The Art of Cruelty Read online

  Critics sympathetic to Arbus have worked overtime to absolve her of such coldness, often by recasting it as honesty. “Arbus knew that honesty is not a gift, endowed by native naiveté, nor a matter of style, or politics, or philosophy,” one wrote in the catalogue essay to her 2003 retrospective, Revelations. “She knew rather that it is a reward for bravery in the face of the truth.” But what truth could this critic possibly be talking about? That freaks look freaky? That anyone can be made to look like a freak? And since when is honesty a prize rather than a practice?

  Whatever Arbus’s stated intent, the fascination of her work for me is less about her ability to capture “what something really looks like,” and more about its capacity to reveal how that “something” changes per frame—how many conflicting truths there might be within a singular image, moment, or person. Arbus’s subjects typically look straight at the camera, but I know of no other photographer who draws so much attention to the disturbing split that can exist between two eyes in one gaze (or between two purportedly identical subjects, such as twins, or between two halves of an intimate couple, or even between two sides of a room). One eye of an Arbus subject might deliver the good news of fellow-feeling, while the other bespeaks the bad news of human isolation and pitiability. To insist that one cancels the other out, or to fault her inquiries for not meeting the requirements of “ethical journalism,” is to miss the disconcerting schism of her vision. “I am like someone who gets excellent glasses because of a slight defect in eyesight and puts Vaseline on them to make it look like he normally sees,” Arbus once explained, describing a late-breaking technique having to do with blurring. “It doesn’t seem sensible but somehow I think it’s right.”

  The artist standing bravely in the face of the (inconvenient, brutal, hard-won, dangerous, offensive) truth, the artist who refuses to “evade facts,” or who can stare down “what the world really looks like”—what could be more heroic? Critics love the rhetoric used by artists such as Arbus and Bacon because it bolsters the sense that art and artists can rip off the veil, they can finally show us what our world is “really like,” what we are really like. I mean it as no slight to these artists (both of whom I admire), nor to the practice of truth-telling (to which I aspire) when I say that I do not believe they do any such thing. Bacon shows us Bacon figures; Arbus shows us Arbus figures. This isn’t to say that Bacon’s paintings don’t tell us quite a bit about the human animal, especially when caught in a spasm of despair or carnage, or that Arbus’s photos don’t communicate quite a bit about the human animal in its freakiness, loneliness, absurdity, or abstruse ecstasy. Their works do all this, while also remaining products of their notoriously particular view of the world. There is absolutely nothing strange about this paradox, unless you’re looking to art to tell you “how things are,” rather than give you the irregular, transitory, and sometimes unwanted news of how it is to be another human being.

  At times, this news is familiar. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,” wrote Emerson, providing a memorable phrase for the grand, surprising pleasure we feel when a work of art returns or restates our own thoughts and feelings to us, however obliquely. At other times, however, the news arrives more alien than majestic, generating the perpetual undergraduate grievance, “I just can’t relate.” It behooves us, I think, to develop an openness to this latter feeling as well as to the former. If we’re lucky, this openness may eventually grow into a hunger.

  Our word is our bond: the phrase belongs to J. L. Austin, the British philosopher whose famous collection of essays, How To Do Things with Words (1962), focuses on something Austin called “performative utterances.” These are instances in which words themselves act as deeds: “I thee wed,” “I hereby christen you,” “I dare you,” “I declare war,” and so on. As Austin explains, whether or not a performative utterance is successful (or “felicitous,” to use his term) depends on the context in which it is uttered. A wedding ceremony conducted by someone not authorized to perform it causes a “misfire”; a promise made by someone who has no intent to fulfill its terms constitutes an “abuse”; and so on. The possible infelicities run the gamut—some involve political questions about social authorization (In which settings can the wedding vows of gay couples be called successful? What kind of action does a public apology—such as the Australian government’s 2008 apology to the indigenous Aborigine people—actually perform?), while others stay tethered to the more personal matter of plain-old broken oaths (“But you promised you would love me and never leave me!”).

  Most important to our purposes here, however, is the one context Austin aims to exclude in entirety: the artistic context. As he explains, “A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language.” Many Austin readers—Jacques Derrida foremost among them—have found themselves intrigued and titillated by this notion of language-as-parasite, this doctrine of linguistic etiolation. For while Austin meant to partition artistic utterance off into the land of un-serious play (an impossibility, Derrida argues), it is precisely here—in the realm of the perverse, or the explicitly performative—that things get interesting.

  For it is here that the question “Is it true?” falls off the table, and other questions move into view, such as “Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations or perceptions does it open in the body?” (These are, not incidentally, the questions that Brian Massumi, translator of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s opus, A Thousand Plateaus, puts forth as the most pertinent to his subjects’ wild philosophical endeavor.)

