The Art of Cruelty

by Maggie Nelson

  Perhaps because Plath did not, and cannot now, answer them, her readers have often done so for her. And the two primary answers—as critic Jacqueline Rose has pointed out—are that “she did it all—only—to herself” (pathology), or “he did it” (in which case “man, meaning Hughes or the male sex he stands in for, is to blame—the woman internalizes, turns against herself, the violence of the world outside”). Again, the problem isn’t that neither answer holds any water. Both do. The problem, as Rose points out, is that “in neither [option] is it acceptable that there might be a component of psychic negativity with no singular origin, which no one will take away for us, for which no one can be blamed.”

  Tough news, this. No wonder that, in the face of it, we might run around trying to smear this negativity onto other sources, including onto itself. “It is easy to blame the dark,” Plath tells us elsewhere. Plath herself took the more unpopular route: she asserted, without apology, in her journal on June 20, 1958, “I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.” (See Kara Walker: “Rage is fun.”)

  This is an especially discomfiting admission for a woman to make. For a woman who claims this hot death-blood is no gladiator or emperor, but a hellish Fury (yet a woman who protests against it too ardently has not yet come to terms with the cruel “ways of the world”). A woman who delves into the relation between Eros and Thanatos is not typically regarded as someone making a transgressive, probing move, but as a self-abasing traitor aiding and abetting rape culture. Likewise, a woman who explores the depths of her despair or depression isn’t typically valorized as a hero on a fearless quest to render any “darkness visible,” but is instead perceived as a redundant example of female vulnerability, fragility, or self-destructiveness. A woman who lives, as did Artaud, like a mad animal at the furthest reaches of her sanity, isn’t a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a “madwoman in the attic,” an abject spectacle. “Her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal’s,” said a visitor to Plath’s London flat, one month before her winter suicide.

  Plath set up shop in “this blackness, / This ram of blackness,” anyway. Then, with steely serenity, she went about sketching the landscape she found there. “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black . . . And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.” Perhaps you do not recognize this landscape, or perhaps you would prefer not to stay too long in it. Perhaps you do not like the starkness of its message. Plath does not care. Plath cares about telling us, over and over again, how it is to live in “the O-gape of complete despair.” That is her suffocation, her dark generosity.

  To perch in the O, to sit with its blackness and silence without demanding the immediate amelioration of either, to resist the urge to make ourselves or anyone else definitively to blame for its existence, to sketch its contours with patience, with exactitude, with eyes open—these are not easy feats. Perhaps they feel, at times, like cruelties, or like an acquiescence to cruelties. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness, however, you might be surprised to feel a sense of relief. “I know the bottom,” Plath wrote. “It is what you fear. / I do not fear it: I have been there.” At least there is a clarity here, a sense of clearing.

  RARER AND BETTER THINGS

  OF COURSE, the frustrating thing about Plath—as with so many artists of cruelty—is that she wields her scimitar of clarity without letting any air into the room. As with Compton-Burnett, Trocchi, Bacon, McDonagh, and many others who appear in these pages, whatever “rarer or better things” may exist in the universe ultimately remain but shadows outside their gates. As a consequence, entering their worlds can bring about the sensation described by Anne Carson (in Decreation) in a poem about reading Beckett: “You know that sense of sinking through crust, / the low black oh no of the little room / with walls too close, so knowable.” One may love, respect, and admire the work, but one may not always feel like hanging out in its little room, or feeling the press of its walls. One may have to be, as they say, in the mood.

  In Plath’s case, I don’t see this airlessness as the mark of any reprehensible shortcoming (be it chemical, moral, or aesthetic), but more likely a result of the fact that she died too young to explore the voluptuousness or complexity of her cruelty, much less to ventilate it. She died, after all, at thirty—an age at which Bacon, for example, had hardly begun to paint. And Bacon’s early paintings are, unsurprisingly, his most over-the-top—he got to paint for four more decades after rendering his most horrific screams, his bloodiest carcasses.

  Even Bacon’s harshest critics agree that one of his best paintings is Jet of Water, from 1988, made when Bacon was seventy-nine years old. Ditto Blood on Pavement, made that same year, a gorgeous, nearly abstract painting that brings to mind both Cy Twombly and the crime-scene photos of Weegee. I don’t personally subscribe to the belief—explicitly or unwittingly expressed by so many critics and curators—that a movement toward abstraction marks some kind of commendable, teleological progress in an artist’s career, or in the history of art itself. Nonetheless, I would have been very curious to see equivalent work made by a seventy-nine-year-old Plath; I would have loved to have seen Plath’s Jet of Water.

  Am I suggesting that, in some sense, cruelty is a young person’s game? Certainly an artist who stays fixated on it runs certain risks. Bacon’s centenary retrospective was greeted by a surplus of backlash reviews lambasting him as a cartoonish one-trick pony—as an overrated “illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst,” as Jerry Saltz put it. Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), for which he went so far as to hire an official “misogyny consultant” (Danish journalist Heidi Laura), seems to have scraped the bottom of whatever gynophobic trough he’s been drinking from for decades. (As the UK’s Telegraph reported, “Recently, [von Trier] was asked directly whether Anti-Christ was misogynistic. Disarmingly, he replied: ‘I don’t know about that. I often wonder what would happen if I just came out and said, “I hate women.” ’ ” Of course, nothing much would change at all.)

