The Museum of Unnecessary Surgeries
Criticism with the possibility of infection.
Literary criticism should be illegal. Not that it shouldn’t be practiced, but that it should be practiced like some of the most deservedly criminal acts: thrillingly, shamefully, and with a non-zero probability of risk for critic and reader alike. It should be pushed to the furthest periphery of civilized life, alongside the “operators” who promise to cure maladies by means that only prolong them, who offer to shoot you in a non-lethal part of your body and extract the slug for as many times as you wish or can afford, or who will add extra appendages to make you an insect or a spider, with or without your explicit consent. Critics of this sort will abide by no theories, let alone “oaths.” They will not respect the wisdom of greater critics or the random winds of popular taste. Where regular, street legal critics will do all that is in their power to extract the parasitic bite of art from their technique, I push its incisors deeper beneath the skin with a pointy stick.
What follows may or may not capture exactly the spirit of what is clearly the best introduction to my best idea ever. Perhaps it is but a taste, the half-approximation of a theme, the tableaux of my botched experiments—my extremely off-road museum of unnecessary surgeries. The “patients” below exhibited came to me with no apparent ailments or regrettable deformities. I handpicked them for my slab. For while there are those who go off the beaten path for my services, for whatever reason, there are those who simply deserve unnecessary surgery. They beg to be explored and dissected. Their parts are so interesting and cool. Unnecessary surgery Literary criticism, bloody and unsanitary though it is, is the faint, fast-fading ember of humanism in a world that has lost all patience for it.
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce’s relation to the literary greats of his generation—Twain, James, Howells, etc.—was very simple: he hated them and they barely thought about him at all. “The reputation of Ambrose Bierce has always radiated an occult, artificial, drug-store scent,” wrote H.L. Mencken, who did not delight in being in close proximity with the man. Yet Bierce’s literary antiheroism has done little to obstruct his renown. In fact it, and his disappearance somewhere in Mexico, have only enabled it. Though without his body of work he’d be little more than a sideshow attraction.
Victor LaValle assessed it best when he drew a line between the writings of Ernest Hemingway and Ambrose Bierce. Hemingway wrote about war; Bierce wrote about “being a soldier.” The former is subject to romanticism while the latter is steeped in drudgery, grime, noise, pain, and absurdity. The Civil War was America’s first modern war, and Bierce was America’s first truly modern writer, having come out of the war with a gunshot wound in the head and an unprecedented tolerance, even a pleasure, for physical, moral, and literary mayhem.
Because Ambrose Bierce’s legacy rests on shortform mediums (the story, the fable, the editorial, the aphorism), and because he could not be trusted to edit it himself, Bierce’s copious writing is at the mercy of anthologists. In addition to the countless, often overlapping, short story collections and the scant but still bewildering nonfiction collections, there remain competing editions of his one great work The Devil’s Dictionary. The Library of America have made matters somewhat simpler, providing the fullest account of the Dictionary, the Civil War stories, and other short fiction, while at the same time confirming his distinguished place in American literature.
The thread that unifies his work is the dismally lapidary and ferociously precise prose by which his uninhibited scurrility was given total license. Bierce is perhaps the least pleasant author in English. His stories often featured cruel twists, supernatural phenomena that was always malevolent, violence toward parents, infants, and animals, and humor that ranged from droll to infernal. The full range of his wit—polemical, satirical, ironic, and depressive—and the depth of his bitterness are best captured in the Dictionary, assembled over a course of years as a newspaper commentator. He is also at his least exhausting in small bites. A lecturer is defined as “One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.” A wedding is “A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.” Fear is “A sense of the total depravity of the immediate future.”
Bierce’s influence is widely felt but seldom properly credited. I can’t imagine that an America without Bierce would also have The Twilight Zone, National Lampoon magazine, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, hardcore punk, and ‘90s alt-culture. He’s not just a great hater, but an extravagant fireworks display of hate. Bierce’s aesthetic compound of unquenchable amoral fury, corrosive retorts, and abysmal disappointment, inimitable though it is in a pure sense, laid the groundwork for a weapons-grade style of antagonism that compels the American’s moral repulsion and masochistic adoration in equal measure.
Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan is to postwar literature what Francis Bacon is to postwar art.
It is not simply a matter of biographical overlap—their bitter parental relations, their dissatisfied love lives, their mysterious pasts and late-blooming career maturities. Nor is it rooted only in their distinctly intense styles, moved by violence, both intimate and general. It is something closer to mutual codependence. Kavan (who was herself a painter) wrote in brush strokes. Her distant mothers, raging husbands, psych ward lifers and overseers, and her disruptive, antagonistic natural world could transfer without much difficulty into the Baconian sensibility. Just as Bacon’s triptychs, screaming popes, and crouching men have narrative arcs—their own beginnings, middles, and ends.
Consider Kavan’s “A Bright Green Field,” in which villagers risk their lives to mow a meadow of seemingly sentient grass. It tells of “twitching marionettes” with sickles in-hand making “extraordinary contortions” against “countless millions of blades … standing ready, like lances, like thickets, like trees, to resist invasion.” Linguistic lushness of color and motion renders compelling what would otherwise be an appallingly unsentimental, even antihuman vision, and something just as comfortable within the urgency of Bacon’s canvases. “Mist and twilight had blotted out colours, all shapes were blurred and indefinite, so that the clear-cut bright green field stood out startlingly, mysteriously retaining the light of the departed day, concentrated in its small rectangle, floating over the roofs like a bright green flag.”
An acclaim on par with Bacon’s never came to Kavan in her lifetime, and even now it accumulates behind the velocity of the earth-consuming ice she describes in her final novel. This may be her saving grace. Though Bacon is not dated as Julian Schnabel or Damien Hirst are dated, his paintings are viewed in completion. Their catastrophes are behind us, they are memories of events with which your are free to appropriate and pinpoint your trinketed anxieties and disenchantments. Kavan’s catastrophes, whatever emanation or scope, remain ongoing—their course indeterminant, their intensity still mercifully far from conventional comprehension.
William S. Burroughs
When Norman Podhoretz wrote “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” for Partisan Review in 1958, Naked Lunch was just a line in a poem, an “endless” and unpublishable novel. By 1963, Naked Lunch, after several rounds of editing to make it less endless, found a publisher and a central role in the ongoing mid-20th century drama over what constitutes “obscenity,” let alone “literature.” The New York Review of Books, thinking maybe that she would pan the novel, assigned it to Mary McCarthy, who instead turned in a review praising it as the great neo-Swiftian satire of the age.
It is not a matter of deciding which New York intellectual was more vindicated. Both were right. Seldom has a work of art ever delivered on its promised degeneracy and its artistic merit in equal measure. Naked Lunch boasts the exalted distinction of being the one “beat” novel that is still worth reading, in large part because, aside from drug use and the colloquial prose of its early sections, the novel shares almost none of the preoccupations that have dated its contemporaries. Rather than romanticizing itinerant youth slumming it with dirt farmers, speed freaks, and forgotten jazz musicians, or sinking Whitmanesque free-verse into paroxysmal platitudes, Burroughs offers only the most scathing and vividly deranged ridicule of repression, hypocrisy, and bureaucracy. Its under-appreciated effect is its humor, which at its best reads like a hybrid of Georges Bataille and the Marx Brothers. This is true enough whenever Burroughs’s maniacal surgeon Dr. Benway appears.
Burroughs’s distinct brand of lucidity, at once acerbic and madcap, withstood decades of stylistic upheavals from his pulpy early novels to his more listenable than readable “cut-up” trilogy to the distinctly utopian dystopian novels of his later years. It weaves like a thread through his copious marginalia: his teenage essay “Personal Magnetism,” his constantly recycled college story “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” the anarchic early routine “Roosevelt After the Inauguration,” his sometimes learned but often crankish journalism collected in The Adding Machine, a tossed-off Harper’s symposium answer that became a popular reading staple “Why I Stopped Wanting to be President,” and his alt-rock hit “Thanksgiving Prayer.”
