Bildungsromane, Domination, Sado-Masochism
On Leon Craig's Parallel Hells, Freud, and (fictional) Sexual Self-Harm
My friend Leon wrote a book for short stories this year. I wanted to write something about it that I hope still works for a reader who knows I am already biased in the book's favour, so I decided to look at its themes, and how Leon’s handling of them transforms one of the characteristic motifs of contemporary realist fiction.
Leon Craig’s short story collection, Parallel Hells, begins with a marvellous, and marvellously considered first sentence. “The butterflies were beginning to form a paste.” A young woman and her father are driving through Mexico, on the way to a beach resort, racking up a butterfly bodycount along the way. There, the narrator, the daughter, strikes up an acquaintance with a compatriot, a young English man who claims that his girlfriend is a vampire. He is waiting to be turned into one himself, and the narrator, who is really more interested in his girlfriend, admires the chutzpah of the other woman’s ruse. The man, Alexander, and the narrator go swimming together, and she observes the evidence of his girlfriend’s ‘vampirism’:
He eventually followed suit, leaving his clothes by mine on the jetty and slipping into the cool, clear water. Striations laced along his forearms, hips and neck, some newer and pinker than others. I wanted to trace the marks she had made on him, to feel the patterns of her thought. Instead, I pointed at a web of them, but didn’t quite make contact.
‘Do you ... like ... it?’
‘Sometimes.’
At least he had a better idea than most men ever will of what it is like to be owned by someone else. I began to wonder about her long-term plans for him, she couldn’t string this out indefinitely.
The ‘pattern’ of the narrator’s own thought here is telling. The body, injured, tells a story. It becomes malleable under the pressure of desire. In a way, it changes gender, or allows us to see that gender, as we understand and practice it, is a set of fantasies that we inflict, often tortuously on our bodies. But the wounds themselves show how seriously we ought to take fantasies. The narrator doesn’t think of sex in terms of desire organized by a response to the body. Power comes first, and that force reorganizes the body.
But that reorganization takes the form of pain and injury. That’s why the butterflies are nice, I think.
When we think of a butterfly, we (I) think of two things. They are beautiful, first. Second, they are not born beautiful, they become beautiful. Both the narrator and Alexander indulge fantasies of transformation. Alexander wants to live forever, as a vampire with his strange vampire lover. The narrator simply wants to shuck off some unpleasant associations and enjoy a different sense of self in the sun.
But her attempts to ironically inhabit a certain kind of holiday fantasy are undermined by the fact that she has a stomach bug, which makes it harder, I imagine, to project certain kinds of fun summer vibes. Alexander’s fantasy of immortality ends when his body washes up on the beach, after his girlfriend Oriana sees him kiss the narrator.
Whether Oriana is a real vampire or not, is sort of beside the point here. Or rather the question is stretched out to not be a point, but a structure. What is the relationship between our desires and fantasies and the fact of the body?
In a lot of Craig’s stories, our fantasies take primacy. They assert themselves over and above the claims of the body as source, the natural origin point of desire. The next story is about a golem; characters swap genders, they perform satanic rituals for sexual gratification that take on a life of their own. One immortal Lovecraftian monster, currently on vacation in the lesbian kink community remarks, ‘for as long as I had to wear this silly body, I might as well gesture at its fakeness.’
One way of reading this is of course as, a nifty way of dramatizing some of the affordances and tensions of queerness, the refusal to be bound by a particular set of assumptions about desire’s relationship to nature. The supernatural implies as much in its very name, and so horror makes a good bedfellow for queer themes. But of course if nature isn’t inescapable, power might be, and playing with it, the collection suggests can still be dangerous—how well equipped are we to draw that line between pain and pleasure?
Writing a particular kind of subtle body horror, I should say, is not the only thing Craig does well in the book. There’s a lot of nicely observed social comedy, and a real sense of the agonies and ecstasies of group dynamics, some wonderfully observed riffs on the social position of Jewishness in Britain. These writerly achievements aren’t unrelated to the way she handles this question I’ve picked out, but I want to stay with the particular attitude towards the body and desire for a little bit, because I think it’s especially interesting in the context of a lot of other contemporary fiction.
Over the last few years, there seems to me to have emerged quite a popular mode for writing about sex and power that clearly reflects a ‘structure of feeling’ current in the population, even as the authors are trying to use it analytically, or diagnostically. We might call the mode sexual self-harm. This takes a number of forms, which, speaking anecdotally, also seems to chime with the often dispiriting experiences of people who have sex with men. Raven Leilani’s elegant and biting, Luster, for example, features a woman who pursues unpleasant and unsatisfying sex with an older man who chokes her, which is not quite what she wants. Sally Rooney’s Normal People, in Marianne, likewise features a kind of masochism that also reflects, to some extent, a kind of drive for abjection. Wallace, in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, lets himself be mistreated sexually by his mostly straight friend, Miller. These are just three off the top of my head. There are quite a few more.
