"We're inside now, our hearts lost forever/Can't replace the fear or thrill of the chase/
Each ritual showed us the door for our wandering:/Open and shut, then slammed in our face."--Ian Curtis, "Decades"
"Ian Curtis wrote that. He sang with a band called Joy Division. Hearing him sing such things in his deep, quavering voice, I had the sense that he couldn't get close to his feelings, and his embarrassed attempts were the subject of what he was doing."--Dennis Cooper, Safe
Cooper's influence endures, but it is his own work which now seems most important. Wrong, a collection of prose gathered from four of his earlier books, is both a series of splatter-sex elegies and a fossil record of the writer's progress. It contains one novella, six pieces of short fiction, two autobiographical vignettes and two critical essays on the complicity of memory and porn. Each exhaustively rewritten piece unfolds like a black-door flower: a petal-cluster of dead-end truths which somehow lead to keener griefs and deeper observations.
The collection begins with "A Herd," a story about loss and the attempt to reach emotions sheathed in numbness. When a teen-ager is abducted and butchered by a serial murderer, his family, friends, and even the killer himself hold onto the victim's vanishing memory. The event and its aftermath are seen alternately from the point of view of the killer and the victim's survivors.
The solipsistic narrative bears more than a passing resemblance to Providence, by Alan Resnais, a film mentioned in Cooper's early piece, "Then as Before":
It was my favorite film. It held the right combination of smarts and emotion¬starring the first, with a cameo by the latter. When I established myself as an artist and was handed a sizable budget, I'd do something like it.
In Providence, an acerbic invalid investigates his own memory until he is drawn past false perceptions: he learns that people and feelings he had been dismissing as hypocritical are in fact sincere. As he emerges from convalescence, he is astonished by his family's kindness: his dark recollections dissolve in the face of the remembered, and his deathbed cynicism proves emphatically unreal.
From Resnais's self-reinventing narrative, Cooper learned to make cynicism lead to the possibility of emotion: to write in a sullen voice which is sliced open by insight to reveal texture, ambivalence, a more difficult point of view. It is Cooper's fusion of this new narrative technique with eighties minimalism that sets Wrong apart from the pithed fiction of its period.
The fusion is refined in Safe, a fifty-nine page balancing act which Cooper likes to call a prose poem and which I must insist on calling a novella. Inches away from being Cooper's masterpiece, Safe remains the most fertile synthesis of minimalism and metanarrative that was attempted by any American at that time.
Safe is divided into three sections. In each, Mark, "a young man who's so comfortable with his own beauty that he can smear it, then see that image displayed without whimpering," is seen from the viewpoint of a different lover. In the first section, "missing men," Rob Hall, a writer obsessed with serial murder, is attempting to finish a novel. His polished style is somehow burying his work's emotional content: "the work's mood" is "too removed": "Now he's let his own prose grow so chandelierlike it lights only its own mechanism, not the life happening under it." The origins of Rob's coldness are given in a few telling flashbacks:
He thinks of the day his best friend yelled, "Boy kisser!" Kids were squealing, running to classrooms around him. He crumpled onto the cold cement walkway, sure its hard slap was the last feeling he'd have in his stupid, minuscule lifetime...
When I was younger and met a boy I wanted to sleep with, I was too embarrassed to say so. I'd lie there wishing he was in trouble or dying, so that my feelings about him were justified...
Later, Rob is revising a fantasy in which a pedophile murderer pretends he is strangling himself as a child. Rob finishes the passage, only to find it unsatisfying; then a ringing telephone, like an alarm clock wresting the dreamer out of sleep, disrupts Rob's moment of self-recrimination. The caller is Mark, a genuine object of desire, whose reality focusses Rob's attention once more on the possibility of emotion.
The second section, "my mark," is the closest Safe ever comes to prose poetry. An eponymous narrator's sustained meditation on Mark's photograph, the passage which begins "A head that has power over me," is especially lyrical: its seven paragraphs interlock like linked stanzas from an ode. At times, the elided paradoxes and dizzying introspection seem reminiscent of Ashbery's "Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror":
I fill a head with what I need to believe about it. It's a mirage created by beauty built flush to a quasi-emotion that I'm reading in at the moment of impact: its eyes on mine, mine glancing off for a second, then burrowing in.