  These questions are enthralling to me. But they are not enthralling to everyone. In fact, an emphasis on new thoughts, new emotions, new sensations, and new perceptions has struck some—the poet T. S. Eliot, for example—as completely wrongheaded. In his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot argues that the search for “new human emotions to express” is in fact a grievous error, and that such a quest for novelty leads only to “the discovery of the perverse.” But, of course, for those of us who sense that there is more human hope and enlivenment to be found in the realm of the perverse than in traditions that have proved dull, restrictive, unimaginative, inapplicable, or unjust, Eliot’s warning acts as a goad rather than a discouragement.

  “IF YOU are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. I agree. But what are we?

  After all, a writer can be lying to herself as well as to the reader, and still convince herself, as well as the whole world, of her brutal honesty. I have heard many memoirists, for example, float the principle that “you can say anything you want about other people in your work as long as you make yourself look just as bad”—the cruel-to-oneself-obviates-cruelty-to-others fallacy. I’ve heard this equation tossed out at seminars and podiums and cocktail parties and interviews and classrooms. Often it is set forth as the secret solution to the essentially unsolvable ethical mess that is autobiographical writing.

  Personally I think this equation a sham, a chicanery, one with its roots planted firmly in narcissism. Writing can hurt people; self-exposure or self-flagellation offers no insurance against the pain. And while I do not think all autobiographical writing is essentially an act of betrayal, as I’ve also heard it said, in my experience it does nearly always make someone feel betrayed. It doesn’t have to be “brutal” to do so—all it has to do is offer the record of one person’s consciousness, one person’s interpretation of events that involved others, which is precisely what it cannot help but do. If and when it tries to speak for oth
ers, the sense of betrayal it provokes can be even stronger. Add to this the fact that a book’s publication rarely coincides with the period in which it was written (and, by extension, with the self who wrote it)—a situation that can create a certain temporal dissonance, in which feelings from the past make their uneasy debut in the present, often in much-changed circumstances. This temporal dissonance—familiar to writers everywhere—can cause agonizing discomfort for current loved ones, and understandably so. There is no inoculation against these pains—only unsteady compromise, negotiation. If one is lucky, such dissonances can offer insight into the ways in which writing serves as a seismograph of feeling, an open-eyed charting of what has come down the river, rather than as a testament to unchanging emotional truths or desires.

  Writing, especially autobiographical writing, can be a hothouse of self-deceptions, but it also has the uncanny ability to expose self-deceptions with the formidable exactitude of surgery. Most distressing, perhaps for writer and reader alike, is when both functions appear to be underway simultaneously. This is not rare. It could be one description of “the writing process.” It is also a good description of the particularly acute vacillation between insight and self-delusion that characterizes addictive thinking, which is likely why it haunts Frey’s drunkalogue, along with those of so many others.

  I know of no writer who dramatizes this vacillation more compellingly than Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, particularly in his 1960 best-seller, Cain’s Book. Cain’s Book is an autobiographical, diaristic account of a junkie living on a barge in and around New York City. In his foreword to its 1992 reissue, critic Greil Marcus writes, “Trocchi’s life was a cheap triumph. Cain’s Book, written over the course of seven years, is not cheap. It is cruel.” Marcus argues that despite attempts by well-meaning readers to rescue Cain’s Book from itself, “You can’t derive socially useful sentiments from lines like, ‘She’d suck the fix out of your ass.’ ” True enough. But if the cruelty in Trocchi were simply a reiteration of the amorality and nihilism of a junkie’s universe, it would be a bore. Trocchi’s cruelty is of a more metaphysical variety: it is the cruelty of leading himself, and the reader, through passage after passage of compelling philosophical rumination and psychological insight, then snapping us back to nasty animal need—to score, to fuck, to flee, to forget—which is always standing by to nullify mind and heart.

  Likewise, Trocchi’s bluster would not be interesting or even all that cruel were it nothing but bluster. Dark as Trocchi’s junkie narrator’s mental whirlpool may be, it is also laced with clarity. Junk gives him the distinct impression that he is finally seeing things “as they are,” but whether this insight is enlightenment or delusion cannot be settled: it is both, and it is neither. That is the inexorable, cruel struggle of being in thrall to a substance—especially one that alleviates pain at the same time that it causes it.

  Here is Trocchi’s narrator, for example, contemplating the “illusory sense of adequacy induced in a man by the drug”: “Illusory? Can a . . . ‘datum’ be false? Inadequate? In relation to what? The facts? What facts? Marxian facts? Freudian facts? Mendelian facts? More and more I found it necessary to suspend such facts, to exist simply in abeyance, to give up (if you will), and come naked to apprehension.” This sounds worthy; we are with him. We, too, are ready to live like Adam and Eve, feral and wide-eyed in the Garden. But in the next breath he admits, “It’s not possible to come quite naked to apprehension and for the past year I have found it difficult to sustain even an approximate attitude without shit, horse, heroin.” In other words, the addict, much like the artist, finds himself using artifice to strip artifice of artifice. The whirlpool grabs another limb.