None of these novels are unsophisticated enough as to say that this kind of sexual self-harm is a symptom of lack of self-esteem. In all cases a connection is made between this need and a particular trauma, but not so clunkily as to annoy you. They also really do attempt to give us the ambivalence and attraction their characters apparently feel for being used or abused, or choked, or whatever. This abjection is generally also connected to the wider structural position of the characters. They occupy, to varying degrees, structurally oppressed categories, but they feel this oppression most directly as the aggregate of interpersonal interactions (that’s how novels works after all), the slights and dismissals of ignorant white colleagues, the casual cruelty of men. So it makes sense that these characters’ sex lives, from a dramatic standpoint, re-enact these themes, intensify them, literalize the violence undergirding their interpersonal relationships.
These writers are also, arguably, showing their characters engaging in the classic Freudian repetition compulsion. Trauma is big these days, and there have been some big takes about its function and value in fiction. I’m not trying to offer one here; I know nothing about Trauma theory and have no desire to learn. But I do have some vague memories of Freud.
Freud, you might remember, suggests that we do not merely act on a desire for more and more pleasurable sensation. Rather, we attempt to become masters of our sensations. When Freud sees a child throwing his toy away, he offers this interpretation:
The interpretation of the game readily presented itself. It was associated with the child's immense cultural achievement in successfully abnegating his drives (that is, abnegating the gratification thereof) by allowing his mother to go away without his making a great fuss. He compensated for it, so to speak, by himself re-enacting this same disappearance–reappearance scenario with whatever objects fell to hand. […] The going away of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor even a matter of indifference. How then does his repetition of this painful experience in his play fit in with the pleasure principle? One might wish to reply that the mother's departure would need to be reenacted in the game as the precondition of her happy return, and that this latter event was its real purpose. Such a view would be contradicted by the evident fact that Act One, the departure, was played as a game all on its own, indeed vastly more often than the full performance with its happy conclusion.
Freud suggest that what is happening with the child is an expression of the desire for control, which manifests in our response to all unpleasant events. ‘The experience affected him, but his own role in it was passive, and he therefore gave himself an active one by repeating it as a game, even though it had been unpleasurable.’
Whether the child is taking pleasure in this mastery, then becomes the question of the text. And this is a question that is interestingly restaged in the mode of contemporary sexual self harm writing. The ones I’ve named are kinds of Bildungsromane. They are about people acquiring that mastery, coming to some level of insight about themselves and their position in society, their desire to be artists, who are in some sense the opposite of victims. Repetition compulsion is transmuted into the art of the story itself, there the author takes back control over sexual self-harm, turning it into an elegant motif that fits the theme of the story. Jacques Lacan thought that the toy throwing ‘Fort Da’ game was about being inducted into the realm of the signifier, of writing, of the necessary acceptance of mediation needed to be a person. In this, sense, sexual self-harm as a motif becomes, like art itself, a way of restaging loss as gain. Practice losing farther, losing faster.
Freud, however, provides us with a vision of this need to control gone out of control, of what happens when it ceases to be a game and becomes a whole life:
Thus we all know people whose human relationships invariably end in the same manner: benefactors who are angrily abandoned after a certain period by each of their protégés in turn, no matter how much these may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seem destined to drink the cup of ingratitude to its bitter dregs; men whose every friendship ends in betrayal; […] lovers whose every intimate relationship with a woman goes through the selfsame phases and leads to the selfsame outcome.
[…]
The most moving poetical depiction of such a predisposition to fate is given by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme liberata. The hero Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda, she having done battle with him in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he penetrates the strange charmed forest that so frightens the army of crusaders. There he smites a tall tree with his sword, but blood gushes from the wound, and the voice of Clorinda, whose spirit has magically entered into that very tree, accuses him of yet again doing harm to his beloved.
I would ask you briefly to note the poetical metempsychosis there. When one’s need to repeat goes beyond what we could call control and becomes fate, we start to speak of things in supernatural terms.
Freud is driven to suggest the existence of another force, a force which he tries to explain in terms of ‘wild speculation’, based on how life emerges from non-life. We do not simply seek pleasurable stimuli, but have a kind of relic system inside of us that resents the entrance of any stimuli into our bodily system. Something wants us not to be receptive at all, to become like stone. Freud keeps having to approach this in supernatural terms, describing the repetition compulsion as ‘daemonic’. And in the end, he offers us this origin story of all of our most basic needs and drives:
And this ultimate goal of all organic striving may be equally susceptible of definition. It would contradict the conservative nature of drives if it were the goal of life to achieve a state never previously attained to. Rather, it must aspire to an old state, a primordial state from which it once departed, and to which via all the circuitous byways of development it strives to return. If we may reasonably suppose, on the basis of all our experience without exception, that every living thing dies – reverts to the inorganic – for intrinsic reasons, then we can only say that the goal of all life is death.
Spooky.
Freud’s original theory of the urge to repeat can easily be incorporated into a basic narrative of triumphant (or even pleasingly ambivalent literary) overcoming. That’s what he wanted to do after all, help people break from their compulsions. But he spoke of these compulsions as a horror story.
