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• on September 8, 2009 Permalink

  Wetlands by Charlotte Roche 

  Modernism. Existentialism. Atheism. Nihilism. God wasn’t waiting for us. We were just passing time. The beginning of the twentieth century is littered with literary classics like The Trial, Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Waiting for Godot. Classics that are succinctly summarised by Queen’s refrain from Bohemian Rhapsody: “Nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters.” The works became classics because they reflected, or created, a world view that became the epitome of the 20th Century. A world where our body just disappeared into thin air. Our body, ashes into the air.

  But we don’t disappear into thin air. There is something left behind. There is our shit that disappears down the drain. There is our piss soaking into the earth. There are our toenails, fingernails, our pubic hair, our facial hair, our snot, our cum, our smegma, our earwax. There is the sleep that sticks to our eyes, there is our dandruff and all those flakes of skin that dance in the sunlight. Daily our bodies fall apart and touch the earth. Our bodies end in the earth. Discarded. Excreted. Grounded.

  

  I might be standing alone with my bare arse hanging out in the open, when I say that the novel Wetlands by Charlotte Roche has all the markings of a 21st century classic. A novel Sallie Tisdale of the New York Times described as “banal and repetitive” with “all the nuance of Mad Magazine and less wit.” A novel that opens with instructions on treating hemorrhoids:

  For exterior itching, you squeeze a hazelnut-sized dollop from the tube onto your finger with the shortest nail and rub it onto your rosette. The tube’s also got a pointed attachment with lots of holes in it that allows you to shove it up your ass and squeeze salve out to quell the itchiness inside.

  Wetlands has been described as “shocking”, “explicit” and every publishers dream sales pitch, “controversial,” but this has no bearing on why I consider the book significant. The graphic descriptions are hardly groundbreaking. Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye” broke that ground eighty years ago. Wetlands is significant because it captures a burgeoning 21st Century world view. World view is perhaps the wrong phrase here. Let’s call it a bare body view.

  Wetlands is the story of 18-year-old Helen Memel who lies bare bottomed on a hospital bed in the Department of Internal Medicine at Maria Hilf Hospital after an accident involving shaving her anus. Helen revels in the various discharges of her body. She uses her smegma he way others use perfume:

  I dip my finger into my pussy and dab a little slime behind my earlobes. It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek.

  Wetlands celebrates all the bits and pieces that are generated from the body. The piss. The puke. The menstrual blood. The anal discharges. Wetlands celebrates the abject.

  

  Paul McCarthy, ‘Santa’s Chocolate Shop’ 1997

  I never really understood the abject until I read Wetlands. I remember a couple of years ago standing in a Berlin gallery staring mouth agape at Paul McCarthy’s video installation, Santa’s Chocolate Shop, blankly watching as Santa’s pantless elves were covered in Santa’s chocolate sauce – a substitute for a certain bodily fluid. ‘Oh, so this must have something to do with Kristeva and the abject,’ I thought to myself and quickly followed the thought bubble with a more audible ‘hmmmmmm.’ I decided that the abject didn’t really matter too much to me. I might piss and shit, and I might be disgusted by own my piss and shit, but honestly, that crap stinks. However, while reading Wetlands, and I was often gagging and gulping while reading some scenes, I came to the conclusion that there is a kind of tragic beauty in all of these bodily discharges. It is the beauty of the break-down of the body, a body that lives, even though it is already dead. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote in Corpus:

  All of its life, the body is also a dead body, the body of a dead person, of this death that I am living.

  I remember accompanying a friend to Emergency after he broke his finger and watching all these bodies that were breaking down. The body of a woman sitting next to me who was gasping and gulping, trying to suppress the sickness that was fighting its way up her throat. The body of a child who was vomiting into a small waste basket. The body of a junkie who was raving obscenities and pacing across the room. The body of a man who was hunched over clutching his stomach, muted screams as tears ran down his face. And the bodies of a solemn elderly couple who were sitting still and holding hands stared vacantly ahead. I saw these bodies and I saw bodies that were living but at the same time dying and I thought that it is often only when the body breaks down that we become aware of it.

