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By Jesi Buell.
Lance Olsen, Always Crashing in the Same Car (Fiction Collective 2, 2023)
All art is unstable…
There is no authoritative voice,
there are only multiple readings.
They say “don’t meet your heroes” but I’ve found reading biographies of them to be much more upsetting. I don’t understand most hero worship but the closest I’ve come is with two men: Kurt Vonnegut and David Bowie. When I read Charles J. Shield’s biography of Vonnegut, it broke my heart to see my hero and his less desirable characteristics. So I had high expectations and even higher apprehensions reading Lance Olsen’s latest, which the publisher FC2 describes as “a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives.”
The novel is a hybrid scrapbook of Bowie memorabilia compiled by an academic writing on his sabbatical. This “love song” to Bowie is part biography, part criticism, part exploration of ageing and somehow, at the same time, the idea of “unfinalizability”. The narrator is a bit snobby, the kind of guy who uses words like “paratactical” and asserts that fans know Bowie least of all. He’s someone who lets you know that you’ve been interpreting “China Girl” wrong all these years. A bit of a Comic Book Guy, if you will. He exists tangentially in this text, like everyone else, only in their relation to Bowie. His role is interesting as the curator of Bowie facts but also in the way that he is a prototypical fan who Olsen transforms into a multidimensional man, mirroring how Bowie goes from a picture in a magazine, a myth, into a much more complex character. This book treats a life like a text that is being written as we read it and, in many ways, everyone outside of Bowie exists to illustrate another facet of the man. Both Bowie and the narrator are interested in “how others write him into themselves.” He becomes an amalgam of an expansive audience’s opinions and experiences. In fact, Bowie only remembers parts of himself once he’s “read about himself reading it in a biography about him.”
One of Bowie’s superpowers was his ability to “proclaim identities” and to express himself across all types of sensory mediums. Always Crashing in the Same Car opens with his cancer writing itself across his insides. The cancer’s story enforces the idea of the physical as textual (i.e. something we read), but Olsen shows us how Bowie’s art wasn’t music. It was also his clothes, make-up, videos and films; books he read, paintings he made and art he collected, who he fucked — his art was bodily. It was performance and therefore transitory, incapable of finality. Of course it was experienced differently by different people but it was also experienced differently by the same person, as that person changed (as Bowie changed).
Books provide us with the pretence of making sense of things (every form suggests a philosophy), but the things they make sense of are constructions inhabited by fictions with crafted intentions, all loose ends interlaced and cinched. Each time we return to a text, regardless of our best efforts, the years will have regenerated it — we will have been translated into another foreign tongue of ourselves.
I love chapters like “Diamond Dogs”, which is basically a cast list of people in and around Bowie’s life who puzzle together to form a specific time. In those moments, there is a flash of an understanding of a certain Bowie. It is a special alchemy of happenstance and error and clarity, which Olsen captures beautifully in spare but deftly-rendered vignettes. These chapters make Bowie a collage himself. My absolute favorite part occurs later as a faux interview with Angie Bowie, David’s first wife. In the chapter, she is answering questions that no one is asking her (the space where the questions should be are ellipses, full with silence and prolepsis). Though she is introduced in the “Diamond Dogs” chapter as “[m]anipulative, scheming, volatile, promiscuous, bitter, emotional,” she is also the first person to be introduced, suggesting her importance in Bowie’s life, as if Bowie didn’t really start being Bowie until he met Angie. But every horrible stereotype thrown at women is given to Angie: she is a succubus, a selfish, money-crazed woman, and, worse indictment of all, an emotionally unavailable mother. “Everyone Says Hi” allows her space for her interpretation of Bowie, but also by giving space to show Bowie as fallible and temperamental — the hero, the artist, and still a real man. It is another, less seen angle from which to understand him.
As the novel continues, Olsen doesn’t shy away from the things that make Bowie complicated. He explores the Nazism and his sex with underage girls (“as young as thirteen”). It would be easy to dismiss this as an attempt to stir up controversy or for glam rock excess. While Olsen doesn’t give us answers, he asks questions that I’ve been thinking about since. How do fans weigh these horrible elements against what he did for people — his charity, his art, and how he lived his life as a symbol for misfits and social outliers?
The ellipses and the asterisks, the symbols that stand for absence, hold so much meaning in this work. They remind us of the parts in-between that we never see. Towards the end there are two similar chapters written from Iman’s point of view as she talks to a dying Bowie. They are two imaginings of the same moment that unfold very differently. These conversations are themselves ellipses, a blank page that we fill in with our own stories we pose as Bowie’s. No one saw those moments besides the two people inside them, and even they only saw one side. In Always Crashing in the Same Car, Olsen has created a poignant, stimulating meditation on definition by exploring the life of a man whose appeal is found in his ability to refuse conclusion.
The recognition and celebration that everything,
positively everything,
lives between quotation marks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesi Buell is an artist from Upstate New York. Her reviews can be seen in The Rumpus, Chicago Review of Books, Heavy Feather Review, and others. She also helms KERNPUNKT Press, a home for experimental writing.
By Terri Mullholland.
Emma Bolland, Instructions from Light (Joan, 2023)
I have started to write about Emma Bolland’s book Instructions from Light several times, most of it has been in my head as I procrastinate putting the words onto the page: ‘Cut to hands, paused above a keyboard, as if about to type, frozen’. Because how can I do justice to this text?
I had a dream while writing/not writing this review that I interviewed Emma. We sat facing each other in blue velvet armchairs on an empty stage. Emma was lit by a spotlight above and I was in darkness. The conversation was about reading and writing and translation. On waking, I tried to transcribe as much of what Emma had said as possible — but I’d forgotten it all. All Emma’s words had gone and I’d just written a bad translation of badly remembered lines: ‘where is the line between dreaming and remembering? he she, they remember(s) (which one am I?)’
The experience of reading Instructions from Light is like waking up from a dream. You’re left with the images of multiple scenes — a cinematic montage that has been cut up, spliced together, and diced apart — flickering in your mind’s eye like an old film. Bolland’s text is framed by a translation of the screenplay of Le Silence by Louis Delluc. The original film is presumed lost, so everything — the staging, the lighting, and the costumes — must be reimagined. Different fonts indicate the multiple voices/characters/texts: the original manuscript, the translation, and the commentary on the translation. Thoughts vacillate between translating the text (and the difficulty and the impossibility of translating) and how to stage the work, how to translate it visually: ‘I think about my eye behind the camera’.
Then there are other voices/characters/texts woven through, the notes left in notebooks, fragments from corrupted voice files, a personal ‘I/Eye’ account that splinters the self: ‘I gather my selves around a table — I wonder where I am I wonder how it is I got here’. The reader is both disorientated and captivated as characters slip between the named protagonists of the screenplay, between I/Eye, between she/they. Within the screenplay there are also sequences of letters lying on tables, being written, opened, and read. Translating Le Silence raises difficulties in establishing who is speaking, a confusion of pronouns that is reflected throughout the book: ‘I can’t seem to settle on a frequency, hovering in a space between she and they and unable to claim either as my own’.
We have establishing shots to the text as a whole, ‘this is a book about a sanity in flux’, that continue throughout, repeated, revised, so that nothing is ever established, everything is flux. The rug is pulled, and continues to be pulled, out from under our feet if we try to get too comfy: ‘This is a story — a story plural — about remembering. A story about memory-image, and a story about memory-image questioned’.
This is a work that refuses categorisation: ‘They have learned their lesson, which is that categorisation can be used against them’. Bolland uses the language of categorisation, of the medical establishment, of mental illness, of found texts from patient instruction and medication warning leaflets, to write new texts within texts. So the overall effect is like reading a palimpsest with all the layers visible. These multiple stories intrude, collide, and seep into each other. Reading them becomes an act of listening, of witnessing, rather than interpretation. These other voices present their own difficulties of filming: ‘what annoys me is that his text seems so filmable. But their text? The others? How do I film the things for which I cannot account?’
Being unable to film it, Bolland writes the unaccountable, and the difficulties of being unaccounted for and ‘trying to locate, to write a self that has been dislocated, a self that is fragmented’, and does so brilliantly. The fragments pieced together like kintsugi; the joins glistening with light.
This is a translation, it is also a meditation on the act of translating, of reading, of listening, of interpretation, and of not doing all these things. It is about the gaps in language, in narrative, and the silences created and imposed. It is about what happens when language and understanding break apart and you start to listen to the silences underneath.
It is poetic, it is beautiful, and it is utterly compelling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terri Mullholland is a writer and researcher living in London. She has a PhD from the University of Oxford, where she has taught English Literature and Critical Theory. Her flash fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Litro, Mercurious, and The Liminal Review, and her pamphlet of hybrid pieces Weather / Patterns was published by intergraphia books in October 2022.
Andrei Codrescu interviewed by John Wisniewski.
3:AM: When did you begin writing, Andrei?
AC: Before I started reading. I had to repeat first grade because I couldn’t read, but I wrote a lot imitating the letters in books. When the reading bud opened in my brain I read what I wrote — ethereal beautiful made all kinds of sense (to me). Schoolbooks were excruciatingly boring by comparison. There are few books I’ve read since that came close to my preliterate works. I wish I still had them but my stepfather burned them for heat in the winter of 1953 when Stalin died.
3:AM: Could you tell us about your early life?
AC: I was paralyzed by terror that my mother was an ice witch. I was shot by soldiers from a moving truck and was hit below the knee with a wooden sabot by a little girl when we moved to a new apartment. I loved my mother’s sister Anna who wore glasses, chain-smoked and read books in three languages. My cousin Y showed me hers and I showed her mine: there was no hair around either hers or mine. Her father taught me chess and let me win.
