray 1987, 49). Thus, Salinger’s “love of baseball” is the novel writer’s fictional creation. W. P. Kinsella could get away with Salinger’s inclusion in the novel because his representation of the man is obviously fictional (e.g., “Jerry” goes off into the unknown with the ghostly ballplayers at the end) and reasonably sympathetic, with no malice intended on Kinsella’s part (Cutchins 2002, 74n5). Such clearly fictional aspects did little to mollify the intensely private author, however. Salinger did not like his inclusion as a character in Shoeless Joe and threatened legal action for the film adaptation, which led to his replacement with the entirely fictional Terrence Mann, played by James Earl Jones (Pellow 1991, 23).

Many readers of Shoeless Joe may be surprised to learn that Archie Graham was a real person who actually played only half an inning of major league baseball and went on to become a small-town doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota. The Chisholm newspaper editorial that Ray reads in the novel actually exists and is included in Graham’s player file at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library (Steele 2011, 121). W. P. Kinsella read about Graham in a baseball encyclopedia and decided to write him into one of his stories. Kinsella himself undertook a research trip to Chisholm, much like Ray and Salinger do in the novel. In an amusing anecdote that illustrates the confusion of fact and fiction, Kinsella told Don Murray that the librarian in Chisholm maintained that J. D. Salinger actually accompanied Kinsella on his research trip (1987, 48). Furthermore, the inclusion of Graham as a character in the novel and film inspired other researchers to write a biography of his life (Friedlander and Reising 2009), further blending the real and the imaginary.

Another fictional character with a real-world stand-in is Eddie Scissons. Although an entirely fictional character, Scissons is based on a man whom Kinsella met on a street corner in Iowa City (the same way Ray meets Eddie), a man who falsely claimed to have played for the Chicago Cubs (Murray 1987, 48). Kinsella later wrote the short story “The Eddie Scissons Syndrome” (1988, 137–52), in which a psychologist references the character in the novel Shoeless Joe—fiction referencing other fiction, as fiction, all by the same author.

The merging of W. P. Kinsella and his narrator, Ray Kinsella, further blends reality and fiction. While it is overly simplistic to conflate author and persona, Kinsella encourages such a reading (Boe 1983, 182), even beyond the shared last name. The similarities are too many to be coincidence. Both W. P. and Ray grew up on their fathers’ baseball stories; both have a deep love for Iowa; both had previous unhappy careers as insurance salesmen; and W. P.’s first wife was named Anne while Ray’s wife is Annie (Morse 1998, 354; Murray 1987, 7; Steele 2011, 192). Such interweaving of reality and fiction often leaves readers guessing what is true and what is made up. Robert Hamblin offers a clever analogy for the “mix of fact and fabrication” in Shoeless Joe and Kinsella’s other work (1992, 3). Kinsella’s readers, he writes, are like batters facing a pitcher with a mix of pitches, never entirely sure what is coming. The clearly factual material is like a hard, straight fastball. We see a lot of curves, as well, when Kinsella delivers “that spin of distortion that fiction puts on straight fact” (4). Sometimes, what Kinsella offers is so obviously surreal fantasy that it is like a knuckleball—a pitch that we know is coming, yet it still deceives and gives trouble (5). Kinsella’s frequent use of “fact-that-turns-out-to-be-fiction, and fiction-that-turns-out-to-be-fact” is like a split-fingered fastball (6–7). It looks like a straight fastball, but then it deceptively moves and the bottom drops out of it, becoming a curve. With Kinsella, we can never be too sure what is truth and what is fiction—at least, not without a lot of fact-checking. Kinsella’s metafictional interweaving of fact and fiction complicates the idea of reality, suggesting that reality is multi-layered and may not be that far removed in form or function from what we see in myth (Schwartz 1987, 144).

SHOELESS JOE AS HEROIC QUEST

The fantastical elements of Shoeless Joe make strong demands on readers (Randall 1987, 175), but they may be assisted in suspending their disbelief by the fact that the structure of Shoeless Joe reflects a familiar form: the “heroic quest” narrative. The idea of the heroic quest comes from a classic piece of literary criticism, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949. In this wide-ranging work, Campbell argues that across cultures and over time, many origin stories, fairy tales, and myths have a similar structure, which amounts to a “monomyth.” This monomyth suggests that heroes in a story are expected to move through a number of sub-stages (Campbell breaks it down to eighteen in total), which fit into three more general stages: “separation or departure,” where they leave everyday life to start a quest; “trials and victories of initiation,” where heroes must find within themselves the resources needed to accomplish their goals and overcome challenges; and “return and integration with society,” where the now changed heroes bring back the “boon” they have achieved and must find a way to reintegrate, which is often the hardest stage (Campbell 2008, 28–29).