  McDonagh has gone from penning linguistically riveting plays to directing derivative Hollywood shoot-’em-ups loaded with the banality of visual gore, such as 2008’s In Bruges. His 2010 play A Behanding in Spokane—his first set in America—was laden with racist drivel, and panned by most as a sordid flop. Michael Haneke’s American remake of Funny Games seemed profoundly misguided, its scenes of a blonde and bound Naomi Watts jumping around in her underwear undercutting, for many, every highbrow thing Haneke has ever said about his pleasure-prohibiting representations of violence. (Haneke has since redeemed himself in the eyes of many critics with 2009’s White Ribbon, primarily due to the film’s restraint: “You expect harm to befall [the characters], like a plague, but, for once, it stays its hand,” Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker.) Paul McCarthy is doing quite well into his sixth decade, but his beat has always been abjection, dark comedy, and taboo-busting rather than cruelty.

  Some writers—such as Elfriede Jelinek—are able to sustain and invent upon their cruel and claustrophobic worlds so relentlessly over the years that their stamina rather than their affective range becomes the wonder. (“My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality,” Jalinek has said. “Redemption is the specialty of other authors.” It may also bear noting that Jelinek is a famous agoraphobe, who didn’t even venture out for the 2004 Nobel ceremony at which she won the prize in literature.) Others, such as Gaitskill, evidence, over time, a certain expansiveness that feels thrilling rather than slack. Others still—such as Mendieta, Schneemann, Abramovi´c , Walker, Bowles, Ono, Finley, Antin, Kusama, Akerman, Compton-Burnett, and so on—are, to my mind, still waiting to be adequately contended with, heard, understood.

  And, of course, there are the many, many others whose work did not appear in these pages, but easily could have (Gina Pane, Valie Export, Maria Lassnig, Cindy Sherman, Rebecca Horn, Marlene McCarty, Chl
oe Piene, Nathalie Djurberg, Eileen Myles, Darcey Steinke, Peggy Ahwesh, Wanda Coleman, Dennis Cooper, Harmony Korine, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amos Tutuola—to name but a few). The most interesting of this work—past, present, or future—is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde’s long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence—be it in art or in political action—might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings. For as Arendt puts it succinctly in On Violence, “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

  And then, of course, there are madmen such as Artaud, who neither crash and burn nor “grow up,” nor provide anything close to a usable blueprint for the future of art, life, human happiness, the revolution, or the planet, but who simply radiate, pulse, and magnetize across space and time, reminding us of what the outer limits of being human might be.

  “There’s a way that I always disbelieve Artaud,” says writer Rick Moody, in a June 2009 piece in The Believer, “especially now that I am twenty years from my own time in the psychiatric hospital. In my disbelief, sometimes he seems just a sick person, and I want to say that I am no longer willing to be sick for my own art—it’s a young man’s game.” I can’t personally say that I’ve ever been tempted to believe or disbelieve Artaud—as Sontag once wrote, the one thing you cannot do with Artaud is apply him; likely you cannot believe him either, at least not in the sense of becoming a follower. What’s there to believe or follow in his later poetry, in which he calls himself “Artaud the Momo,” coins the term “Boss-Pussy,” and worries incessantly about people stealing his semen and excrement? Artaud’s last fragment of written work reads, “And they have pushed me over / into death, / where I ceaselessly eat / cock / anus / and caca / at all my meals, / all those of THE CROSS.” In the face of such anarchic, blasphemous transmissions, I can only revel in their strangeness, and try to open myself up—when possible—to their incitements, inspirations, comedy, and terror, their spasms of agony and joy.

  Perhaps as a sort of unwitting warning, my used copy of The Theater and Its Double arrived to me bearing the following inscription: “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.” I have since learned that this quotation comes from punk legend Patti Smith—no stranger to abandon, balance, or stealth. Over the years, I have come to think of this quotation as a prayer, or aspiration—one that draws a ring of action around art and life, acknowledging their tight tether, while also sagely differentiating between them. The quotation reminds me of something Richard Foreman says in Unbalancing Acts, in the midst of a Brechtian diatribe against the attempt to create a flow of love or empathy between stage players and audience members. “Art should not be a substitute for real life,” Foreman writes. “Love should be between people.” I agree. Taking such pressure off art frees up both art, and loving.

  SO, TO return to my rejected Williams epigraph, which takes love as its subject: “The business of love is cruelty, / which, / by our wills, / we transform / to live together.” It still sounds good—but what could it mean? I don’t particularly agree with its temporal proposition—that the business of love begins as a form of cruelty, which can be subsequently (heroically?) altered, until we all get along. I do, however, like its calm admission of the coexistence of love and cruelty—its acknowledgment that they can exist within one another, rather than at opposite ends of the spectrum, or locked in an oppositional embrace. That there might be an alchemical, rather than a conflictual, relationship between them. That the possibility of transformation is always alive, and always ours.