  I remember moments when my body has broken down with another. Our sicknesses mix. Our fevers lead us to holiday together in hallucinations. Our bodies broken. We leave them on the bed together. We know they are there. We feel their physical presence. We know them more than ever. But we leave them behind. They don’t work anymore. Maybe it is here, in sickness, that we can transcend the barriers of skin and share this mutual imagining of meaning. Maybe, while living, we can only moan and let our vile fluids stew together.

  After Helen has her arse operated on and stitched up, she decides to tear it open again on the wheels of the hospital bed. She does this in the hope that her separated parents will reunite while visiting her at her bedside. As long as she keeps stewing in her blood and pus, there is a chance that their love can be rekindled. It is a naive yearning for love and meaning in her life. Helen’s mother is the antithesis of the anti-hygeine Helen, her mother was the kind of woman who’s dying thought at the scene of an accident would be: “How long have I been wearing these panties? Are there any wetspots on them?” The mother represents the unliving, those who adverse to the abject, the kempt:

  Everything is clean and carefully styled. Every little body part has been treated with some beauty product. What these women don’t know: the more effort they put into these little details, the more uptight they seem.

  When Helen was younger she caught her mother lying on the kitchen with her younger brother passed out. The oven door was open. It is a clean kind of death. The death that a clean woman would hope for. Helen rescued her mother and never spoke of it again.
  The clean death, the death where we wait for it all to disappear is the death of the classics of twentieth century. The death of Wetlands, is the death we die each day, our body breaks down. As Heidegger writes that being “is always already dying: in its “being-towards-its-end.”

  
  Tags: abject, body (2), book review (3), charlotte roche, death, heidegger (5), kristeva, Paul McCarthy, sickness (2), wetlands   

   

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• on June 18, 2009 Permalink

  Leigh Sales on doubt 

  There is certainty. Then there is doubt. There is opinion. Then there is objective truth. There is faith. Then there is trust.

  It is a strange state of affairs when we have a journalist, such as Leigh Sales, telling us all about doubt. Journalists might practice doubt, but they certainly don’t produce it, package it, and push it to the public. Journalists peddle certainty, not doubt. This happened. That happened. This person’s an expert. That person’s a victim. Never does a ‘maybe’ or a ‘might’ make the front page headlines. But maybe that’s just a matter of news style and form. Maybe that’s why Leigh Sales wrote an essay on the subject rather than put together a Lateline news bulletin. A news report that could have been followed by an interview with an expert on doubt. An expert that would probably be Leigh Sales now, she has, after-all, produced a book on the subject, albeit a very little book.

  

  For Leigh Sales, doubt is instinctive, a natural state of being. She is uneasy about those who don’t doubt. According to her, people like Sarah Palin, with their “unwavering certainty in themselves and their beliefs and opinions,” suffer from a form of “moral vanity.” But Sales isn’t certain about this. If Sales was certain, she would fall into league with the rest of Australia’s high-profile commentators. That obnoxious bunch of people “who act – in public at least – as if they have never experienced a second of self-doubt or entertained the thought that they might be wrong.” So Sales might be wrong about doubt, but that doesn’t mean we should disregard her 10,000 word essay. It is after-all an essay. On doubt. Which is what the essay form is all about. Doubt.

  According to Sales, most contemporary commentary stinks of certainty. Yet she has a nostalgia for journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow and Walter Lippman who “were the voices of reason and cool authority”. Surely a writer with a voice of authority would also stink of certainty. But possibly the difference here is a matter of hot authority versus cool authority. Sales infers that the hot authority of the contemporary commentator is achieved by shouting “more inflammatory invective louder than anybody else”.