3:AM: What inspires you to write?
AC: Novelty, surprise — streets I never saw before, people on the New York subway, witty people, story tellers, great books by authors nobody has heard of, found texts of pamphlets, wind blown newspapers, lost letters, exhibitionists, masked humans, people with humdrum jobs who change into royalty at festivals, Orchard Street and brunch at Katja’s on the Lower East Side, NY; funny things my friends do, intelligent dogs and repair shops.
3:AM: What were your first published works?
AC: All my work was published in the akashik record, then in print in Steaua (The Star) and Flacara Sibiului (The Flame of Sibiu) in Transylvania, then in The World (New York) and El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City).
3:AM: Any favourite authors and poets?
AC: It’s true: authors are not poets. I don’t like authors, but I like the poets Arghezi, Bacovia, Blaga, Berrigan and Villon.
3:AM: Tell us about writing the film Road Scholar — what was the idea for the screenplay?
AC: There was no screenplay, there was only a cherry red convertible Cadillac and America.
3:AM: What was your idea for convening Exquisite Corpse?
AC: I published Exquisite Corpse, I didn’t “convene” it: I would have to be God to convene a corpse, whether dead or alive! Exquisite Corpse was a flat, long newspaper aka The Pravda of the Avantgarde. The idea of the Corpse was to kill all dead establishment poets and expose live ones to the blitzkrieg of small press fame.
3:AM: Why did you decide to speak on National Public Radio?
AC: It was amusing!
3:AM: Any thoughts or controversial remarks?
AC: Yes. I didn’t make enough. Hopefully next time you look me up, Google will be a thing of the past like Xerox
3:AM: hat are you working on now, Andrei?
AC: A secret project with arctic AIs.
Check out our previous interviews with Andrei Codrescu from 2003 and 2009.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
John Wisniewski has written for amfm Magazine, Perfect Sound Forever magazine, the LARB and Chiron Review.
By Emma Jones.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed by Céline Sciamma, 2019
I wanted to use the tools of cinema so you would feel the patriarchy without actually having to embody it with an antagonist
– Céline Sciamma, 2019
Set in eighteenth-century France, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) hints at the patriarchal society that dictates the conditions of the women who inhabit the film. It is the reason why the painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), submits work for exhibition under her father’s name. It is the reason, too, why she has been called to a small island off the coast of Brittany. The Countess (Valeria Golino) has commissioned her to paint a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), due by arrangement to be married to a Milanese aristocrat. Mentioned but not seen is Héloïse’s sister who, rather than succumb to marriage, chose instead to jump off the rocky cliffs that surround the island. Héloïse is her replacement, the planned portrait her dowry.
If the patriarchy defines the rules of the society in which the narrative is set, however, then it sits on the periphery. The focus, instead, is on how desire builds and is felt, as Marianne and Héloïse become lovers. The relationships in the film that are defined by power, ownership and oppression, are the antithesis of the one formed between Marianne and Héloïse. As the latter begins to paint the former we see an affair born between equals. And, tellingly for a film that is about the relationship between artist and sitter, it is through the act of looking that this equality is engendered. Throughout, director and writer Céline Sciamma creates a visual language that is a purposeful act of transgression.
The relationship between Héloïse and Marianne, and to a different extent, between them and the young housekeeper Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), is something they create for themselves, that sits outside existing frames of reference. It’s an argument for an alternative mode of being, and it is built through a different mode of looking. That’s the process we are watching in Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a figuring out of new ways to look at one another and, by extension, at the world around us. It feels like Sciamma is trying to invent something too, a cinematic vision that breaks out of its own patriarchal confines. It is a queering of vision, and a rebellion against existing lesbian love stories in cinema that place performative eroticism over any meaningful connection.
This way of looking impacts each and every scene. Nothing in Sciamma’s film is wasted. Everything is slowed right down. With cinematographer Claire Mathon she creates a space in which intimacy can flourish. Not just between Marianne and Héloïse, but between character and audience too. In minute nine of the film, Marianne has only just arrived at the house, after travelling by boat to the island. She has not yet met Héloïse. Candlelit, she walks down the empty staircase in her stained painter’s smock, makes her way into the sparse kitchen and finds cheese and bread in the cupboards. There’s no dialogue and, like the rest of the film, there is no musical score either, only diegetic sound — sighs of wind in the corridors, the crackle of the fire in the kitchen.
There is nothing in this scene that anticipates some big reveal, but neither is it simply a bridge used to drive the narrative forward. Indeed, Sciamma’s practice as a screenwriter begins with two lists: a ‘desired’ list and a ‘needed’ list. Over time, after the desired elements have been mapped onto the needed scenes, she says ‘you can end up in a position where you have two scenes you want, without the bridge you need’. That’s how this scene feels. It sits outside of any conflict and yet still tells a story. It is a minute in time held up to the light for purposeful consideration. There is no need to wait for something to happen. It is already here, and it is quietly revelatory.
The story up until minute nine of the film focuses on the painter. It is a group of young women we see at the very start of the film, making their marks on paper. Marianne guides them. ‘First, my contours. The outline,’ she tells her class, ‘Not too fast. Take time to look at me’. It’s the first words we hear (or read, if, like me, you are watching the subtitles in English over the original French). As an audience, then, it is Marianne whom we have considered first. The artist/muse dichotomy falls apart. We watch as her students look at her, in a way that she has dictated. It is something we are reminded of as she in turn paints Héloïse, and when Héloïse reminds her that she isn’t the only one regarding, seeing, when she tells Marianne: ‘If you look at me, who do I look at?’.
Keep looking, Sciamma suggests, and we may find a gaze that is reciprocal, one that we recognise and one that we can hold, tenderly.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Jones is a freelance art and non-fiction writer who is interested in the slippery form of the essay. Emma was previously Curatorial Assistant at Tate Modern, where she specialised in photography. Curatorial credits include solo displays on Graciela Iturbide (2019), Ernest Cole (2020) and Šejla Kamerić (2022). Recent writing credits include contributions to the book publication Photography: A Feminist History (2021), the magazine L’Essenzial Studio Journal V.4 (2022) and online at Lucy Writers Platform (2023). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow
By C. D. Rose.
Amy Arnold, Lori & Joe (Prototype, 2023)
You could argue, if you really wanted to, that the attempt to represent consciousness on the page is one of the things the novel is designed to do. Many, certainly, have tried. You’ll have your own list, no doubt, but it’ll probably include Joyce and Woolf, maybe Dorothy Richardson or Edouard Dujardin, Beckett even, or Proust arguably. And you’ll have your own opinion about whether interior monologue or stream of consciousness, or something else altogether, is the right term to use, or what the difference between them is. The techniques are often those associated with high modernism, but – thank goodness – it’s still a thing: Mike McCormack’s 2016 Solar Bones might be one example, and perhaps most notably there’s the work of Jon Fosse.
Amy Arnold’s first novel Slip of a Fish (And Other Stories, 2018) contained repeated references to Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire and while her graceful and unsettling new book, Lori & Joe, doesn’t reference the Norwegian writer directly, it shares many of his concerns, both stylistic and thematic.
Lori awakes one morning to find her life partner, Joe, has died unexpectedly. She doesn’t call a doctor, an ambulance, the police, or observe any of the rules, niceties or obligations which face you at the sudden onset of grief over a death unexpected. She pulls her boots on and goes out walking over the fell. That’s about as much plot as you’re going to get in this book, though there is of course much more to it. The novel is, as far as I can discern, circadian, in that its action takes place over the course of a day, but as Lori walks over the south Lakeland hills, her observation, memory and reflection open up that limited time frame, so that this becomes the story not of one single day, but of the accumulation of years.
While Lori’s internal voice (if we can characterise it so) is sometimes confused and confusing, this is because Lori won’t always acknowledge exactly what has happened to her, around her, and what she may have caused to happen. While we may be narrative animals, attempting to order and thereby explain our actions and our selves by means of creating a logical sequence for them, we are rarely successful at doing so. The lapses, evasions and blocks will never let us tell the full story, nor even perhaps know it.
In a way that might be troublesome for such a book, Lori however has little internality. You’d write a book of this kind to examine someone with a rich interior life, wouldn’t you? Arnold doesn’t. Lori is professedly unbookish, is left largely unmoved by the music (Bartók, Bach, Pārt) which Joe had loved so much and encouraged her to listen to, and doesn’t seem to even watch TV other than the perfunctory viewing of the news. Yet she is far from being a blank. Most of what she thinks, feels and remembers are her interactions with others. Though she is a very solitary person (crucially, with no children), conversations with others — partly real, partly imagined and remembered differently at every recall — make up who Lori is.
Lori’s initial apparent lack of interiority is also belied by her feeling for the landscape. As well as being about time and memory, Lori & Joe is also a book about place, though you will find no rhapsodic swells of new nature writing here, no purple passages about the storied beauty of the Lakes. The land is seen entirely from within that consciousness, close up. This is about being a body — and a streaming consciousness — in the landscape, the untouchable nature of the mind against rocks and rain and puddles and fog. And the importance of a good pair of boots.