Ray Kinsella’s overall journey in Shoeless Joe maps well onto the stages and sub-stages of this classic heroic quest.¹ Ray starts with an “openness to adventure” in his willingness to believe that baseball can work magic in people’s lives (Campbell 2008, 42). He receives a “call to adventure” in the voice telling him to build a ballpark (42-44). He must “cross the first threshold” and make a leap of faith when he sets out to convince Salinger to come with him (64). He faces many trials and “ordeals by fire”: people constantly doubt him and he doubts himself, and he risks losing his farm and his family’s future to keep the dream ballpark going (81-84). There is an “apotheosis” (becoming god-like) in Ray’s ability to help others achieve redemption, or live out their wishes, and a “receiving of the boon” when Ray gets to meet his own father (127-129, 148-150). Ray’s apotheosis extends to the world beyond the farm, as we expect other seekers, others on a journey, to come to his field at the end and receive a boon, as well. There is ultimately a “last threshold” and “reincorporation” when Ray realizes it is Salinger, not he, who will get to travel into the ghost players’ world with them (188-189, 196-198). Ray is jealous but realizes he is needed by his family and by the ballpark, as the ongoing caretaker. Through all of this, Ray’s journey, although geographically limited for the most part to a cornfield in Iowa, is similar to that of many an epic hero.

In Shoeless Joe, sport has the ability to be apotheotic, to lift people into some sort of sacred world. We clearly see Kinsella’s use of baseball for its mythic potential in how he uses aspects of the fantastic and sends Ray on a hero’s journey. Like other forms of myth, Kinsella sees baseball as a place where life lessons can be learned, rebirth and renewal can happen, communities can form, and people can have a spiritual experience. However, with Kinsella, spiritual does not mean religious, at least not in the sense of organized religion. Much of the academic literature on Shoeless Joe focuses on Kinsella’s critique of organized religion and his holding up of baseball as a means of spiritual development (see Altherr, 1990; Beach 1998; Joffe 1992; Lord 1992). For example, any characters who are identified with organized religion are framed negatively. Annie’s mother is described as a woman who judges everyone on religious grounds, who looks with disapproval at just about everyone, and who revels in her self-righteousness: “When there were lulls in the conversation she read her Bible, sneering a little in her perfection” (Kinsella 1982, 23). Annie’s brother Mark—who “also has brothers named Matthew, Luke, and John” (24)—subscribes to a form of evangelical Christianity, yet is also a rapacious capitalist and the main villain of the novel. The Christians in Shoeless Joe are joyless and allow religion to disrupt their social relationships (Beach 1998, 87).

The believers in baseball, however, achieve spiritual enlightenment. That baseball can be a form of secular religion, and one that substitutes for organized religion that is no longer viable (Cochran 1987, 32), is made clear throughout the novel. Shoeless Joe Jackson says, “This must be Heaven,” and Ray replies, “No, it’s Iowa” (Kinsella 1982, 16). Before he dies, Eddie Scissons delivers what Timothy Lord refers to as “the sermon on the bleachers” (1992, 47). Looking “for all the world like an Old Testament Prophet on the side of a mountain,” Eddie tells everyone that “the word is baseball,” and asks, “Can you imagine walking around with the very word of baseball enshrined inside you? Because the word of salvation is baseball. It gets inside you. Inside me. And the words that I speak are spirit, and are baseball” (Kinsella 1982, 191-192).² In these ways, baseball explicitly supplants organized religion—in particular, Christianity—as a place for belief, redemption, and community in Shoeless Joe, taking on the functions of religion and mythos.

CONCLUSION

Shoeless Joe is a canonical work of baseball literature and a fascinating exploration of America’s national pastime by a Canadian writer. It departs from other baseball fiction in its magic realism, its demands of readers to buy into fantastical elements, and its sending of characters, and readers, on spiritual quests. The elements that set it apart are the very things that some readers and critics dislike. Shoeless Joe certainly has its faults—a naïve optimism, an excess of metaphor, a nostalgia for a time that makes it less inclusive. However, the combination of real-world people with surreal events, often in simple, realistic settings, contributes to its believability and moves it towards the mythic possibilities of baseball that Kinsella liked so much.

In W. P. Kinsella’s 1996 novel, If Wishes Were Horses, the character of Ray Kinsella resurfaces and narrates part of the novel. We learn that Ray’s field still has its magic and that he has become legendary for helping people achieve various dreams. Ray’s little cornfield ballpark in Iowa has become mythic itself. This is appropriate, since magic, dreaming, and myth are at the heart of W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. In allowing all of the characters in the novel to have their dreams fulfilled, Kinsella offers baseball (and Iowa) as a social world for dreams and dreamers. Shoeless Joe’s focus on myth and dreaming are what draw people into the novel—and often, into sport more generally. Sport is a world where myth sometimes lives and walks and where people can form a sense of identity and community through their fandom. This mythic function of modern sport is something Kinsella returns to again and again in his entire oeuvre of baseball writing.

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