  Cool authority is probably accomplished by following the sage advice of 12th century French philosopher Pierre Abelard, a man that would be the doubt expert sitting opposite Sales in a Lateline interview, that is of course if he wasn’t long dead. The philosophy of Abelard informs much of Sales’ ideas ‘on doubt,’ she even chooses to open the book with a quote from him:

  The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

  Sales shares the view of the former face of Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who says that he tries “very, very hard not to tell people, ‘This is what I believe’, or ‘This is good’, or ‘This is bad’. But rather, ‘This is what I’m learning in my reporting’.” So cool authority comes from learning, not necessarily from what you have learnt, but rather from acknowledging that you are still learning. Sales writes that the “application of a doubtful mind is the best way to wisdom and insight” and that doubt is “is enshrined in journalism‘s foundations – objectivity and balance”.

  But objectivity is a tricky concept, especially for the doubtful mind, and Sales acknowledges this. Sales writes that “no reporter can be perfectly objective – every day every story involves subjective judgments – but if we give up striving for objectivity, if we stop examining ourselves for closed mindedness, then all is lost”. Striving, learning, seeking, and most significantly trying or trialling, these are the tenets of a doubtful mind, but these are also the functions of the essay form.

  The word essay was born from the French essayer, to try or to attempt. Sales is in a sense arguing for the essay form. The doubtful mind attempts to understand, or to know. But the doubtful mind never knows, the doubtful mind always has another question to ask, and the doubtful mind is always ready and willing to hear another’s answer.

  Sales mentions the recent dispute between Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson. Manne had written an article for the Monthly about radical journalist Wilfred Burchett and Gerard Henderson disagreed with some of what was written. Henderson and Manne debated the topic via email, and then decided to publish all of their email correspondence through their respective journals, the Sydney Institute Quarterly and the Monthly. Sales couldn’t comprehend how each could have such an immovable sense of rightness:

  I can’t understand how each could have felt so certain of his own rightness and of the value of his own opinion that he was prepared to move so many pages of an argument from the private inbox to the public domain.

  A true essay expresses no illusion of rightness. An essay is an exploration, an attempt. An essay doubts. An essay writer doubts themselves. Sales writes that this is the problem of contemporary commentary. Not enough doubters. I would argue that the problem is that there are not enough essayists. Essayists who write that they lived, they experienced this and they think that. They think. They consider. But most of all: they try. This is the beauty of Melbourne University Press’ Little Books on Big Themes, of which ‘On doubt’ is a part of. Writers are invited to choose a topic, and write a 10,000 word essay on it. They try the topic out. Sales chose doubt. Her second choice was embarrassment. The Little Books bring essays onto the bookshelves and out of the journals. The independent publication of each essay, in its own little book, also seems to withdraw the writer from any particular scene or sphere of influence. There are no battle lines drawn, no binaries, and the culture wars seem to be far off in some distant land.

  The Monthly, under Sally Warhaft, was one of the few regular publications that was beginning to foster an essay culture in Australia, but that too, under the influence of Robert Manne, began to regress into the kind of commentary that Sales describes as “more concerned with point-scoring than with educating audiences,” a commentary that plays to its ‘own cliques, neglecting the wider public’. The Monthly’s downfall commenced when Manne stonewalled a decision by Warhaft to publish an article by Peter Costello.

  According to Gideon Haigh, “Manne stated weightily that The Monthly was a ‘social democrat’ magazine,” and that Warhaft was wrong in believing The Monthly to be independent of any cultural or political bias. It is probably naive to expect any publication to be completely independent in the same way it is naive to expect any journalist to be completely objective, but the Monthly under Warhaft strived to be such a publication.

  The Monthly doubted itself, it never seemed to be sure of what it was; was it a political journal, was it a cultural magazine, was it a literary review? The Monthly experimented and meandered. It was a publication that always seemed to be attempting to be something, and because of this, it was a publication of doubt. It could have been the journal of essays this country needs, a journal that documents people trying to work things out, a journal where we could read about what people are learning, not what people know. Instead it’s a social democrat magazine.