In a recent review of Fosse’s work in the London Review of Books, Blake Morrison notes the counter-intuitive fact that Fosse’s style is actually very easy to read: ‘the prose is so repetitive and circling that the eye moves quickly down the page, unafraid of missing anything out since every new detail or revelation is sure to be dwelled on at length… what threatens to be heavy proves lightsome.’ It’s not quite the same with Arnold, partly because there are sentences, even though all are long and many of them break, but also because Arnold does require attention: it is precisely in those details, repeated and modified each time, that Lori’s story lies. The reader is aided by chapter-like segments, each headed with a comfortingly old-fashioned title telling the reader what’s going on (‘IT’S EARLY, IT ISN’T QUITE LIGHT, AND THE FOG IS DOWN OVER THE FELL,’ ‘LORI CLIMBS OVER THE STILE AT MOOR HEAD,’ ‘LORI LEANS AGAINST THE STONE WALL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BRIDLEWAY’.)
To say that this book is an experiment in the representation of consciousness, however, would be to do it a disservice. It is more than that, as any such (successful) experiment is bound to be. This is a small book, but not a minor one. Lori is a great example of the person-of-little-to-no-importance type. The style, like Lori, never draws attention to itself: it is understated, quietly brilliant. This is a book which is about what memory does to time, and what time does to memory. And in its successful representation of consciousness it is also about the crushing fear of loneliness, and the accumulation of time’s work, put alongside the pleasure of putting your feet in a puddle or eating a dry scone: the minuscule and the massive co-existing. This is a story of the ‘ordinary life’ presented to remind us that no life is ordinary.
The novel offers little comfort or closure, there are no epiphanies and revelations are scant, glimpsed only. And yet, it does show us what might it be like to exist on this earth, in all its conflict and wonder, even if only for a moment, as another person. This is, after all, one of the unique things that such writing can do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. D. Rose‘s three books The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and The Blind Accordionist form a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why. A collection of his short stories is forthcoming.
You can read an interview with him here. Twitter: @cdrose_write
By Wes Brown.
John Vercher, After the Lights Go Out (Pushkin Press, 2022)
In 1908, the black boxer Jack Johnson defeated the white defending champion Tommy Burns. In the words of Jack London, the bout was a “hopeless slaughter” and journalists called on former champion James Jeffries to come out of retirement to “wipe the smile from Johnson’s face”. Jeffries declared he would “reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race” and relieve the anxieties of white supremacists everywhere. In what was then billed as The Fight of The Century, Johnson defeated Jeffries, sparking race riots in which hundreds of black people were injured and a number killed. It was five years until Johnson dropped his belt to a white boxer, Jess Willard, with Johnson claiming he threw the fight in protest to the rage hurled at him. It would be another twenty years before an African American boxer was allowed to contend for the title.
The ‘great white hope’ trope has been repeated in fight films and novels alike, dramatizing fears of the other and offering wish-fulfilment fantasies for Caucasian audiences. Even in the Rocky films, it is Apollo Creed who Rocky must overcome as his first adversary. In Rocky Balboa (2006), The Italian Stallion comes out of retirement in his 50s to fight a brash black fighter and put him in his place. The franchise has since gone some way to rectify this with the Creed series, allowing black directors and black actors to tell their own stories. But in literature there has been a lack of black protagonists in fight fiction. While the stink of the ‘great white hope’ has lingered, Vercher’s After the Lights Go Out is not so much a counterpunch to the trope as a knockout blow, a slow-burning noir thriller disguised as a sports drama about identity, memory and race. It is a contender to the crown of a canon that has not always been so welcoming.
When MMA biracial fighter Xavier ‘Scarecrow’ Wallace finds himself lined up for a number-one contenders fight after years as a journeyman and failing a drugs test (not his fault), he sees his chance for glory. But the problem is he’s absorbed too much punishment, his brain pin-balled across his skull too many times and like his father he’s beginning to forget who he was. Xavier’s central conflict arises from his divided and dissolving identity: everything he once held certain, black or white, appears to be disappearing. His white father, Sam, has Alzheimer’s and is confined to a care home. He was once married to Xavier’s mother, Evelyn, a black woman who abandoned her family when Xavier was a child. Sam was once the kind of ‘colour blind’ white liberal who said he didn’t care if people were, “Black, yellow, purple or green” and make jokes about his wife’s ethnicity, only to laugh away his remarks:
He’d pinch her behind and tell her that despite her dark skin, he could see her at night just fine with his own baby blues. She laughed, but not in a way that said she found it funny.
Now suffering from dementia, he is finding it harder to conceal his racist inclinations. Still, Xavier is shocked when nurses report his dad has been racially abusing staff. Xavier is taken aback. They mean to say the man with a biracial son, who was married to a black woman is capable of racism? Xavier doesn’t believe it until he uses the n-word to describe him. “That man back there. . .” he says, “I don’t know that man.”
As a white reader, After The Lights Go Out is at its best when it makes you question your own certainties and prejudices. Vercher is careful to avoid being too didactic: this is a noirish world where nothing is black and white. Even Xavier’s mother, Evelyn, who veers close to being a sermonising voice in the novel, is not beyond fighting dirty (years of experience of racism have seen to that). She offers him the possibility of reconciliation, though if Xavier can take that is a different matter. There’s short shrift for white liberals like Sam who engage in ‘hipster’ racism: using their privilege to tell ‘ironic’ racist jokes that couldn’t possibly be so because they’re ‘too self-aware’, the kind where the butt of the satire tends to be less privileged white people who are the ‘real’ racists. Humour can be transgressive and bond people, though the line between a joke about racism and a joke that is racist is often unclear. The novel gets deep into the moral complexities of identity. What is black? What is white? Who has the authenticity to decide?
In one delicious scene, Xavier encounters Shot’s latest white MMA prodigy in the gym. Lawrence is a rising star, unaware that he’s fodder Shot can build to help him throw fights. Lawrence is a jumped-up white guy with cornrows, full of sneering, upstart braggadocio who claims to be “Blacker” than the more cerebral Xavier. Lawrence reminds Xavier of the “white boys” he went to High School with who imitated black rappers so unflatteringly they put on a “modern-day minstrelshow” and told Xavier that he listened to “white music” and talked “all proper” because his black mother taught college English. In defending his pride, Xavier goes too far and the dark inner voice takes over during sparring:
An image flashed across his mind’s eye Lawrence’s face leaking blood from openings both natural and not. And Xavier wanted to make the image real.
Xavier puts a beating on Lawrence but forces himself into an impossible position. Shot has his own underworld dealings and without his pawn in place, Xavier is forced to repay him: throw his match or suffer the consequences as he spirals downwardly into post-concussive oblivion, unable to ascertain who his father really was and who he’s fighting for. After The Lights Go Out is not the kind of sports drama where conflicts are resolved by athletic prowess. Inside the octagon might be where the last of Xavier is most together: unleashing his ID, in gales of ultra-violence but where the maelstrom of his doubt and self-destruction is most fierce. In the run-up to his fight, as the inner whispers grow louder, his identity crisis threaten a loss of control. Battles within the cage are merely microcosms of the power struggles without. This is knockout artistry as consciousness raising.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wes Brown teaches creative writing at the University of East London. His autobiographical novel about pro wrestling, Breaking Kayfabe, will be published by Bluemoose in 2023.
By Andrew Flinn and Astrid von Rosen.
Sven Lindquist, Dig Where You Stand: How to Research Your Job, tr. Ann Henning Jocelyn (Repeater Books, 2023)
Finally the long-awaited English translation of Sven Lindqvist’s key activist research manual and manifesto Gräv där du står / Dig Where You Stand has arrived! When first published in Swedish in 1978 the book was a critical intervention into the conflict between the competing narratives of workers’ histories and more dominant and pervasive elite histories. Today the book makes for a powerful entry into the urgent and pressing task of critically addressing the increasingly complex, painfully precarious work conditions of human lives in global-local economies, as well as for all “barefoot researchers” working to research and write counter-histories which challenge other dominant and often exclusionary narratives.
Digging as Workers’ Inquiry
The central idea underpinning Dig Where You Stand is that doing history work is a necessary and significant contributory factor in achieving social, political and industrial change, and indeed in fashioning a new world. The book conveys the key idea that everyone — not just academics — can learn how to (and benefit from) critically and rigorously explore history, especially their own. It provides clear, comprehensive and engaging instructions on how everyone can systematically research the history of their workplace and industry, employ a multiplicity of sources (official records as well as more informal oral and personal sources) in a critical fashion and choose research methods relevant to the subject of the research. It instructs the reader how to formulate and pose urgent and critical research questions — questions about power and the lived legacies of the past in the present still relevant today — and provides the researcher with the tools to research and answer those questions. Without a proper question, you are ill-equipped to enter the archive and commence the act of research, warns Lindqvist, and you will get lost. Today, in our global precarious economy, and the resulting indeterminate archives, the warning is more relevant than ever.
Dig Where You Stand prompts workers to become researchers, to follow the money and the power it represents, confers and reproduces. It invites them to take on the role as experts on their job and industry and “dig” out its hidden histories to produce a new picture and understanding of that industry and their position within it as a vital step towards social and economic transformation.
Written in an engaging and clear language that everyone can understand, Dig Where You Stand challenges the arbitrary and harmful boundaries between the public and the academy, workers and experts, “amateur” and “professional” researchers. In so doing, Dig Where You Stand was aligning itself with a long-standing intellectual and political tradition. Lindqvist himself described the roots of workers “digging” being located in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (“Wo du stehst, grab tiefhinein!” / “Where you stand, dig in deeply”) and also in practices undertaken after the Russian and Chinese revolutions (Lindqvist 2014). Digging practice has also strong echoes of the “Workers’ Inquiry” advocated by Marx and the Workers’ Enquiry movement in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the approach encouraged by inter-war Pan-Africanists like Arthur Schomburg for African Americans to dig up their past (McAllister 2022, Wright 2017, Schomburg 1925).