Still, it is only sensible that Burroughs the prose artist and satirist is overshadowed by Burroughs the pioneer of moral laxity. There is hardly a need for satire when the laxity Burroughs pioneered or otherwise helped along—opioids, sexual saturnalia, post-hippie youth culture, junk spirituality, conspiracy theories, weapons collecting, even his brief interest in Scientology—has become practically bourgeois. Everyone knows that satire always punches up. Once you profane the icons, you do not go around besmirching the good names of the iconoclasts. Though such concerns probably never registered with much acuteness to the man who, in addition to writing about talking assholes and doing more smack than all the Rolling Stones combined, read Westbrook Pegler, hated abortion, and who may or may have shot his wife on purpose.
Mary Gaitskill
Enough time has passed since the ascendance of the “literary brat pack” that we might be able to reorient its parts more accurately. Because they came at the same time in the 1980s, wrote about the same kinds of people, shared the same publishers, and caroused in the same clubs, the moment made for easy commodification that, at the very least, took pressure off of publisher marketing departments. But hindsight grants us the privilege of seeing just how incompatible their efforts were with each other. Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York and Jay McInereny’s Bright Lights, Big City heed to a sort of pop or new romantic fiction. These are nothing like Bret Easton Ellis’s novels which convey an iciness and severity more akin to punk realism; tagged along with him is Mary Gaitskill.
Gaitskill seems the odd author out of this group despite her age, the 1984 debut of her short story collection Bad Behavior, and its predominantly urban setting and young disaffected characters. I chalk it up in part to her not having the same social life as the others; but at the same time, the intensity and depth of her writing is far more accomplished than any of her peers.
Bad Behavior lacks the apocalyptic bacchanal of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Its amorality is comparably lo-fi, extremism less aloof and less satirically distinct from the reader’s everyday experience; in particular, everyday relationships.
A predominant theme, at least as detected in my reading, is boundaries—or the lack thereof; of different worlds and perspectives meeting and commingling. The underworld and the straight world are barely distinct. Brothels are as blandly static as offices; offices are rife with sexual improprieties. Relationships are less framed as conflicting needs and desires than as bargains being endlessly renegotiated. The collection, always carrying a cult appeal, has arisen somewhat as an anti-text of #MeToo, or perhaps as a text of its aftermath. It does not condemn or comment upon the vulgarities and dominance games its female characters must maneuver, but reports them in an unsentimental, occasionally spiky but timelessly unaffected third-person narration (excepting “Secretary,” written in a slightly less unsentimental first-person).
In this sense, it helps to think of Gaitskill less in relation to the literary brat pack and more in relation to Breece D’J Pancake, whose prose was just as spare, his narrative world just as bleak, but infused with a tenderness for his characters and an indignation toward their hardship that Gaitskill declined to indulge. The stories in Bad Behavior lack arcs, few of their characters mature or transform to any noticeable degree, some even get worse. Love, careers, and aspirations are flat, familiar circles.
John Gray
It doesn’t take much to create an important work. All it needs to do is match up with more than 80 percent of what the public thinks is important at the time it is published. Obviously that is not widely applicable, but such is what happened with John Gray’s Straw Dogs, a short, sharply written survey of “antihumanism” and a critique of the Enlightenment and a human-centered moral order. Released in, say, 1995 it would have been considered crankish, but released as it was seven years later, after the 9/11 attacks and just before the Iraq War, of which Gray was a searing if unsuccessful critic, its polemic against progress resonated, to say the least.
Before Straw Dogs, Gray was an obscure academic, with studies on John Stuart Mill, Hayek, and Isaiah Berlin. He’d drifted politically over the years from Thatcherism to New Labour to his current pessimism that seems to reject any proactive scheme with a hopeful, ameliorative aim as utopian. The greatest selling point of the book is its clear prose. Where Gray falls short as an aphorist (“Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen” is the high bar here) he excels as a writer of nutshells, simplifying ideas down to their granular essence. It was both shocking and refreshing for many to read that employment, careers, mastery of technology, stable environment, perpetual peace, freedom, the rightness of modernity, among other amenities were not to be taken as granted.