  After reading ‘On doubt,’ I have become a certainty sceptic and a doubt seeker. Sales writes of the culture of certainty in the Bush administration, where Bush told his advisors ‘I don’t need people around me who are not steady… And if there’s a kind of hand-wringing attitude going on when time’s are tough, I don’t like it’. People want certainty in their leaders. We never hear the Prime Minister say “It might work, it might not work, but goddamn-it, we’re going to bloody try”. Rudd can’t even admit that the treasury projections are only a possibility, and he doesn’t want to doubt his treasury, they’re experts, and he is a man of faith. In a culture of getting-things-done, doubters aren’t doers, but as Sales writes doubts “prevent us from acting recklessly without regards for consequences.” The world would probably be in a little less trouble if we had a few more doubters, but what do I know, I’m just trying things out.

  
  Tags: book review (3), certainty, doubt, essay, gerard henderson, gideon haigh, journalism, leigh sales, Pierre Abelard, robert manne, sally warhaft, the monthly   

   

• on September 29, 2008 Permalink

  The Floating Opera and the art of treading water 

  The morning of June 21st (or 22nd), 1937, Todd Andrews wakes with a solution. He is going to kill himself. He continues the idle routine of his day with the quiet resolve that this day will be his last.

  Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occured to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod – that is, almost death – and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

  John Barth’s The Floating Opera is a novel about ‘almost-death’ or more succinctly ‘life’. Todd Andrews is a young solicitor who suffers a condition of the heart where every beat could be his last. He adapts various systems of living to cope with this condition. The first being life as a rake in college where ‘the goal was to drink the most whisky, fornicate the most girls, get the least sleep, and make the highest grades’.

  Todd Andrew’s fast living soon fizzled out on a brothel floor with a swollen prostate and a broken glass bottle embedded in his leg. He countered that system of living with life as a saint. This involved sitting on window sills, sunk in shadows, speaking very little. Life as a saint succeeded for Todd Andrews until his best friend loaned him his wife after a nice day of sailing. The next system of living was life as a cynic. Cynicism survived until the morning of June 21st (or 22nd) when Todd Andrews despaired.

  The conclusion that swallowed me was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live. Futility gripped me by the throat; my head was tight. The impulse to raise my arms and eyes to heaven was almost overpowering – but there was no one for me to raise them to. All I could do was clench my jaw, squint my arms, and shake my head from side to side. But every motion pierced me with its own futility, every new feeling with its private hopelessness, until a battery of little agonies attacked from all sides, each drawing its strength from the great agony within me.

  The novel is soaked in Sixties nihilism yet Todd Andrews’ calculated and measured manner of living resembles the very systematic and applied ‘life guides’ featured in the Noughties phenomena of life hacking.

  John Barth was only 24 when he wrote The Floating Opera. The novel involves that existential search for the solution to living that is prevalent in the early novels of writers of the period. This search for the solution to living is evident in the ‘life hack’ blogs of young writers Clay Collins and Scott H Young. Both bloggers are attempting to master the methods of living.

  This is how existential angst has surfaced and thrived in the electronica era. It has dissolved into some sort of quest to modify habits so that people can become more productive. If you’re not flapping your arms about filling up space then you’re failing to live. This would have been the fourth phase of Todd Andrews had he been able to log on to Wordpress and register a blog.

  Merlin Mann, who was right there at the beginning blogging about productivity hacks, has recently redefined the purpose of his site 43 folders. It is now a site about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. It is a step out of the bleak black hole of life hacking in that it suggests that you should focus your attention more on what you are producing rather than the the act of producing itself. Swimming somewhere rather than attempting to perfect the art of treading water.

  This is the failure of the life-hacking community. A young intelligentsia skipping over existential crises so focused on finding the easiest way to do something that they forget to question what really should be done.

  Todd Andrews worked on his Inquiry. A never-ending project, much like a blog, that attempted to uncover ‘why things are’. There should be more blogs answering this Inquiry of Todd Andrews.

  
  Tags: blogging (3), book review (3), existentialism (2), john barth, lifehacks, merlin mann, the floating opera   

  Andrew Newman exits his studio on Monday, September 29, after having made art | Comings and Goings is discussing. Toggle Comments