According to Lindqvist, experts (academics, industrial leaders and the likes) are not to be automatically feared and deferred to, because a worker is the expert on their job. Lindqvist concludes his preface, “That is why your own job is such a good starting point for your research. Dig where you stand!” These short and to-the-point sentences neatly capture what we argue is a key distinguishing feature in and for Dig Where You Stand, namely embodied and situated action. Making “your own job” the point of departure in becoming a researcher, Lindqvist firmly grounds and situates the practitioner (in his case, the cement worker) in real life, material space and the human body. When adding the imperative “dig where you stand!”, this research stance is charged with a call to take action, enter the explorative stage empowered as practitioner-scholar, and to do so without shame and fear.
In line with previous as well as current perspectives in feminist research, Lindqvist’s real-life case studies situate, embody and visualise rather than merely describe how workers (and other communities) can on their own or in collaboration with others create this “new picture” and use it as tool for change. His exposition of politically engaged and counter-history-making is still known and acts as an inspiration to many interested in radical history practices within social movement and activist environments today (see for instance the international History from Below network and the influence of Dig, “a mass history movement” (Ball and Box, 2015)).
Starting by looking out from one’s local setting to the world and ending with a vision of the future (set sometime in the 2020s) where activist scholars collaborate with academics to work for social change, the book’s thirty chapters of “materials and methods, which anyone can use to trace their own history and that of their workmates”, together create a montage of possible ways to explore a job and the workplace. History is set in motion in a multitude of dynamic and critically fruitful approaches engaging oral history, visual analysis, archival research, memory work, spatial explorations and critical reflection. The results of such research could be equally dynamic, with Lindqvist warning that “research is not mainly a defensive but an offensive weapon. It’s more suited for conquest than for defence.
By Christiana Spens.
The following is an extract from Christiana Spens‘s The Fear (Repeater Books, 2023)
The day before my father died, I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris with my boyfriend. At that time, I had been living in Paris, subletting short-term from my old landlord, and we were in a long-distance relationship. I was also going back and forth to Scotland a lot, for my course, and also to see my dad. We’d spend time in museums and cafes, when my boyfriend was around, stretching out our free tickets and expensive espressos, to fill the frozen, bright days.
We went to the exhibition in the morning, which I was reviewing for a magazine. I knew my father was ill, but I didn’t know quite how bad things were. There had been so many scares before that I had begun to not really believe it could ever happen. I was waiting to find out whether I needed to book flights back, though, whether it could really be that bad, when we went.
We walked around, trying to be normal, but death loomed anyway; a stark crow in the otherwise green and pristine Luxembourg Gardens; window displays of eerie candles and flower arrangements. I tried to concentrate on work — I was trying to get as much finished as I could in case I had to leave Paris — but even my work was all about death, it turned out.
We took the Metro from Montmartre to the Grand Palais, an imposing building surrounded by decorative gardens and busy roads, and random police marching around. It was eerie and dark inside, like a mausoleum. Women in veils and latex, dying flowers and bowed heads. Fur and lipstick and Irish hair, props and faces lit to seem as blank as sculptures from Ancient Greece. A large white, minimal cross on the wall, next to all the other crucifixes and dying roses. A figure in a blank hood.
There were Polaroids that Mapplethorpe had taken in the 1970s and formal black-and-white portraits of the artist and his friends. He had created a system of iconography that embraced S&M and Catholicism at once, in this pursuit of true beauty. There were classical, sculptural nudes and arrangements of flowers. “I am looking for perfection in form”, he was quoted as having said, his words on the wall of the museum. “I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.”1 He lined up Saints and rent-boys, celebrities and Michelangelo. Striving for transcendence, perfection and immortality, he had developed an aesthetic, spiritual code in these figures, flowers and icons. He had re-appropriated religious iconography to show how art and sex were his own religion. He had written a letter to Patti Smith: “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together” (1). There was Robert and a skull, Robert in drag. Robert with a cigarette. Robert living with/dying from AIDS.
But his photographs betrayed none of these struggles. Instead, they were an altar to his idols and ideals, beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness, success and failure. He had used art to transcend, to go beyond struggle and fear, to assert his own ideals in spite of the doubt he must have felt or experienced from other people, and the fear of his own they betrayed. By transforming images of death, sex and himself so that he triumphed, transcendent and by turning what seemed pornographic into a form in the language of Michelangelo, he sought redemption not only from personal, spiritual dilemmas, but from life itself, and the fear of death that implied.
The nudes are so still, I wrote down, sitting on a bench in front of them, that they cannot be alive and, of course, frozen in time and a photograph, they are not. The flowers seem to be placed as carefully as funeral arrangements. The little altar, with images of Jesus’ crucifixion, together with the lines and lines of photographs of Mapplethorpe’s friends and idols, complete the reconstruction of a fantastical funeral. He has reconciled with doubt, pain and death; he has created his own meticulously executed send-off.
We walked out of the exhibition, out of the darkness. Outside, the pond shone turquoise and shallow, with statues and tourists in the distance, and a froth of fine algae at the bottom. I sat on a chair by the pond and smiled and smiled, and my boyfriend took a picture of me. We were both wearing black, and my skull scarf flickered against my skin in the breeze. I had not picked out these things intentionally.
After being in such dim light before, I was surprised by the brightness of the sun outside, the fresh green of the gardens and trees we walked through, after the soft tones of marble and spot-lit flesh and bone. We walked on to the Jardins du Luxembourg, where the pathways were covered in fine cream gravel. I heard a strange noise as we walked that I couldn’t quite place — a lone cry — and looked around to see what it was. I saw a single black crow, seeming oblivious to the people straying around, standing still on a spot of the lawn, continuing to make its odd, eerie cry, beak open, towards the sky. “Isn’t that creepy?” I said, and my boyfriend nodded and we kept walking. It had seemed so incongruous there, in the green and the sun, as tourists in neutral travel clothes wandered around nearby.
We had just come back from the Mapplethorpe exhibition when my mother phoned and told me how bad things were. “He’s not getting better”, she said. I had been so used to being told he was dying that it didn’t seem fully possible as a reality. But I booked flights to Scotland for the next day, anyway, in a daze. By the time we got home, he was gone.
***
There was a nervous atmosphere at home, with people sitting around, waiting for the funeral to happen. Death seemed unexpectedly public; everyone knew about it. He had been ill for such a long time, during which we had often been ignored or looked down on as a family, mainly because financial problems had followed illness so swiftly.
He had, to me, died very slowly and gradually, and detached from the outside world. The grief was therefore dispersed over the years, but no one had seemed very involved until this point, in which he had physically gone, which seemed in some ways quite arbitrary. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it entirely, but at times it felt good that I was finally allowed to be proud of him, to tell people what he was like, to be allowed the ritual of death. The illness had become a strange spectre, before — haunting us all with the imminence of death, the Fear — but now that tension faded, and in a strange way it brought him back to me, more fully, in essence. A spirit distilled, managed, sort of. As if grief can be bottled, memories saved, legacies controlled.
In the week or so before the funeral, so many flowers were delivered that they took up every surface: lilies, their scent pervading over every other, white roses of various shapes and arrangements. They covered everything: a large dinner table, side tables, sideboards, a dresser, two desks. They arrived in cellophane and paper, with sad notes from friends. So much white, but occasionally some purple, from a thistle, the dark green stalks and long, winding leaves. When all the vases were used up, I found other things, jugs and glasses, to put them in. We bought a couple more vases as well. I took most of the leaves off the stems, cut them down, arranged them between the vases.
As the days went on, I plucked out the dead ones as they wilted, rearranged the bouquets with those flowers missing, merging them together. Cutting stalks, refilling water, bundling all of the cellophane and ribbons into rubbish bins. There was so much clearing up, cutting things away. I thought of Mapplethorpe, the flowers he had photographed. I imagined the actual process that had gone into them. How many flowers had he bought, for a photograph of one? What did all the waste look like, scattered around his studio? What did he do with the leftover flowers, and the flowers he’d finished photographing, when he was done with them? Or did he just discard them, decadently, or busily, efficiently, entirely focused on the art at the end? Why had he not photographed more dead flowers, decaying things, why this stark purity?
I thought of those flowers again — his entwined white tulips and star-like orchids and sensual, begging lilies. The dark and light, the harmony and yet the desire, pushing through. I thought of them over and over, as they flickered in my mind, and somehow, it quietened my despair.
Robert Mapplethorpe took me by the hand, and perhaps my father did too — gave me lilies and roses, morbid confetti. I tried to capture the flowers before they died. I photographed each one, recording their gradual wilting, as they flopped and fell. After I had taken so many, I put the photographs away, hid them, and tried to live.
(1) Patti Smith, Just Kids, Ecco Press, 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christiana Spens is an academic, writer and artist based in London. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, and before that read Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and several other books. She writes regularly for publications such as Prospect, The Irish Times, Byline Times, Art Quarterly and Studio International on politics and culture, and is a founding member of Truth Tellers, based at Kings College London.
By Grant Maierhofer.
Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman, 2008
I don’t know why but I’m still affected by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t know him, and I don’t think I’ve even seen all of his work, but his presence is so affecting to me. He doesn’t look like an actor. He struggled with addiction. He got sober young and relapsed. It scares me.
In Charlie Kaufman’s film we probably have his best work, playing a director putting on productions that grow from Death of a Salesman to an impossibly large thing, but in the ninth minute of the film we just have him talking to his doctor. The doctor asks if he means right as in morally correct or as in accurate. Hoffman’s Caden Cotard says he doesn’t know, maybe accurate, and then we’re with these two for a moment, this awkward moment between someone who is hyper aware of themselves and his doctor, and although there’s always that temptation to simply state anything to keep an appointment moving along, that doesn’t happen, and suddenly both men are forced to sit and think, and it’s uncomfortable but warm.