The final section, "bad thoughts," is narrated by Doug Landau, another seasoned veteran with an appetite for porn. But Landau's scope is wider than that of Rob or "Dennis," and his voice never loses its unnerving composure:
There's an incredible softness about Georgia. It's in the air which, no matter the weather, feels as tenable as the mist on your forearms. It's in the messy green fields rolled up against each horizon and in manicured lawns you imagine the dead could draw up like a comforter if they tried...
Languishing for Mark, Doug palliates his grief with a series of younger lovers. The last, a boy named Skip, turns him around. "Bad thoughts" closes with this provisional couple standing near the shore. Doug compares his love-life to a drawer shut tightly, though waves of salt-water and emotion seem to leave the subject, Mark, ajar.
Cooper's shorter vignettes read unevenly, but his two essays on porn are seamless. "Container," a monograph on feeling's failure and Amsterdam's red light district, relentlessly analyses the voyeur's urge to possess:
Phillip hovers just inside my daydreams, unseen but omnipresent. And every once in a while I try to kill him off. I shove the knot of my feelings as deep as they'll go into a prose style as compact and smoothed-out as I can build out of what I know. But they don't belong here, any more than a man's fist belongs in a boy's ass.
"Square One" is a deeply truthful meditation on porn. It explores that cinema's one-dimensional depths as if the hard-core zoetrope Cooper had been pondering were an eighties Grecian urn:
I'm an aesthete looking closely at a metaphorical window as though it were actually open. I use it to spy on a scene that exists for my benefit over which I have zero control. I've half resigned myself to simply scratching its surface. I concede that my separation from it is an intricate part of its magic. Its magic is an abstraction a cute guy like Jeff can stand around naked in, feeling more important than he could realistically be...
The justification which "Square One" makes for porn is applicable to the splatter-sex in Wrong itself. When violence and prurience are perpetually questioned by the southern right and Canadian left; when a good gay is someone who reads Burroughs and Genet but despises any new writer with a violent sensibility; when a good feminist castigates de Sade without ever conceding the importance of his having argued all positions, humane or otherwise, it is important to remember that luxuriant descriptions of violence and visceral sex are necessary. When they are profoundly nuanced, as in "Safe" and "Container," repellent scenes turn aesthetic, and collagenic thrashings in darkness calcify to glistening obsidian. Cooper's themes might seem excessive, but their resonance is less pedestrian shock-wave than personal charge.
The eighties were a celebration of the literary shoulder-pad; of pastiche and sham; and
of mediocre artists with interesting profiles. But under the deflating gaze of the
nineties, Dennis Cooper will be remembered as the most prophetic writer of his time.
The sexual émigrés whom Lou Reed canonized two decades ago, Cooper searched mercilessly
in the last. Wrong is the closest an American has come to synthesizing the cerebral
dislocations of Handke and the criminal romanticism of Saint Genet. It is the essence
of ambivalence in one irremediable volume.
Rob Hardin is a writer, composer and session musician living in NYC. His writing has
appeared in Mississippi Review, Fiction International, and Black Ice, and in the
anthologies Storming The Reality Studio (Duke University Press) and Postmodern Culture
(Oxford). Recent sound projects include Billy Squier's Hear And Now (Capitol Records),
and the anti-industrial group Virus, whose music he describes as "Vargas in shattered
fiberglass."
Page 1 "cut through...all demeanor...[and be] as clear and resilient as bullet-proof glass..." Jailbait, p. iv.
Page 1 "the presence of television, popular music and movies in our lives seems only to be increasing." Coming Attractions, p. i.
Page 2 "It was my favorite film..." Excerpt from "Then as Before," an autobiographical fragment from Tenderness of the Wolves, p. 15.
Page 3 "A young man who's so comfortable with his own beauty that he can smear it..." Wrong, p. 103.
Pages 3 to 4 "the work's mood...too removed...Now he's let his own prose grow so chandelierlike..." Wrong, p. 104.
Page 4 "He thinks of the day his best friend yelled, 'Boy kisser'..." Wrong, p. 108.
Page 4 "When I was younger and met a boy I wanted to sleep with..." Wrong, p. 135.
Page 4 "He has to get this shit out of his system.....so deftly written it escorts Mark, like the lush..." Wrong, pp. 119-120.
Page 5 "I fill a head with what I need to believe about it..." Wrong, p. 133. Page 5 "There's an incredible softness about Georgia...." Wrong, p. 138.
Page 6 "Phillip hovers just inside my daydreams..." Wrong, p. 42.
Page 6 "I'm an aesthete looking closely at a metaphorical window..." Wrong, p. 83.