Of course, the trauma has already occurred; it cannot be reversed or excised. It can, however, be restaged. Evenson calibrates the daughter’s movement toward her final abreaction very finely, so that its horror is laced through with the daughter’s poignant hope against hope that the restaging will “make everything right for good”—the perennial wish of any child who wishes to alter a primal scene that somehow went terribly, terribly wrong. In the end, the pleasure of the story’s aesthetic perfection—that is, its own capacity to “make everything right,” through language, through structure, through tone—stands in howling contrast to the characters’ inability to do so. The effect is an unlikely tenderness that suffuses the story’s variety pack of cruelties.
I HAVE been trying, for some time now, to understand if or how Plath’s line is cruel. When I close my eyes and imagine one of her late poems, I see lines singed out of the page, or the thin red lines that so many adolescents have taken to slicing into their skin, be it for control or release. Then I open up Plath’s Collected Poems, and see that her poems appear in lines like those of any other poet—some short, some long, all made of words, and so on. Then I start reading, and once again I feel the sear. And I realize that it comes from the combination of lines turned, shorn, or stopped with furious resolve, and the hyperactive sound Plath has enclosed within them—the meticulously coiled internal rhymes and consonance she folds like razor blades into crisply creased white paper. “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets,” she writes in “Elm,” demon tongue dancing. “And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.”
Perhaps because I find the prose of women writers such as Jean Rhys, Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Marguerite Duras, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, Eileen Myles, and their ilk often fiercer in form and effect than that of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to Raymond Carver, Western literary history’s habit of aligning men with tough rigor and women with a hazy “écriture féminine” (or, analogously, Western art history’s tradition of aligning men with the muscular decisiveness of line, and women with the spacey formlessness of color) has always struck me as odd: more of a prescription or fantasy than a description or observation. It is true, however, that when women push toward making “core cuts,” the act may come across differently. If a body is already defined (by misogynistic culture) by its holes, where’s the heroism—even if it’s a nihilistic heroism—in “boring one hole after another, until what lurks behind begins to seep through”? As any ascetic can tell you, lucidity often arrives via subtraction, via impoverishment. But as any anorexic or self-cutter knows, it can be difficult to know when to stop chiseling.
Artist Eleanor Antin puts this problem on display with high irony in her 1972 piece Carving: A Traditional Sculpture. In Carving, Antin takes her own body as the living marble to be sculpted, and employs a thirty-six-day diet regimen to do the chiseling. Each day of her diet, she photographs herself from the front, the back, and both sides in front of the same white door frame. The resulting rows of photographs depict her stout, naked body, slimming almost imperceptibly over the days, her vacant stare prohibiting any happy before-and-after narrative. It is as if Antin had posed the question of if and how women might interact with an artistic tradition based on the shaping and marshaling of their bodies without literally diminishing themselves, and then stared it down, answer-less, with this unforgiving mug shot, this scraggly hair, these pendulous, broad-nippled breasts, all offered blankly, day after day, to the camera.
There is in fact an enormous amount of work by women that undercuts—or at least complicates—the heroism of penetration, and that dismantles—or at least complicates—the mythos of the devouring hole. After all, despite the elaborate fear, anxiety, and desire spun around the imago of the vagina as a sort of calamitous, even predatory void, most women are fully aware that the vagina does not resemble a whirling vortex, or a tunnel to the abyss. It, too, is a situation of meat—of blood vessels, of spongy walls, of mucus, of nerves, of pulse.
Mendieta’s Silueta series, in which Mendieta makes a slit in the earth, often in the shape of her body, and fills it with either sand, water, twigs, flowers, pigment, gunpowder, or fire, comes to mind here, as does Louise Bourgeois’s miraculous sculptural play with concave and convex forms. But perhaps the freakiest and most irreverent play of this nature can be found in the work of artist Yayoi Kusama, who has been obsessed with the polka dot—the ultimate hole that both is and is not a hole—for over forty years now. See, for example, Kusama’s 1967 video, Self-Obliteration, which documents various obliterations—or ecstatic communions—accomplished via painting polka dots on the body, or wearing them while moving through a polka-dotted landscape. Here, Warhol’s superficiality meets feminist wit (not to mention an outrageous obsessive-compulsiveness, for which Kusama has long been institutionalized). “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well,” wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?
FROM THE legendary catastrophe of his working space, Bacon chiseled rings of action out of the piles of images strewn around his feet and affixed to his walls, and drew our attention to the game. The game, for Bacon, was to paint the human figure with inexorable precision and equally inexorable distortion. A smattering of arrows repeatedly draws our attention to certain smears of color, certain areas of the body or canvas, for no apparent reason other than to tell us that, however profound the distortion may be, we are not to be excused from the task of focusing. We are not to collapse, amid the loneliness, injury, or carnage, into a state of diffuse or shocked bewilderment. The paintings aim for “the right degree of bewilderment,” as Henry James once put it, which, for James, most certainly did not mean allowing for sloppiness or randomness with bewilderment as an excuse. We are to remain alert. Alert pervs, alert detectives.