I think most of the novels that incorporate this sexual self-harm motif underplay the power of their character’s compulsions. The authors might have other perfectly legitimate concerns, concerns with dramatizing social power relationships and enriching their characters, or with representing genuine personal progress. But while you might feel sympathy for their characters, you don’t quite, in my experience, feel that they do enough with that sexual compulsion, to stop it from feeling like a prefabricated piece of the contemporary Bildungsroman. When I read them, it doesn’t seem to have any autonomy from the character arcs of these novels. It is something to be mastered.
By comparison, the BDSM horror of Craig’s stories gives to the compulsions their own independent power. We get to see them breathe a little, even under heavy restraints.
Most crucially, there’s something scarily impersonal and out of control about these desires and compulsions; even as they burlesque the (hetero)normative frameworks of desire, they threaten to consume desire itself. The body, in ‘Suckers’, the story I quoted above, is not the source of desires. Instead, various fantasies of power are played out on the body. As I said, Craig burlesques our misconstructions of what we want, when we mistake power for nature. But those fantasies do get their shape from something, and perhaps that something is death itself. You can transform into whatever you want, a butterfly even, but you’ll still be compelled to hurl yourself against a windscreen.
Craig’s writing, much like the others I’ve mentioned, shows how our desires are shaped by modern social power, but in making the desires themselves often demonic, she gives them their own motions that exceed the remit of artistic control common to the novel. Marianne’s desire to be hit in Normal People is something that can be got under control. I don’t mean that simply because that’s what happens, but because you see the connection between it and her own wider life story. I’m not here trying to take a side on the question of whether Rooney is ‘kink-shaming’, my point is more that the line between sex and theme seems to have no kinks in it. Wallace, in Real Life, in the end, watches the sun, not alone, and therefore just self-aware enough to console the reader. The work of art is repetition with a difference, and the difference is beauty.
But what if we were in some sense misconstruing our urge for control? Failing to see that our desire for control was itself, not as natural as we thought?
Weirdly, since BDSM is in a way all about repeating things that ought to be painful, or at least frightening, under conditions that allow them to be enjoyed, you might expect stories about characters who engage in such acts to offer the same kind of controlled pleasure. Safe words. And up to a point, that’s what you’re going to get with all literature. Not horror, but its representation. Nevertheless, the horror in Craig’s stories goes further towards making us confront a certain kind of feeling that things really are beyond our control. What if there was something in our desires that we couldn’t understand as either natural or a natural response to trauma?
Freud didn’t believe in the supernatural; the death drive was a natural response to trauma. But the way he talks about it is as if trauma has opened up a hole into another dimension, one full of demons. Something of that demonic energy seems to me to be salutary, if you’re going to think about the power our fantasies have over us, and that’s why I enjoyed reading Craig’s stories as a comment, at a slant, on a seemingly generational experience of being possessed by desires that we distrust; maybe some people find such things demonic.
Perhaps Craig offers a different perspective on how compulsions are really experienced as desires. The struggle to get these under control comes from the same place as the compulsions, and might be as scary. There are demons everywhere. An author can have fun with that
*
One of the shortest stories in Parallel Hells is called ‘No Dominion’. That’s an allusion to the Bible, but probably via a poem of Dylan Thomas’s. The poem imagines a world after everything has died, in which life is, in a sense, proved right. It’s hard to put that, because it’s hard to envisage what matters about life in the face of death. But in Craig’s story, which is a love story structured in the form of a hellish repetition of a plane crash, she seems to me to riff on a line: Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again. This is what happens in the story, repeatedly, as a plane crashes onto the ocean. But this rhythm of repeated falling into death is used to address a beloved:
You were my consolation every time I travelled, though I never told you. My neighbour read her book quietly, as the man by the window clambered past us clutching a razor to freshen up in the bathroom, while I sat and thought of you. As the flight attendants ran through their dumbshow, the screeching of the air along the plane increased but they went on with their routine unmoved. They had done this all so often and I had sat through it so many times I knew their moves by heart. I wondered if I should tell you, if you’d care. I always concluded that you would care, so I shouldn’t. Took out my memories and touched them gently like icons, gold leaf beginning to peel at the places most caressed. Despite my fear, this was the time that I liked most, in that grey twilight between the arbitrary demarcations of hours, days and minutes. In transit, there was time no longer, our routines were always the same. Here, I could not count how long I’d wasted living for you, living in you. I held my seat arms impotently long after the plane righted itself, searching the attendants’ faces for dismay. Their haggard good cheer rendered them identical, would I know if I had seen them all before? We had got more than halfway before we began losing height. First slowly, then faster and faster when nothing could be done to stop the falling. I gave too much to the thought of you, but you would be something to hold in my mind at the last. I held onto you even as we hit the water
into the darkness and silence and cold ..
Something about this struck me as a sort of counterweight to the way traumatic repetition is used to dramatize relationships in realist fiction. Admittedly, this isn’t a healthy way of addressing a beloved, but the repetition itself doesn’t diminish the intensity of the feelings or bring them under artistic control. Here we get closer to the power of Freud’s poetic fate, the horror found in Tasso. Sometimes, I think even in very good, self-aware fiction, we see the realist novel’s origins in its advocacy of bourgeois self-control: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and so on. It’s nice, sometimes to see other angles on the horrors of love. These things are meant to scare you.