And then we have Cotard watching his production of Death of a Salesman in dress rehearsal, and Willie Loman is delivering his speech to his son who walks off in the middle of the scene about football. He realizes his son has gone and goes to his car, the car crashes into the house and in the production a piece of architecture hits Michelle Williams’ character, so Cotard goes to check on her. It’s clear there’s a budding romance between them.
In the midst of this Cotard says it’s too late in the game to be having these problems. At around nine minutes into the film it feels fine to link that with the movie itself. Or it’s Cotard’s life, and it’s the place wherein he can express his frustration over the ongoing problems that are consuming him — his family, his health, his work, his identity — and his frustration is the same as Willie’s, then, the father trying to wax poetically about the importance of the big game, and these big moments, who lashes out by crashing his car, as Cotard lashes out at the crash itself and everything breaking down around him.
Two protagonists, then, a mumbling Everyman who is subjected to the average medical appointment wherein he gives up everything to find out what’s happening, only to be stopped with a quandary about the differences between moral rightness and simply being correct; and a theater director late in preparations for a play about the lateness of living and the world moving on whether or not we’d like it to, lashing out but then laughing and embracing the small comforts of a tryst with the starring actress.
It’s interesting because there are moments in this film I find physically painful to watch. There’s a moment when Hoffman’s character is putting together this massive production in a warehouse the size of the city and it becomes so introspective that I can hardly bear to look at it. I think I chose Synecdoche for a piece of criticism like this because I knew it wouldn’t mean I’d have to watch the entire film again, and I don’t know what that says about me or about the work, to be simultaneously drawn towards something and its creator but not to be so drawn towards it that I want to simply watch it over and over again and can even comfortably do so.
I watch Synecdoche every year or every couple of years or so. I get caught up in different elements, most recently Olive’s (Cotard’s daughter) tattoos—I liked the idea of trying to replicate them on myself as a way of forever connecting with the film. I don’t even know if it’s something I’d say I like in a typical application of that term. There are artworks that I like, and artworks that I even love, and then there are those perhaps I need, or have needed, and this film would fit in there, where its aesthetic rendering of certain preoccupations of the creator align perfectly with my own thinking.
We get the whiffs of the rest of the film here, in minute 9, the sense of frustration the outside world can often impose on people driven by aesthetics, and the awkward lives such people lead whenever they’re not in their various temples. The sense of bliss that’s double-edged when Cotard is in his temple and everything’s not entirely perfect, and the predilection people in these situations have for simply telling jokes or laughing, because to name anything else too exactly might hinder the experience of everyone involved. The presence of the director, too, in Cotard but also in Kaufman: imposings upon imposings upon imposings. In his review of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Roger Ebert made the point that even fictional films are a sort of documentary about the actors performing in these films, which I think also nicely expresses the layerings of influence and performance in Synecdoche, New York.
In the realm of the practical, then, i.e., the doctor’s office, this artist is useless; he’s mumbling and unsure and evasive. The doctor, comparatively, is comfortable and incisive, commenting on Cotard’s observation and moving around it without much in the way of anxiety or reservation. In the theater, though, Cotard isn’t bashful, or unsure, and responds quickly to a potential injury with the same speed we’d hope a doctor might exercise in a similar situation. The film itself seems to also be about the growth of an aesthetic life to the extent it almost becomes unwieldy, where people viewing the warehouse much later in Synecdoche, New York couldn’t help but ask why, and wonder at the role this kind of production might play in living. What’s interesting is that this doesn’t happen. Everybody there is committed, even if they’re asking their director why, and he can’t offer much in response. Living beats Cotard down, as does the work, but here, there’s still a fire and a determination to see this production through, to make it unique and to make it expressive and powerful. The wavering in the doctor’s office gives way to certitude and drive.
Something I struggle with with film in particular is the desire to take it in in any order I’d like. I hear about readers who read the end of a book first, and I’ve read some things piecemeal and never entirely through, and the distinctions with film seem arbitrary enough or at least made so by television and our screens, where films are broken into pieces anyway. Oddly, too, it seems natural, so when I rewatch this ninth minute consciously I feel as though I’m engaging in a criticism most in line with my natural aesthetic position, the one where I’m no longer carving out large swathes of time to watch one film from beginning to end, or reading much work that seems to demand a kind of attention that now feels unnatural, for better or worse.
Most of us don’t like to visit the doctor, and I think it has to do with the forfeiture of authority. In this situation, the doctor has indicated that the eyes are part of the brain, and Hoffman’s character suggests that this just doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem entirely right, and it’s left there, with the moral question pursued and the usage question, rather than resolving it, and this leads to the dress rehearsal and the shift where Cotard is now the authority, and in his position of authority he behaves not unlike a doctor in an emergency. A flirtatious doctor, and a theater director who’s able to treat his work with an utmost seriousness, which again preoccupies me.
I don’t know why, but I find myself thinking most these days about the question of art and what it’s for. Emil Cioran wrote about there being something wonderful in the pursuit of doing something that’s entirely useless. To pursue something that is useless as opposed to doing any of the countless other things a person might do could have a kind of honor to it. And the world wants to tell us which things are useful and which things are useless. But the longer I live — and certainly this is a film to be lived with — the more I feel it’s inadequate to think of art as useless, unless we’re willing to go all the way. All the way in or all the way out, and this film feels like someone going all the way in to see what’s there.
It’s an art that’s so grand that it feels comfortable to look at it with pity, a space where an artist puts everything in front of you, and takes that gesture quite seriously, and your reaction to it — like any reaction to any vulnerability — inevitably communicates the most about where you’re at, and that’s okay, too.
I’ve just watched the ninth minute one more time, from a few seconds before to a few seconds after, and I think there’s something to watching or taking in certain works of art in this manner. For some people, Synecdoche, New York is too much to bear in its entirety all at once. I don’t know why I’m that sort of person, but I think it’s true. Looking at this, though, and thinking about the whole of it, and what I like and dislike and love and hate about it, I’m certain it’s a work of art. I used to say that Paris, Texas was my favorite film. Probably, in part, because I thought this made me sound cooler than I am, and partly because, when I first watched it, about forty minutes in, the sentence “this is my favorite film” came into my mind. It’s odd because I don’t sit around excited to watch that film, and I doubt I’ve even seen it more than ten times, but it’s similar to Synecdoche, New York in that I know it affects me deeply, and there’s something in it that resonates so much with me that I actually find it hard to watch. I have no doubt that Wenders’ film would lend itself quite well to this sort of viewing experience. Piecemeal, split up, with the pressure lessened. I don’t know what any of this means.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grant Maierhofer is the author of Ebb, most recently, and a forthcoming book from Inside the Castle whose title is too long to include here.
By Tom La Farge.
Now by the swelling of things
and the empty din of phrases
students have reached this point,
that when they come into court,
they think they have been carried
into another world.
– Petronius, Satyricon, 1
Fellini starts exactly here, at the swelling of things that transfers us to another world, the empire of rhetoric, populated by the grotesque, ornate, far-fetched, hysterical figures by which rhetoric is said to denature true language, purus sermo; but Fellini’s figures are human.
They lend themselves to the powerful man, to amplify his discourse, himself, his position, his central importance as declamator, yet turn aside to eat, to kiss, to stare into the camera that meets their steady eye at their eye-level.
Red sky lowers, rubor of inflamed language, above a furrowed waste where a poet, lying imagining dying, ‘bequeathes’ to Encolpio, student of literature, everything absent from this scene: the seasons, the earth, rivers, sea, sky.
Strapped down in a covered cart, an unsatisfiable woman, who speaks in moans and pantings, in eye-widenings and flicks of the tongue, is wheeled for a cure to the cave of a hermaphrodite: inert,
bloodless, semidivine, unarousable, a magnet for this film’s most monstrously lopped or twisted or
swollen figures.
Contours everywhere bloat, warp, explode, and the paradigm of shape is the meats carried out from Trimalchio’s ovens, swollen or burst in a spiky splay of blackened limbs: rhetoric’s distention,
disruption of the envelope.
Rhetoric encloses every setting by dropping a ceiling, or else the enreddened sky, and wrapping walls around, some built, some natural like rockfaces, but all overpainted or inscribed or mottled like tissue, to encyst a swelling performance.
In Vernacchio’s theater a plump, masked comedian frisks and farts, while an axe crops a peasant’s hand; later Caesar is mocked, but the performance hasn’t begun until Encolpio, student of literature, interrupts the play to demand his catamite, Gitone, until Vernacchio raises his mask to implore the camera.
Lica the pirate with the staring glass eye, so much larger and whiter than its fellow, humiliates his prisoner Encolpio by forcing him first to wrestle in the lamplit hold, and next, on deck, to stand up as bridegroom beside Lica, the happy, saffron-veiled bride, in nuptials that Lica’s crew joyfully celebrates till joined by a boarding party of legionaires, fresh come from assassinating Caesar (who stabbed himself first, to be sure, but no blood flowed till the soldiers plied their spears); they strike off Lica’s head, which, sinking, stares pleadingly at the camera through undulant thicknesses of ocean.
The camera tilts up to view the new Caesar passing in triumph, preceded and followed by bunched spears, eagles in demonic spread, bristling crests, and the turreted shapelessness of elephants, blocking a flat, bright sky that mutes their features (but Caesar’s haunted eyes engage the camera) but limns their figures, stark and spiky as Trimalchio’s meats.