For James, this “right degree of bewilderment” meant a “precise ambiguity,” one that could conjure, over hundreds of pages of dense, incandescent syntax, something of the glorious, shifting fog of human consciousness. For Bacon, it meant something quite different: it meant forcing precision and ambiguity to coexist in a sort of calamity, in which to clarify one aspect of a figure is to force the smearing, or implosion, of another.
In contemporary literature, the work of Mary Gaitskill presents one of the most riveting examples of this collision of cutting and smearing, incision and blur. Gaitskill’s early stories, such as those collected in 1989’s notorious Bad Behavior, are all about the cut. Language here—be it that of the descriptive fabric of the stories, or that of the dialogue exchanged by their characters—is most definitely a tool used to penetrate, to dismantle, to bore holes. But rather than burn through projections, delusions, cant, or miscommunications, language here bores through the self-esteem and dignity of the characters, along with any possibility of compassionate communication between them. In “A Romantic Weekend,” a man and a woman who barely know each other go away together for the weekend, hoping to have some nasty S/M sex in an empty apartment. Before they’ve even boarded their plane, however, they find themselves wildly incompatible:
They arrived at the bar an hour early. They went to a bar and drank. The bar was an open-ended cube with a red neon sign that said “Cocktails.” There was no sense of shelter in it. The furniture was spindly and exposed, and there were no doors to protect you from the sight of dazed, unattractive passengers wandering through the airport with their luggage. She ordered a Bloody Mary.
“I can’t believe you ordered that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I want a bloody Beth.” He gave her a look that made her think of a neurotic dog with its tongue hanging out, waiting to bite someone.
“Oh,” she said.
The open-ended cube in which these two miserable souls find themselves—and through which other miserable souls must pass, and be involuntarily subjected to our two main characters’ mean scrutiny—is a good
spatial example of Gaitskill’s early fictive constructions at large. There is no shelter in them. The characters are fully exposed to the cruelty of the elements (which here means to each other, and, more crucially, to Gaitskill’s merciless authorial voice), yet the stories are also lacking in fresh air, or any hope of it. The characters revolve in a stale atmosphere, repeatedly poisoned by nasty speech and corrosive projections, along with a sense that even the most quotidian details of the world are unbearably repulsive.
While waiting on the street for her weekend date to arrive, Beth thinks, “A large, distracted businessman walked by holding a half-eaten hot dog. Two girls passed, sharing cashews from a white bag. The eating added to her sense that the world was disorderly and unbeautiful. She became acutely aware of the garbage on the street. The wind stirred it; a candy wrapper waved forlornly from its trapped position in the mesh of a jammed public wastebasket. This was all wrong, all horrible.” If a candy wrapper signifies this much ugliness and despair, one can only guess how Beth will feel after her weekend with a juvenile and obnoxious sadist who periodically burns her under her shirt with a cigarette lighter in a decidedly nonerotic fashion. Nothing here is nice at all.
The pitiless quality of these early stories was impressive, and Gaitskill justly gained fame for them. But it wasn’t until her novel Veronica, published in 2005, that Gaitskill began to adumbrate this sear with extended experiments in blurring. In the earlier work, the principal task of intelligence—both that of the characters, and of Gaitskill—is to slice through the veil of cant and cliché to reveal the “all wrong, all horrible” nature of things. In Veronica, however, this version of intelligence is no longer enough. Veronica is narrated by Alison, an ex-model—once young and beautiful, now older, injured, and sick with hepatitis—thinking back on her salad days in New York and Paris, as well as about her friend Veronica, who died of AIDS years ago. “[Veronica] spent her last days alone,” Alison bluntly tells us in the novel’s opening pages. “I wasn’t with her. When she died, nobody was with her.”
Veronica has no shortage of such bluntness, a bluntness meant to highlight starkly the cruelty, suffering, and loneliness flowing through the lives of its main characters. But the novel takes equal care to emphasize the flow. When Alison recalls Veronica’s story of being raped by a stranger in her apartment—a story Veronica ends by saying, “My rapist was very tender”—Alison has the following train of thought: “Smart people would say that [Veronica] spoke that way about that story because she was trying to take control over it, because she wanted to deny the pain of it, even make herself superior to it. This is probably true. Smart people would also say that sentimentality always indicates a lack of feeling. Maybe this is true, too. But I’m sure she truly thought the rapist was tender.” What impresses me here, especially in contrast to Gaitskill’s earlier work, is the space made by allowing there to be more than one way for “smart people” to respond, as well as the suggestion that while “smart people” might offer incisive, imposing diagnoses, they might also miss the boat entirely. That an intelligence focused solely on puncturing or mastery may end up deaf, dumb, and blind to other ways of knowing, of perceiving. Or that, at the very least, such an intelligence, with all its probing and psychoanalyzing, may miss the surface truth of what another is actually trying to communicate.