  Such a proposition is in keeping with the work of British psychologist D. W. Winnicott, who concerned himself primarily with the needs and behaviors of infants and small children. Winnicott differed from Freud, Melanie Klein, and other analysts in that he did not customarily term an infant’s “business of love” sadistic, no matter how aggressive the behavior; he thought such a term attributed more malice to the infant than was plausible. But Winnicott did spend a great deal of time thinking and writing about the intense dance between vulnerability and ruthlessness that begins when we are infants and persists, in its way, for the rest of our lives—our grappling with desires so fierce one fears that they might overwhelm or obliterate others, others that we may desperately not want to lose—indeed, that we cannot afford to lose.

  For Winnicott, it was crucial and normal that a mother feel hatred for her baby, and equally so that the baby be able, in turn, to hate her. Love occurs, he thought, when the infant is able to test the love object, often via aggression, and the object survives, proves itself able to withstand the testing. One of Winnicott’s most well-known images for the balancing act of parent and child has to with holding: the baby must be held loosely enough to experience freedom, but tightly enough so that it does not fall. Love, in this case, is a container—a “holding environment”—with the right amount of space provided. Or—and here is Winnicott’s generosity—if not exactly right, “good enough.”

  Such an image echoes that offered by John Cage, in a 1966 piece of writing titled “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).” Here Cage writes: “The most, the best, we can do, we / believe (wanting to give evidence of / love), is to get out of the way, leave / space around whomever or whatever it is.” These lines have always struck me as an admirable mantra to live by, if not an exceedingly difficult—perhaps at times impossible—one, given the ruthlessness of our desires, the fraught apprehension of our dependency, the heavy, chaotic experience of jealousy, and the radical undone-ness that can attend both loss and communion.

  What a relief, then, to return to this Cage piece and find that its very next line reads, “But there is no space!”—a protest of the previous line’s serenity. And so we are returned to negotiation, to paradox. A similar dynamic animates Cage’s title: “How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),” which first acknowledges the desire to change the world, then pulls the rug out from under it. Such gestures are in keeping with one of Buddhism’s most enlivening paradoxes: that we can dedicate our lives to ending suffering, while acknowledging the first noble truth, that life is suffering. Such paradoxes are ours to keep.

  A paradox is more than the coexistence of opposing propositions or impulses. It signals the possibility—and sometimes the arrival—of a third term into a situation that otherwise appeared to consist of but two opposing forces. Roland Barthes elaborates this third term—which he calls the Neutral—with the utmost of beauty and intelligence in his 1977–78 series of lectures titled The Neutral. Barthes’s Neutral is that which throws a wrench into any system (doxa) that demands, often with menacing pressure, that one enter conflicts, produce meaning, take sides, choose between binary oppositions (i.e., “is cruel! / is not!”) that are not of one’s making, and for which one has no appetite.

  As it disrupts such demands, the Neutral introduces responses that had heretofore been unthinkable—such as to slip, to drift, to flee, to escape. In a world fixated on the freedom to speak and the demand to be heard, the Neutral proposes “a right to be silent—a possibility of being silent . . . the right not to listen . . . to not read the book, to think nothing of it, to be unable to say what I think of it: the right not to desire.” It allows for a practice of gentle aversion: the right to reject the offered choices, to demur, to turn away, to turn one’s attention to rarer and better things.

  Preserving the space for such responses has been one of this book’s primary aims. Of equal importance has been making a space for paying close attention, for recognizing and articulating ambivalence, uncertainty, repulsion, and pleasure. I have intended no special claim for art or litera
ture—that is, no grand theory of their value. But I have meant to express throughout a deep appreciation of them as my teachers. For, as Barthes suggests, insofar as certain third terms—however volatile or disturbing—baffle the oppressive forces of reduction, generality, and dogmatism, they deserve to be called sweetness.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE THOUGHTS in this book belong as much to my beloved and brilliant Harry Dodge as they do to me. I am beyond grateful for our dialogue, and for the unimaginably rich business of our love. The luck is mine, everyday. Jackpot.

  My sincere gratitude to PJ Mark (of Janklow & Nesbit) and Alane Mason (of W. W. Norton), for their intelligence, encouragement, and guidance, all of which has made this a much better book. I thank them both for their profound role in bringing it into being. Thanks also to Denise Scarfi and all others at Norton who worked on this book’s behalf.

  Thanks also to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; my friends and colleagues at CalArts, especially Dean Nancy Wood, and my students from the 2007 and 2010 Art of Cruelty seminars; Ali Liebegott, Beth Pickens, and Michelle Tea of RADAR Lab, for providing such a beautiful place for me to finish, and for others to flourish; and friends Cort Day, Wayne Koestenbaum, Aaron Kunin, and Anthony McCann, for the immeasurably smart and helpful leads, inspiration, and advice they offered along the way.