  In the end, the junkie narrator of Cain’s Book does not so much cut through the veils of his self-delusion as he does give up the fight. “I am still sitting here, writing, with the feeling I have not even begun to say what I mean, apparently sane still, and with a sense of my freedom and responsibility, more or less cut off as I was before, with the intention as soon as I have finished this last paragraph to go into the next room and turn on.” Writing hasn’t changed a thing; when the writer puts down the pen, no matter how lucid or brutally honest his insights may have been, it is back to business as usual, which means, in this case, shooting up. This is depressing, but its honesty heartens me. It disallows the delusion that the act of writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature is not, after all, self-help. “I am living my personal Dada,” writes Trocchi. “In all of this there is a terrible emotional smear.”

  BUT WHAT about Bacon’s earlier claim, that there exists some kind of intrinsic link between “facts” and the horrific, or the offensive? What kind of “fact” is Bacon talking about? Is it “fact” in and of itself, or a particular kind of fact that Bacon thinks so hard for us to hear, so hard for us to bear? Is it the news of our inevitable death, our animal-ness, “man’s inhumanity to man,” the endless wheel of suffering, our “situation of meat”? Or, in Trocchi’s case, that of the dog-eat-dog nature of addiction? Does “fact” feel brutal only if and when we—either as individuals or as a populace—have grown accustomed to living in a realm of delusion or lies? Is there a relationship, as Bacon suggests, between honesty and brutality, or is “brutal honesty” but a shortcut to conjuring “direct and raw” feeling? Is it a shortcut that Bacon—along with many other so-called artists of cruelty—indulges?

  “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness,” a Tennessee Williams character once proclaimed. My own experience testifies to something of the same. I go down to the bookstore and skim shiny new memoir jacket after shiny new memoir jacket, until my mind starts to blur with blurb-speak testifying to each writer’s brutal honesty, which is usually a close cousin of his or her “searing” or “unsentimental” prose, which, to be truly praiseworthy and dazzling, must also somehow shimmer onto the page “without a drop of self-pity.” I wander out of the bookstore wondering, Is honesty paired with brutality a more winning, or at least a more marketable, combination? And why has self-pity become the specter to be avoided at all costs, in order to earn artistic seriousness, moral rectitude, and, perhaps, that all-important commodity, readers? (“How to avoid self-pity,” Joan Didion chastens herself at the outset of her bestselling grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, a book a friend of mine recently designated, without rancor, as “widow porn.”)

  For not all frankness is created equal. “Brutal honesty” is honesty that either aims to hurt someone or doesn’t care if it does. (“No one wants to be friends with you,” “You smell bad,” “You’ve always been less attractive than your sister,” “I never loved you.”) While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.

  The fictional world of English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett showcases this distinction with more alacrity—and, if you like, more cruelty—than I’ve found in any other place. If you pick up one of her drawing-room novels such as Parents and Children (1941) expecting it to depict only “the deadly claustrophobia within a late-Victorian upper-middle-class family,” as its back cover says, beware. For Compton-Burnett’s truer subjects are the deadly knots of honesty, brutality, and betrayal that can lie at the heart of both our language and our deeds.

  Once I happily recommended Compton-Burnett’s novels to a friend, who later told me that she had tried to read them but couldn’t, because the things people said to each other in them were so unrelievingly cruel. Up until that point, I had felt only an unmitigated, cleansing pleasure in reading Compton-Burnett
. And so I was forced to take pause and consider the possibility that I was either especially attracted to Compton-Burnett’s particular brand of emotional sadism, blind to it, or both. There may be some truth here. But I think, at the end of the day, what I find so invigorating in Compton-Burnett is not her alleged cruelty, but her unwillingness to let anyone off the hook when it comes to the complexities of truth-telling. “I know you did not mean to be unkind, dear,” says Eleanor, the mother in Parents and Children, to her daughter, who has just unintentionally insulted her mother’s class status. “I do not indeed,” her daughter insists. “I was only speaking the truth.” “There isn’t much difference,” Eleanor replies. “Brutal frankness is an accepted term.”

  Accepted term or no, there is a difference. And one main task of Compton-Burnett’s stringent dialogue is to lay it bare. Listen, for example, to this exchange between Eleanor and her young children:

  “Do you show your natural self, James?” said Eleanor, with one of her accesses of coldness.

  “No; yes; I don’t know,” said James, looking surprised and apprehensive.

  “Do you pretend to be different from what you are?”

  “Oh, no,” said James, suddenly seeing his life as a course of subterfuge.

  “Do you, Venice?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”