Veronica doesn’t really “work” as a novel, at least not in the conventional sense, in that the proposed relationship between Alison and Veronica—which is seemingly meant to serve as a kind of saving grace for our narrator—never really rings true. The novel’s truer triumph lies in its rendering of the rushing whirl of things going on, and the quiet ecstasy of feeling one’s body, mind, and personal history to be but a small, momentarily congealed piece of matter in a glorious, fluctuating whole. If anything delivers Alison to the achievement of her last line—“I will be full of gratitude and joy”—it is her repeated, deepening experience of this blurring, this experience of herself as a “grain or a grass or a stone, a tiny thing that knows everything but can’t say anything.”
This blurring begins in the first few pages, when Alison sets out for a walk: “my focus slips and goes funny. . . . It’s like I get sucked out of normal life into a place where the order of things has changed; it’s still my life and I recognize it, but the people and places in it are sliding around indiscriminately.” And it continues throughout her memories of her life as a model: “I walk down a hallway crowded with gorgeous people. Lush arms, gold skin, fantastic flashing eyes, lips made up so big and full, they seemed mute—made not to talk but only to sense and receive. So much beauty, like bursts of violent color hitting your eye together and mixing until they were mud. . . . A girl met my eye and I was amazed to see her face emerge with such clarity.” The face here functions as a miraculous shimmer of individuality, albeit one always on the cusp of being made mud, or resubmerged into a crowd (or, as in a modeling career, into the sea of other models’ equally extraordinary faces). Alison knows this, and as the novel comes to its climax, she finds in it no small measure of satisfaction and bliss: “I had succeeded. I had become like this music. My face had been a note in a piece of continuous music that rolled over people while they talked and drank and married and made babies. No one remembers a particular note. No one remembers a piece of grass. But it does its part. I had done my part.”
This passage may sound familiar to readers of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, which culminates in a justly famous passage celebrating the dynamic relation between form and flux—a relation of paramount concern to Woolf. The last paragraph of To the Lighthouse describes painter Lily Briscoe’s final reckoning with her canvas in progress: “There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did it matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done, it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying her brush down in extreme fatigue, I had had my vision.”
Veronica’s meditation on flux and form may echo Woolf ’s genius classic, but it is new to Gaitskill, a writer who is, after all, far more captivated by cruelty, nastiness, and callousness than Woolf ever was. Speaking about Veronica in a 2009 interview in Bomb magazine, Gaitskill says, “We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct—eyes, nose, mouth—and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it’s going to dissolve completely. It’s a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts.” A younger Gaitskill might have satirized the savagery of this situation. At present, she seems more interested in the ways in which specificity and precision coexist with—or eventually give way to—disintegration and dispersal: that completely natural, inevitable process that, as she herself notes, regularly breaks our hearts.
FACE
OWING IN large part to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the face has received a lot of attention in recent years as a site of ethical activity. In her book Precarious Life, Judith Butler makes extensive use of Levinas’s notion of “the face of the Other,” which serves, for Levinas, as the locus of ethics. As Levinas puts it, “The face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill.’ ”
Unlike the many ethical systems that advocate beginning with the self and then extrapolating out to include an Other (epitomized, again, by the Golden Rule), Levinas begins with the reverse presumption—that “the other’s right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other.” The face of the Other delivers this edict, which can be understood as a kind of divine imperative. “If the Other
, the Other’s face . . . at once tempts me with murder and prohibits me from acting upon it, then the face operates to produce a struggle for me, and establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics.”
This struggle would have come as no surprise to Francis Bacon, who customarily referred to the distortions he performed on the faces of his subjects as “injuries,” and preferred to work from photographs so as to “practice the injury in private.” He preferred, too, to work from images of friends, especially friends whose faces he found beautiful. “If they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them,” he said. One primary object of this violence, for Bacon, was the subtraction of the face from the head, so that the head could be made meat.
For those of you with five minutes to spare and a curiosity about the head-made-meat, I recommend Otto Muehl’s 1967 film Kardinal, as it is one of the most efficient, unsettling renderings of such that I’ve ever seen. The film is remarkable for its bold proposal of the human head as a canvas for Action painting, and its performance of a disconcerting, minimalist brutality, complicated by the apparent consensuality of the event. The film begins with the hands of a male figure binding a human face and head (its eyes shut) with twine and a clear plastic-like tape. After the face is bound, the male figure—whose body flickers in and out of the frame—begins performing a series of mistreatments, applications, and effacements on it.
The Art of Cruelty Page 21