Distrustful
to the Core : Subversive Lyricism of the Tales of Toxicity
“The world does not
speak. Only we do” (6). That’s how Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) lets his demetaphysized theory reach the reader. That’s also how
dispersed insulated destinies of denizens look to an eye of an urban dweller
amid muted spaces separating habitats scattered across the vast, desertlike
cityscape in a faraway corner of planet Earth, somewhere on the west cost of
the USA.
As if the cohesive
tissue holding the infrastructure were
dissolving in the haze of detached, dispassionate, and, above all,
disinterested individuals torpidly accepting the impossibility of bonding without
falling into a trap of bondage. As if the hollowness of the irresponsiveness of
the world were persuasive enough to convince one that there might be an
equation between individuality and individualism, between unity and uniformity.
As if a massifying cultural amalgamation were capable of depriving one of the
right to refacement, the right to the remix.
Dennis Cooper’s novel Try (1994) epitomizes such a social
drought, simultaneously portraying desolateness of inner spaces. In such a
scenario, what might seem to be resonating actually does not. Because there is
no sound to ensure reverberation. Because there is no silence either to
alleviate the rebarbative lack of reciprocity impossibilized by its linguistic
false pair—muteness. Or, so somnambulist logic would want one to believe.
The characters in this
carefully worded novel, elegantly peppered with a combination of an impeccable
verbal expression and a lavishly sleazy streetwise linguistic articulation,
seem to be mere projections of dystopian reflections of the architecture almost
embodying an idea of an archipelago consisting of incompatible,
incommensurable, and irreconcilable individuals increasingly sagging into the
inverted version of both the notion of selfhood and communality.
Ziggy, a teenager, on
the surface deeply deranged as a consequence of having been molested by both of
his adoptive gay fathers, finds a semi-consolation in editing the zine for the sexually
abused named after the song “I Apologize” by his favorite band Hüsker Dü. He
wanders in a staticky miasma of his room stuffed with evaporations from bodily
crevices and encrusted secretions leaving decorative traces on the sheets, just
as they seem to be caking micromaps on his belly. The ambience is nothing short
of the savagery of the perversity his adoptive uncle Ken, Brice’s brother,
exercises somewhere within a scarcely identifiable locality of that urban
desert.
Agonizing over his
emotional tumult, Ziggy is tempted to seek refuge in an embrace of that creepy
quasi-relative of his. Calls him. Ken is busy, though, shooting a porn video,
but offers to accept being paid a visit by the frustrated adopted nephew.
Perhaps under the proviso that Ziggy contributes to the movie, starring Robin,
a teen Slayer fan, out of his mind on whatever substance generously supplied by
the director himself as a, so to speak, foreplay of what in the aftermath of
porn rites--playing the tape now backwards, now forwards--looks like a
necrophilic continuation of the
cinematic extravaganza. However, it’s the wee hours of the morning. Ziggy
stays at home.
Distances between
habitats feel like intergalactic spaces, as inaccessible as veins are for
another solitary insomniac, somewhere in a faraway enclave of the city. Perhaps
even farther feels the place where his temporarily unsettled innerness can find
what Ken seems to be able to provide. A boy is sitting in front of the
computer. Nodding heavily. He’s all hooded, baggy eyes, minimized pupils,
scarred skin, bulbous intermuscular tissue. Loaded beyond belief, he is zoning
across the screen displaying scraps of text which he tends to see as a
novel-in-progress. Spacey traveler through lonely orbits of denial:”According
to books he’d admired, heroin was supposed to make certain outdated necessities
like love, friendship, sex obsolete, and it works in a way” (Try 150). Drifting through an ongoing
oneiric archipelago seen through the slits of his contracted, bloodshot eyes,
the distorted scenery appears as saturated with noise of oblivion as is the
flow in the communication channel hindered by the impossibility to overcome the
spell of disaffection. Air as buzzy as the threat of withdrawal. Or, so heroin
speaks.
Unfathomable distances
between humans in the city of Los Angeles seem to be bridged when Roger, one of
Ziggy’s fathers, flies over from New York to indulge in a sex rampage with his
adopted son, while his ex-partner, the other father of his, named Brice, is busy
quenching his own insatiable carnal thirst
elsewhere, most probably with some of insignificant others. Across the city, in
another of its lonesome pockets, a friend called Calhoun is in incessant search of the ultimate
oblivion within the safe grip of the sovereign power of heroin addiction:”How
does one tell somebody this fucking peaceful to give it up, that he has to go
back to functioning properly in one’s conception of the world?” (Try 138). He has succumbed to the
deceitful idea about the totality of an intense, yet utterly false, immersion.
Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.