I bought Straw Dogs in 2009 having discovered it by some happy accident. I was not shocked by its contents; in a perverse way I was pleased. I had been mulling over many worst-case scenarios in my mind the past eight years never having the resolve to confirm their gravity, let alone voice them. Yet here was this unassuming professor doing just that in plainer language than I was able to muster at the time.
Sometimes a book comes along and changes your life. Other times a book just speaks your mind for you. Though more impressive than that was the erudition Gray brought with it. More than a nutshell writer, Gray is an adept curator. Straw Dogs is as much an intellectual scrap book as it is a treatise. At the time I was only vaguely familiar with Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, G.C. Lichtenberg, Karl Kraus, Guy Debord, or Thomas De Quincey, but there they all were in one capacity or another, in clever quotation or in exposition.
Gray has hit his stride in this style, with variations on the Straw Dogs model that are more conscious of their mass appeal. He is a prophet insofar as he has been widely imitated. And he seems to acknowledge his imitators by imitating them right back. The take-mongers against woke-infected liberalism become portentous aphorists and the portentous aphorist writes takes against woke-infected liberalism. The wheel of culture gets fresh grease. The death of Christopher Hitchens was followed almost immediately by the competition to be his heir. But it is the mysterious fibers of the universe that gives us the “Hitchens” the times most deserve. Gray, with his widely accommodating elixir of learning, concision, and daring but the wit of a skeleton-riddled northern moorland, is a truly well-timed gift.
Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane spent much of her four-year career angering the public. Her plays Blasted and Cleansed were taken as affronts to polite society in a way that art, let alone drama, is rarely taken today. On stage she depicted rape, cannibalism, and torture. Her settings were nightmarish contortions of everyday spaces: a Leeds hotel room becomes a Balkan war zone in Blasted; a college campus becomes a concentration camp in Cleansed. Her dialogue was stripped, words being either pointless or precious. Her meticulous stage directions sometimes defied reason, or at least challenged production logistics.
Kane was one of the luminaries of the “in-yer-face” theater movement that briefly overtook the UK in the 1990s. The term speaks to the inherent datedness of young writers and directors exploding taboos in front of complacent New Labour era audiences. Kane’s grisly material was perhaps given special scrutiny for being a woman in her twenties, but she was defended by Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond, Howard Barker, and other elders of transgressive theater.
I never liked “in-yer-face” as a term or as a concept, certainly with regard to Kane, whose work was studied in dramatic history, building off of the extremist tragedy established by Seneca (whom she adapted in Phaedra’s Love) and John Webster and the experimental drama of Strindberg. Her last two plays Crave and 4.48 Psychosis mark the shift from the brutal to the lyrical. The latter play, a fragmentary and plotless depiction of the internal world of a clinical depressive, is remembered primarily because Kane committed suicide at twenty-eight between its writing and its first staging. But like Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia after it, the play is an honest yet expressionistic portrayal of the contingent reality of the depressive, a blurring between fact and dream. It is also a dream for actors and production designers.
Few were angered by 4.48 Psychosis as opposed to anguished by its context or confused by its message. I feel frustrated by it. The play is too often seen as an end to something, a final statement, when it looks to me like a rudely interrupted beginning of something else. Of leaving behind Kane’s unsubtle early efforts towards an artistic vision that cannot be reduced, in Simon Leys’s words, “to the absurdly minor and narrow craft of playwriting.”
Sarah Kane’s work is not strictly horror, but the term sticks. Kane, Adam Lehrer writes, “has a similar effect to reading Lovecraft or watching a Beckett production for the first time: it radically redefines your understanding of the power of text and the possibilities of theater.” Like Lovecraft Kane is inimitably, uncomfortably visceral; like Beckett, she is stripped bare. Kane’s horror is less about transgressing the bounds of civilization than showing what remains when its veneer is peeled off. It is more un-humanist than antihumanist, not making the case against the advancement of our species, but noting that those aspects we claim to define our species are conspicuously absent. This horror will define the twenty-first century.