Standing before a classically proportioned villa, a handsome paterfamilias, his wife demurely to one side, frees grateful slaves and dispatches his children to safety, promising one disquietingly beautiful daughter, whose eyes suggest precocious knowledge of cameras, to join her the very next day, but this scene, which for a while looks like an image of the normal to set against the monstrosities, a vision of chaste language, is set in a courtyard entirely enclosed by pure façade, a rockface, and a stand of weird white hedge: another theater, therefore, to the center of which the noble Roman moves, and he slits his wrists, his wife too somehow dying, and later someone arranges the bodies on a pyre as fine as Dido’s.
The theaters of rhetoric are linked by the narrative labyrinth through which Encolpio must travel and meet monsters, factitious ordeals, the monsters merely monstrous figures in the discourse; so that ‘Minotauro,’ for instance, who nearly kills him to the rhythmic heckling of spectators lining the bluffs surrounding the sandy waste containing the maze where Encolpio and ‘Minotauro’ strike, dodge, and blindly stalk. ‘Minotauro’ turns out to have a soft spot for students of literature and swears friendship, cheerfully unmasking, just an actor in the festival of Mirth, which demands the ridiculing of a stranger, accomplished then in stylized mockery, with the result that Encolpio is unmanned and cannot service the waiting Arianna, to his deep humiliation.
The birching of his buttocks by women who insouciantly chant cryptic syllables, some formula of remasculation, while he lies rigid on a quilt of pubic triangles on a raked bed of sand, an elephant in the background, while more women gaze out of windows and Ascilto, his lover, swings overhead, jeering, on a circus trapeze swollen to the dimensions of a small stage where yet more women voluptuously loll, fails in the restoration of Encolpio’s virility, not to be regained till he couples with the meaty Enotea, an event he celebrates by running rejoicing through a meadow by a river under an open sky, the first natural setting in the film. But when Ascilto sinks and dies, Encolpio kneels in a final elegiac burst, inducing a sudden shot of desert; and the sky goes red.
But then he sets sail for Africa with freed slaves, while old men sit on the shore, stolidly staring into the camera as they chew a dead man’s flesh to gain his legacy. The student of literature travels, so he tells us, to undiscovered cities, shedding his narrative in a final figure of ekphrasis, wall-paintings on the fragments of the labyrinth, between which the open sky appears, figuring freedom, the receding emptiness that lends no screen to rhetoric’s feverish projections.
Sound like Fellini to you?
Balls! Tumor rerum is Fellini’s matter, ‘sky’ his climactic figure: O altitudo!, a commonplace invoking a ‘height’ of meaning beyond the power of syntax to express, acknowledging the limits of the rhetor’s power, the infinite margin to his page, but slily, by that very gesture, inscribing it.
Rhetoric is disingenuous, a teachable trick, its craft the invention of figures, but in an exhausted world, if the world is ever anything but exhausted, when language has crystallized in figures, if language ever is ‘liquid,’ figures need to be invented, the further-fetched the better, because maybe they can fetch us back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom La Farge (1947-2020) was a novelist, educator, and publisher who lived in Brooklyn, New York. He was the author of more than a dozen books, including The Crimson Bears (Sun & Moon Press), Zuntig (Green Integer), and The Enchantments Trilogy (Spuyten Duyvil). He was also was the editor of Proteotypes, a small press based in Brooklyn. An award now bears his name.
By John L. Williams.
A Preamble
Harry Crews was the last great proponent of the Southern Gothic — possessor of a blazing talent, whether displayed in a dozen fine novels, some outstanding longform journalism or an indelible memoir, A Childhood. This last has just been paid the deserved tribute of reissue as a Penguin Classic. Crews’ star, a decade after his death, is once more in the ascendant.
In 1995 I travelled to Harry’s home in Gainesville, Florida, to interview him for the Observer Magazine, to tie in with the UK release of his latest novel, The Mulching of America. However, the publication date got pushed back by a year and so the piece never ran. I didn’t know it then, but there would be no more significant work from Harry Crews after I spoke to him. Sadly he suffered ever-worsening health until his death in 2012. So I think this profile stands as an only slightly premature eulogy: an eyewitness account of the dying fall of Harry Crews.
***
‘Young pussy and dope,’ says Harry Crews, most singular of American writers, ‘that’s the answer.’ I have to say I’m not sure what the question was. The secret of prolonged youth, perhaps. The key to literary immortality maybe. More likely there wasn’t a question at all. But that’s what Crews tells me the answer is, as he pads across his living room, and lowers himself into his chair, ready to start talking.
Harry Crews, it scarcely needs saying, is an unapologetically macho individual. Born and raised in Georgia, Crews worked as a marine, a pulp mill labourer and a tomato picker before turning novelist. Today he has acquired a reputation as a literary hellraiser that makes Norman Mailer look like an Ivy League dilettante. But the legend of ‘Harry Crews — tattooed wild man of American literature’ has not been all to the good, tending as it has to obscure the real quality of his fiction. For Harry Crews is to the novel what Diane Arbus is to photography: a celebrant of the freakish and the outlandish, the sad and the mad — an American original.
It’s taken me a while to be sat here in Harry Crews’ living room in Gainesville, Florida. Last time I tried I was en route from Miami to Jacksonville Florida, where I had a date with a serial killer’s fiancée, so it seemed a good idea to detour via Gainesville to talk to Harry Crews. I phoned from Miami to check he would be there. No problem. I arrived at Gainsville airport, caught a cab to the address, walked down a short drive to a house almost engulfed by the surrounding woods, and found a note on the door saying, ‘UNAVOIDABLY CALLED AWAY. CREWS.’
This time his publisher told me it would be different. Harry was mortified about what happened last time. It’s just that his dog/aged relative was sick/very ill/dead, and it wouldn’t happen again. This time, I called from New Orleans, I called from Pensacola, I called from Tallahassee. Even then, I was palpably relieved when, after a pause of no more than half a minute, the big wooden door of Harry Crews’ house opened.
The first thing that strikes you on meeting Harry Crews is that physically he is not the man he used to be. The photos on the jackets of his first books show a clean-cut ex-marine with a confident grin and a forehead and chin that look to have been hacked out of granite. Later photos show a man who practically defines grizzled, with a prominent tattoo sporting a skull above an epigram derived from ee cummings, ‘How Do You Like Your Blue Eyed Boy, Dr Death?’, and his eyes squinting out through a mass of scar tissue below a forehead as cro-magnon as ever.
But, at sixty, the past couple of years have treated Crews hard. His knee, already damaged in a motorcycle accident, cracked under him and the resultant months with his leg in the air means that Crews is still forced to hobble around the house. He has the look of a man unhappy in his body, betrayed by the weakness of the flesh.
And, as we start to talk, it seems that it’s not only his physical fitness he has doubts about. Crews seems hard put to find a cheerful topic of conversation, be it the publishing industry, editors, American politics, or his own sales figures. Yet given his start in life, it’s remarkable that he should still be alive at all, let alone producing work that is still far more interesting than ninety per cent of what comes out.
Crews was born in Bacon County, Georgia, at the end of a long dirt road, into the kind of rural poverty that is almost unimaginable now, the kind of poverty amid which the prospect of starving to death was an everyday reality. ‘It was a little enclave of real peasants,’ Crews told me, ‘men who lived with very little margin of error, who were out of time even then.’
His childhood was a troubled one, marked by illness and domestic instability. Only his mother remained a constant and positive presence. His escape route was a traditional one: reading. Reading matter for the young Crews consisted of the Sears Catalogue, an illustrated cornucopia of goods that families like his could only goggle at. So rather than use the catalogue as a shopping tool, Harry, as he recalls in his autobiography, A Childhood: The Biography Of A Place, used the catalogue as a jumping-off point for fantasy, spinning tales around the models.
I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts… Young as I was, though, I had known for a long time that it was all a lie. I knew that under those fancy clothes there had to be scars, there had to be swellings and boils of one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world…. And it was out of this knowledge that I first began to make up stories about the people I found in the catalogue. (A Childhood)
A Childhood is both Crews’ best and darkest work. It’s all here: the three men he called daddy — the blood daddy who died when he was two, the bad step-daddy who drank and fought and shot at his mother, and his uncle Alton, the good daddy who imparted to Crews his unyielding sense of what it is to be a man. And at the heart of the story is an accident all too typical of such a harsh and unforgiving upbringing.
‘When I was six I fell in a vat of boiling water that we’d been using for scalding hogs,’ Crews recalls. ‘We didn’t have enough money for me to go to hospital so the doc came out, put a buggy frame around my bed to keep the sheets from touching my skin, and ran a light into this kind of hut from an outside power line. The heat of the lamp made my skin come off everywhere. People would come from all around just to see me. I think I learned then what it is to be a freak in people’s eyes.’
And when Crews grew up there was only one way he was headed and that was out of Bacon County. The marines beckoned, particularly as Crews was possessed of a talent that would smooth his path through a life in the forces: ‘I spent much of my young manhood in the ring fighting. If you can box in the marines you get to avoid a lot of other things. You never have to do guard duty, never have to do that wretched shit in the kitchens, just as long as you can bloody up another boy, stand on top of him and crow like a rooster. I was a light heavyweight, I lost two fights and won 33. I liked fighting I liked the one-on-one-ism of it. A good fighter should be like a good pit bulldog, shouldn’t mind the blood’.
