With Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith Spins Dreams Into Topsy-Turvy Words

It’s a moving, witty, at times almost trance-like work traversing age, aging, sickness and death, as well as joy, gratitude and wonder.

Year of the MonkeyPatti Smith’s Year of the Monkey is a Book of Dreams, or, more accurately, a Book of Dreaming. It’s not, or not merely, a systematic transcription of the artist’s nocturnal journeys, but rather a book wherein the processes or mechanisms of dreaming determine the course and pulse of the narrative. There’s a canon, or at least a corpus, of this type of work, including preeminently the works of Franz Kafka, along with such unique creations as proto-surrealist Gerard de Nerval’s Aurelia, surrealist texts in general, and, to a more curious degree, Alice In Wonderland. Explicitly referencing pretty much all the above works or writers, along with many others (Smith has never been hero-shy), the book combines Carrollian topsy-turvy with the kind of hard-edged mystic surrealism that Smith is so famous for.

Smith is the ideal avatar for this kind of narrative because her style is so motile. She can go in any direction at any time. From her earliest days as poet-singer onward, she’s woven and fused multiple imageries, a lyrical bric-a-brac able to span centuries, from Joan of Arc to Arthur Rimbaud (one of her earliest heroes) to Jimi Hendrix. Allen Ginsberg once likened reading to time travel, to a reader linking up with a writer from another century and being essentially transported to that time in a very palpable way. Smith is such a time traveler. She seems to live in myriad epochs simultaneously, a spiritual ubiquity directly reflected, in Year of the Monkey, through her surroundings: “It is all about my desk with a cabinet portrait of the young Baudelaire and a photo-booth shot of a young Jane Bowles and an ivory Christ without arms and a small framed print of Alice conversing with the Dodo.”

The book chronicles a year of the poet’s movements across America and more far-flung places—besides being a time-traveler, Smith is a true planetary adventurer, a sought-after figure “slowly wading through a long chain of requests”—as she navigates the mysteries of mortality, both her own and that of others. The dreamlike nature of the journey is signified early. Smith checks in to the Dream Motel, where immediately personification commences. In dreams or Wonderland, anything can take the form and function of anything else:

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“–Thank you, Dream Motel, I said, half to the air, half to the [motel] sign.
–It’s the Dream Inn! the sign exclaimed.
–Oh yeah, sorry, I said, somewhat taken aback. Even so, I didn’t dream a thing.
–Oh really? Nothing!
–Nothing!”

The motel sign remains a constant voice, a kind of Cheshire Virgil nagging Smith through layers of dream. Indeed, throughout Year of the Monkey, she speaks playfully Alice-like to many inanimate objects, be it the motel sign or her puke-spattered boots: “…I was pulling my strings off my Stratocaster when some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots. The last gasp of 2015, a spray of vomit ushering in the New Year…I knelt down and cleaned up my boots. Happy New Year, I told them.”

Another strange, steady occurrence throughout the book is what Smith calls the “candy-wrapper phenomenon”: “The beach was littered with candy wrappers…hundreds of them, maybe thousands, scattering the beach like feathers after a molt […] When I reentered my room, I could see that I was still sleeping, so I waited, with the window open, till I awoke.” These candy wrappers and their continual eerie reappearance evoke that odd totemic potency that mundane objects acquire in dreams. This potency is also reflected in the Polaroids that Smith includes as “amulets” or “talismans,” hard evidence of soft dreams, somewhat the way André Breton, the surrealist movement’s staunchest statesman, incorporated on-the-spot off-kilter photographs into his seminal dream work, Nadja.

To dream or not to dream, that seems to be the question. “The fringe of dream, an evolving fringe at that! Maybe more of a visitation, a prescience of things to come.” For as much as it is a book of dreams, Year of the Monkey is also a Book of the Dead and Dying. Throughout, Smith worries over the health and death of two of her closest friends, and so sometimes seems not only to be conjuring dream logic, but charting her own post-death navigation plan as well: “[I wondered] whether my assessment of the usage of the word candy wrapper was correct. I wondered if the mundanity of my train of thought was hindering my progress […] Cycles of death and resurrection, but not always in the way we imagine. For instance, we might all resurrect looking way different, wearing outfits we’d never be caught dead in.”

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The book builds in visions and end-visions just as the election of Donald Trump looms. The Year of the Monkey gives way to the Year of the Rooster: “It was the 28th of January. The cock of the new year had arrived, a hideous thing with puffed chest and feathers the color of the sun. Too late too late too late, he crowed,” a kind of malignant overturning of the preceding wonderland, as well as a frightening carrion call. The prose becomes increasingly visionary, even biblical, with Smith’s incantatory prowess, her charging-horse delivery, at its most propulsive and insistent, advancing through repetition, invoking through breathless passages of prophecy too lengthy to quote and too powerful to take out of context, terrible visions of shunned migrancy and regenerative imagination.

Year of the Monkey is a kind of Patti in the Valley of the Shadow of Death or Patti in the Sadlands. This isn’t to say the book is regretful or self-pitying. Far from it. Rather, it’s a moving, witty, at times almost trance-like work traversing age, aging, sickness, and death, as well as joy, gratitude, and wonder. No longer the kid of her National Book Award-winning Just Kids, Smith (now 70) may be older, wiser and frailer, but she’s no less curious and curiouser.

Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey is available on September 24 from Knopf.

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Guy Crucianelli

Guy Crucianelli is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. His work has appeared at Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, and the Journal of Popular Culture.

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