“Meanwhile, the world’s
disinterested” (Try 114). In the room
dimlit by an insipid play of electric circuits and seductive reticence of the
screen of his laptop, Calhoun seems to be living in the night that knows no
dawn to relieve it from the heavy imagery of clogged needles, stained cotton
balls, filthy cookers / sooted spoons, syringes storing days, weeks old
remnants of dried blood, once the concoction of horse dissolved in water was
sent to soothe the alarmingly disbalanced biochemistry and feed starved,
withdrawal-ravaged cells. Radically distrustful towards Ziggy’s angular, yet
strangely unembellished, emotionality and his unadulterated naivety, Calhoun
sets out on an endeavor to dissect the semantic imprecision and misperception
of one, in his view, of the most misleading notions humanity conjured up in
order to turn a blind eye to and avoid facing the harsh edges of the world.
Despite all the allure Ziggy’s unmistakably attractive physique confronts him
with, he resists. He is not gay. Once he even had this girlfriend Josie, but
since then, he’s been immersed in the dream of disinterestedness.
To such a vocabulary,
desensitized to verbal infatuation, the whole world is but a locale indifferent
to whatever can be said about it. To such vocabularies there is no threat of
insularity because there is no concept of interconnectivity to be abandoned. To
such linguistic acrobatics there is no sense of miswording since all that is
available to one is but signifiers as polyvalent as descriptions of the world
are. Well, almost.
It is not impossible to
fall into a temporary trap of the possibilities linguistic polyphony presents
one with. It is not impossible to be temporarily tricked into thinking that
strongholds of isolation are all communality is about. It is not impossible to
momentarily mistake the antithesis of self-grandeur for deindividualization.
And yet, it is quite probable that such a heroin-induced, or, suchlike delusion is an echo of what
contemporary cultural realities are trying to impose on one as the model on
which to base thinking. Thoughts, however, are unlike bland facades staring
from each and every urban site depthless in its hollowness, styleless in its
aloofness, unanchored in its hard-headed denial of historical imagination, unmovable
by numberless variants of distorted, inverted versions of turning the cold of
boulevards into the pathways connecting the dwellers and solidifying communal
cohesion. Within such devastatingly dystopian imagery, a friendly reminder
imbues into narrative fabric a slightly modified shade of storytelling colors.
As in Against the
Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986) Terry
Eagleton tirelessly calls for disambiguation, one is reminded that nowadays it
seems that the dream of authenticity might not be an outmoded category because
it was not supposed to be among the postulates to base the vision of the world on
in the first place. In contemporary culture, authenticity appears to be more rendered
redundant than proved untenable. The
modern world sees oscillations between remembering and forgetting combined in the
most astonishing of manners. Among them, one is particularly indicative of a
shamefully compromised deviation of what actually is available to the community
of humans. Thus, in accord with Eagleton’s observations, one would be prone not
to accept the invincibility of authenticity to be a result of there being “no longer
any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from” (132).
In Dennis Cooper’s
novel, consolation sought on the surface narrative of extreme brutality and
graphic aggression cannot be found in those misleading sites. Instead, it emerges
from the tacit subtlety of his prose that subverts the crudeness of deceitful
tales. The peculiar robustness woven into the unverbalized lyricism is perhaps
best suggested through the characterization, particularly the way the
elusiveness of Calhoun lends to the story a touch of humanness that Ziggy in
his disarmingly open admiration makes even more prominent. These characters
symbolize the approach to the theme of the body: between the putrid and the pristine.
One of the scenes most evocative of the
power of weakness is perhaps that of the threesome-style orgy in which the
fathers’ uninhibited sacrilege of the familial and/or age related moral norms
is disrupted by their son’s hesitant request:”’I’ve got some heroin in my jeans
pocket. Can one of you get it out for me? ‘Cos I think I’m going to cry’”
(176).
The subversion comes
creeping like a sound in a psychobilly track, opening with an ominous bass drum
pedal phrase, joined by a fuzzy bassline, continuing throughout the narrative, gradually
allowing the shining guitar chord to dissolve the tension, only after it was
foreshadowed by a gentle breeze of the ride cymbal, imbuing in the literary
fabric a note decisively distinct, unmistakenly different from what cultural
realities are trying to impose on one as the way to think.
Like Ziggy’s
unreservedly offering an oasis of purity amid a desert of intoxication and
detachment, Cooper’s idiom is evocative of the concept of vulnerability sensed as
a vehicle, rather than a self-referential motive. It is persistent in
simplicity, yet steadfast in being neither simplistic nor sentimental. The
disambiguation of this intricate story of toxicity prevails as the novel is
heading towards the closing scene with a verbal bravado as sparse in emotional
articulateness as it is abundant in many other things, but, above all, in the lyrical
potential exuding through the interstices of the communication between the
reluctant interlocutors.
There are sound
responses arising from emotional ruins, from cacophonic cultural amalgamation. There
are creative / critical voices in contemporary culture capable of inspiring the
potential for peaceful/peaceable resistance to noise. There is vivacity within
such vernaculars enabling the endurance of the distinctions between
individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. There is vibrancy
in such responses that can ensure recuperation of the right to refacement, the
right to the remix.
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