When he came out of the marines, Crews took advantage of the GI Bill to go to college at the University of Florida in Gainesvile. By then he was sure that there was one thing he wanted to do and that was to write. But college bored him and after two semesters, this being the height of the beatnik era, Crews decided to take off and see America: ‘I got on my 650cc Triumph, I was gone 17 months and put about 17 thousand miles on the bike. Went to Canada, San Francisco, the Rockies, down to Mexico, across from El Paso to New Orleans. I could cook and tend bar and that meant I could work in any city in this country the day I arrived there’.
When he returned from his travels Crews went back to college and finished his degree. ‘In my senior year I met the only wife I’ve ever had, Sally. That marriage lasted until 1972 and I’ve been without a wife since. She’s a wonderful woman, a marvellous mother and all those things. I figured that if I couldn’t live with her, I couldn’t live with anyone.’
Then two momentous events in Crews’ life occurred. The first of them was a purely terrible event. Crews’ first son, Patrick, drowned in a neighbour’s swimming pool, a month before his fourth birthday. The second was the realisation of his great ambition, with a publisher’s acceptance of his first and finest novel, The Gospel Singer, a story of freaks and fraudulent saints, a backwoods Faust.
The Gospel Singer‘s acceptance was the payoff for ten years of hard work, rewarded only by the publication of two stories in literary magazines. It was well reviewed on publication, in 1968, and, crucially, it led his alma mater, the University of Florida, to offer him a job, teaching Creative Writing in the English Department. It was a great job — good money, not much teaching, plenty of time to write — a novelist’s dream.
And for a while things went very well indeed. His second book, 1969’s Naked in Garden Hills — a North Florida epic that saw him moving from the Southern Gothic of his first novel to the trailer park surrealism he made his own — received the best reviews of his career. Further funny, weird novels like Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, Car and The Gypsy’s Curse, appeared on a more or less annual basis though the early seventies. What connects them is their concern with people most of us see simply as freaks: a midget jockey, a band of karate nazis, a man who decides to eat a car.
‘If you’ve been around carnivals,’ comments Crews, ‘as I have, working on the freak shows, you’ll realise that most of us carry our abnormalities or perversities or whatever on the inside, and so are able to lead what people call a “normal life”. But if you’re three feet tall you can’t do that, if you’re a lady and you’ve got a beard, you can’t do that — for around every corner you turn you’ll meet somebody that’s a mirror to reflect back the improbable grossness of your condition. I see such people as having special consideration under the Lord. I’ve always been fascinated by what they have to go through.’
The prestige gained by Crews’ steady stream of remarkable novels meant that his writing class became a sought-after institution. His fellow Floridian surrealist, Carl Hiaasen, for instance, told me that he failed to be accepted onto the course as an undergraduate.
By the mid-seventies Crews had also found a way of subsidising his trips away from the land of academe: magazine work. This, the most underrated aspect of his writing, began when Playboy called to ask him to write a piece on the building of the Alaskan pipeline. The result was a prizewinning slab of prime New Journalism, entitled ‘Going Down In Valdeez’, and it established Crews as a kind of white-trash Hunter S. Thompson. The 1979 collection of Crews’ magazine journalism, Blood And Grits, rates as one of his finest achievements.
It’s a period he looks back on with affection: ‘I canooed the Suwanee River, I backpacked the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine. I did all that stuff because it was a marvellous antidote to the other part of my life that is pen and paper and sitting down. The men I’ve spent my teaching life with — I’ve never felt a callus in their hands. Their hands all feel like women’s. Rarely have I met a professor who has worked up an honest sweat’.
Throughout the seventies Crews did his level best to make sure no one took him for your typical English professor. So much so that Harry Crews stories — of drink, drugs and debauchery — became common currency in the incestuous world of American letters. But for each observer who saw him as a romantic figure, a redneck Dylan Thomas, there were others that just saw him as sad — just a literary version of Keith Moon — a tame wild man patronised by the establishment.
But it was not the academic life itself that led Crews into his self-destructive ways. ‘It was me who brought all that stuff to the university and to everything else I’ve done. I know that there are men and women who have had that kind of sustained trauma that was my childhood. Who’ve had that and been able to walk on past it and leave it alone. But there’s others of us that it marks in such a way that we’ll never be free of it.’
By the late seventies Crews decided there was only one thing to do, to tackle his demons head on. To this end he set out on the writing of A Childhood, hoping that the act of remembrance would bring some kind of catharsis: ‘I thought that if I recalled what happened to me in the most direct and concrete language that I could, and didn’t lie, I would purge myself of that experience. Well, it didn’t work. It was excruciatingly painful to recall and relive that stuff. And after I’d written it I just woke up one morning and realised I didn’t give a shit anymore’.
‘Whatever you could shoot, I shot — cocaine, heroin, speed. My final drug of choice was dilaudid. It has a better rush than heroin. It comes in a pill and you crush it in a spoon, just as you would with heroin, cook it with a match, warm it a little bit, then shoot it up, You’re good for four, five hours. But the wonderful thing with dilaudid is you know what you’ve got in your hand. With heroin you don’t know what it’s cut with.’
It was nine years before the next Crews novel was published. An essay collection and a couple of short stories appeared, to give the illusion of productivity, but the truth was that Harry Crews was a long way out there.
Then, in 1986, a book called The Calling came out, written by Crews’ best student, a writer called Sterling Watson. At the heart of The Calling is a novelist, Eldon Odom — transparently based on Crews — who is portrayed as a once great novelist, now a sad lecherous drunk and major league bullshitter. It’s a portrait and a book that Crews unsurprisingly resents: ‘All I did to Watson was try to teach him as much as he could learn. I bought his whisky, I got him his agent. I even wrote a blurb for his first novel. Then he wrote that book: not only did he have me in there but my ex-wife, the girl I was living with at the time, my child. In the New York Times the reviewer said “This is supposed to be a roman à clef but you don’t need a key for this book; anyone who knows anything about literature knows this is Harry Crews”. Watson called me after it came out. I don’t know what he expected me to say. I told him it was a blood offence he’d committed, one that only blood can satisfy’.
But it may be that the shock of being portrayed not simply as grotesque, but as a fraud, acted as a spur for Crews. The publication of The Calling coincided with Crews’ return to the literary fray. It began with a novel called All We Need of Hell featuring a character called Duffy Deeter, who has served as Crews’ fictional alter ego several times over the years. Ostensibly a black comedy, the novel is at heart an unsparing portrait of Deeter as a compellingly awful archetype of the bad father: violent, overbearing, never satisfied. The father was transparently Crews himself — the writing group bully, the handball hard man.
Its publication saw the literary world finally rallying round to salute Crews’ maverick talent. When novelist Barry Hannah wrote that ‘We’re lucky to have this book’, many people knew that he wasn’t just paying a compliment, but speaking the literal truth.
Ever since, Crews has enjoyed a real renaissance. His early work was reissued. The likes of Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins began to namedrop him in interviews; Lunch and Rollins even going so far as to name their short-lived band after him. Whether Crews’ decision to acknowledge this new breed of fan by sporting a mohican and muscle T-shirt in his publicity photos was an entirely sound idea is of course another matter.
Whatever, his next novel The Knockout Artist, a skewed boxing novel set in New Orleans saw him back in top form, and when Sean Penn bought the movie rights, Crews found himself a Hollywood soulmate. Penn’s then wife Madonna even got in the act when she asked Crews to interview her.
The next novel, Body, was better yet, refining Crews’ peculiar ability to meld black comedy into authentic tragedy. A study of a female bodybuilder and her single-minded attempt to become Ms Cosmos, it is clearly inspired by Crews’ long relationship with Maggie Powell, a woman who Crews himself trained.
Body is, in a sense, the ultimate Crews novel. Certainly it has the ultimate Crews title. Few writers are so relentlessly concerned with the physical rather than the intellectual: ‘Yes,’ says Crews, ‘It’s because in athletics I can find the truth. You say you can lift 440 pounds on the bench — well I just happen to have 440 pounds and I got a bench… no more talk, we’ll see what you got. I do think that it’s through discipline of the body, and forcing the body beyond itself, that man comes to realisation of all those abstract nouns you read about — mercy and compassion and forgiveness and love and the rest of it’.
Around the time Body came out, Crews finally gave up drinking, driven by the realisation that if he carried on it was going to kill him sooner rather than later: ‘I was willing to do whatever I had to do I tried going to AA meetings, they all tell these sad stories — the time they took a shit in somebody’s ice box — well, we’ve all got a million of these stories and ultimately I found it just tremendously depressing. I’d leave wanting a drink. In the end I found a guy who had a great track record working with addicts and worked one on one, part talk, part hypnosis. I didn’t think it was do-able with alcohol, but I did. I quit’.
‘It’s not easy, though. You go out with a woman and she says, “What wine shall we have?” It’s awkward. Same with the book tour I just went on. Everywhere I went everyone was sloshed and a lot of people are going, “We gotta get Crews drunk and watch him show his ass or mutilate himself”. Well, they were disappointed. I won’t lie and say I enjoy being straight all the time. It’s a fucking drag as far as I’m concerned. If someone told me I had incurable cancer I’d be drunk tonight. To-night!’
Such restraint is clearly so alien to Crews’ nature that it might serve to explain why his novels since Body: Scar Lover and, now, The Mulching Of America, are rather lacking in, well, body. There are moments of vintage Crews strangeness here, but there’s also a lack of drive, of a sense that these books were clamouring to be written.
The same self-doubt, alternating with bluster, is apparent in Crews himself. We’ll be talking about what he’s going to write about next and he’ll mention a nearly completed novel, then mumble, ‘But my editor probably won’t like it’. Or we’ll drift on to Bosnia and he’ll gloomily offer that he thinks the conflict is insoluble, before suddenly brightening and adding, ‘Except by blood!’ Perhaps the saddest point of our talk comes when we discuss his writing class. Crews has expounded the need for tough teachers, for ruthless taskmasters like Belt in Karate is A Thing of the Spirit or Duffy Deeter in All We Need of Hell, or himself in real life. But when I ask which writers his course has produced, there’s a significant pause, and the only name he can come up with is that of Sterling Watson, the pupil who fought back.
One name that Crews doesn’t come up with is that of the Florida cop-turned-serial killer G.J. Schaefer, notorious for his so-called ‘killer fiction’ — stories of rape and murder that Schaefer claims are fiction but the police believe to be literal records of his crimes. I’d heard it rumoured that he had been one of Crews’ students; Crews confirmed it: ‘Yes, he was a former student of mine. I even played handball with the guy. He seemed like a good clean kid. But apparently that’s the way a lot of those guys are. He killed all those girls, I think they nailed him for two murders, because they could really make those cases, but they think he may have done as many as twenty-two’.
‘Playboy asked me to write about him. I finally got in to see him. He seemed to be in what they call denial. They found a lot of written stuff of his (Killer Fiction) and he wanted me to testify that I’d taught him to write like that. I said, “Man, I can’t do that. If you’d written any shit like that and turned it into me you’d have been out of the class”. Then he started talking about more stuff. And the more he talked I thought, “I don’t want to write about this guy, or what he did”.’
It’s a very Harry Crews decision, that one. What he couldn’t stomach in Schaefer was not that he was a murderer, but that he was a liar. For if Crews, in person, is prone to both bravado and self-pity, his claim on us as a writer, and as a person, is that he is in the end honest. His is a screwed-up talent, but his saving grace is that he knows it. And perhaps his clearest articulation of this comes in a remarkable essay he wrote inspired by the mass murderer Charles Whitman, who climbed a tower in Austin Texas and started sniping at random, finally killing fifteen people. It’s a piece that ends like this:
What I know is that all over the surface of the earth where humankind exists men and women are resisting climbing the tower. All of us have our towers to climb. Some are worse than others, but to deny that you have your tower to climb and that you must resist it or succumb to the temptation to do it, to deny that is done at the peril of your heart and mind.
All the way home to Gainesville, I felt that same tenuous diaphanous quality in the way I walked and what I did and what I said. Someone at that moment was climbing his tower, and I could only hope that he would not look down on me. But worse, much worse, I hoped that I would be spared being on the tower myself, because if I believe anything, I believe that the tower is waiting out there. I have no answers as to why it is out there, or even speculations about it, but out there somewhere, around some corner, or in some green meadow, or in some busy street it is. Waiting. (Climbing The Tower).
By the time we finish talking the room is in darkness. The last sound I hear on my tape when I play it back is the sound of Harry Crews apologising. I’m not sure what for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John L. Williams is a biographer, novelist, and crime writer from Cardiff. His non-fiction career began an age ago with his American crime-writing odyssey Into The Badlands. His latest book CLR James: A life Beyond The Boundaries is a biography of the great Trinidadian historian and revolutionary, and was a Times book of the year. He’s also the co-organiser of the Laugharne Weekend Festival in west Wales.
By Chloe Pingeon.
Stephanie LaCava, I Fear My Pain Interests You (Verso Books, 2022)
Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You opens with jarring corporeality. LaCava’s second novel is small: 181 pages of large font. Its unpretentious appearance is mirrored by the narrative’s clipped directness. The book opens with a blank page, then an epigraph.
“Cows are not sentient beings” – Reddit
Beyond this, the story begins. Margot Highsmith is on a plane, and she’s gushing blood. She’s fleeing an older ex-boyfriend named only as “the director” as well as a web of familial attachments, notoriety, and abandonment in New York. She calls herself an actress, although her own public identity is almost entirely derived from her rock star parents and their cult following. Outside of that charmed circle, Margot embraces a self-punishing passivity. Now, she’s on her way to Montana, and she’s bitten her lip to the point of an open wound.
In an uncharacteristic instance of self-perception, the novel opens with a mirror. Margot is in the plane bathroom and through a dirty reflection, she’s observing her own face, marred by the self-inflicted injury. There’s a rare sense of self-recognition as Margot, alone, watches herself bleed, her reflection answering to no one but herself, and her wound existing only in her own awareness. She can’t feel the injury, a condition ultimately diagnosed as congenital analgesia by another pseudo boyfriend who finds a fascination with Margot in Montana, but she seems more irritated than neutral to the gore. If she exits the bathroom bleeding, she will garner unwanted attention. Even alone, she detachedly observes her physicality with only an eye for how it will exist in terms of outside perception.
Sure enough, when she haphazardly cleans herself up and returns to her seat, a woman nearby watches Margot with disgust.
“Lady, your chin, or maybe your nose is bleeding.”
“Lady, you should deal with that.”
As Margot orders food on the plane, she recalls her childhood in a succession of tabloid-like pictures. An outsider’s vision of herself as a child in her mother’s arms being toted, as she describes “like luggage”. These reminisces merge into the narrative of Margot’s childhood, which occupies the first half of the novel.
In the childhood scenes, Margot’s descriptions are vivid and sensory. Remarkably attuned to the nuanced reactions of others to her preformed physicality. Her father holds her in public but leaves her alone on his soundproof stone floor when they are at home. Her mother lets Margot sit on her lap, but any comfort this offers is dimmed by Margot’s awareness of the woman’s frailty. As Margot grows up, and as the flashbacks meet up with the present, LaCava’s writing becomes increasingly disassociated. Margot’s voice and its relationship to the world becomes increasingly distanced. I Fear My Pain Interests You is a vision of a nihilistic/masochistic sensibility. The expected co-opting of her body as a young woman born into a fame that is not really hers is magnified by the fact that Margot lacks her own internal sense of what is right or wrong within her own physical body.
It makes sense, therefore, that where the narrative meets Margot in the present, on the plane, arriving in Montana, she has almost wholly come to embody an essence of self-protective removal. The character that we are met with seems to have gone cold. As she recounts her expulsion from Brown for possession of drugs that she she never really cared to take, her increasing distance from her family, and even her gut-wrenching pinings and betrayals for and by “The Director” and her later boyfriend who she refers only to as “Graves”, she speaks with the passivity of an observer. In the later chapters of the book, as Margot eerily drifts through days alone in Montana subsisting on benadryl and the occasional ice cream bar, she appears to have never been more removed from her own corporeality.
The narrative, too, focuses heavily on Margot’s detachment from her own sensory existence and vulnerability, hovering only briefly on the lapses in her stone façade. Much of the appeal of I Fear My Pain Interests You lies in its sparseness and in its depiction of this very façade, and yet there are times when this façade breaks, and there are times when these breaks feel like the most interesting element of Margot’s otherwise constant coldness. If there is a gap in the novel, it is where the story skips a beat on Margot’s softness, seemingly uneasy about settling on moments that reveal the vulnerability of a protagonist that is characterized above all, as invulnerable.
Margot, for example, is shown to maintain daily phone calls with her best friend, Lucy, who offers Margot poignant advice. Though abandoned by family and acquaintances, Margot is staying in Lucy’s Montana home, and when things become unbearable, it is Lucy who flies to Margot’s rescue. This friendship seems to be genuine and compassionate. It is one of the only things in Margot’s life that feels solid. Lucy, too, is the child of a famous parent (a deceased filmmaker and the original occupant of the Montana lair where Margot is hiding out). Lucy and Margot were briefly classmates at Brown. And yet beyond the bare bone facts, this friendship is never really explored. The phone conversations are referenced, but never, in detail, depicted. And so a degree of dissonance is created between the almost unflinchingly withdrawn Margot that is presented throughout the novel, and the character that is capable of the almost complete openness and vulnerability that is referenced, but rarely truly shown, in her relationship with Lucy.
At times, it seems that Margot’s cool reserve becomes more a matter of authorial convenience than an honest vision of psychological trauma. Margot’s moments of normalcy, desperation, and self-recognition detract from the fated demand for icy withdrawal, and so while LaCava does not entirely deny the existence of these moments of vulnerability, she also refuses, sometimes unnaturally, to settle on them.
Still, the narrative gaps surrounding Margot’s weakness are paralleled by the way in which this vulnerability seems, in her reality, to exist in a void. Margot lacks the ability to feel pain, and so, too, she lacks any internal awareness of what is physically right and wrong. Her physical weakness only exists insofar as it’s perceived by those around her. In Montana, Graves tells her that this numbness is emotional too, and while Margot disagrees, the fact remains that her pain is not her own. Her corporeality becomes entirely disembodied.
I Fear My Pain Interests You gives us a woman who is disengaged from existence, experiencing her life as if she was a bystander. The result is a protagonist whose distance renders her almost neutral. Neither unlikable or particularly sympathetic. Neither healed, or, as the story ends, particularly suffering. There is a nihilism in the lack of resolution. When a person who cannot feel is ignored by the world, does her pain cease to exist at all? LaCava doesn’t seem to think so. The novel ends somewhat suddenly. There is a cautious sort of hope in its abruptness. Margot is still here. Things go on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chloe Pingeon is a writer and recent Boston College graduate based in New York. Her work focuses on contemporary art and culture, and she is particularly interested in how art can give voice to wider cultural moments and trends. Her work has been published in Expat Press, Maudlin House, Despair Books, Exberliner Magazine, and The Artsfuse, among other publications. You can find her on Twitter @chloepingeon
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