Serial Promiscuity

Wrong: Stories
by Dennis Cooper
1992, Grove Press

Just as traditional art eschews the traditional notion of subject, relying instead on a display of purely aesthetic components, pornography's not about what it appear to observe - sex. Porn's simply intimate with human beings, its components... [Porn's true] subject is lust - theirs,
their director's, their viewers.

"Square One" by Dennis Cooper

I don't remember where I heard about Dennis Cooper's writing. I have a sneaking suspicion it involves Wikipedia in some way. In any event, wherever I read about his work, it did not prepare me in the least for the work itself.

I tend to avoid queer literature in much the same way I avoid queer cinema; that is, I hero-worship queer directors (Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes) and writers (Bret Easton Ellis, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster) but willfully avoid works that deal directly with queer themes (Tarnation would be an appropriate film to illustrate this point, Running with Scissors an apt book).

I can't really explain my disinterest but I suspect it has a lot to do with the issue of representation. I grow uncomfortable with being represented by a class of people. While not every portrayal of a class I belong to represents me (not all middle class white twenty-year-olds in literature represents me) the gay community dictates a sort of solidarity. Even the most marginalized within our margins I feel kinship for and thusly identify with to some extent.

With Wrong, this is problematic. Cooper writes about marginalized members of the queer community (rent boys, drug addicts) but also turns his focus on those so far in the margins that they are almost off the page.

Cooper advertises early in this collection that the material will not be easy to deal with. The first story "A Herd" chronicles the exploits of a John Wayne Gacy-like figure who kidnaps, sodomizes and mutilates teenage boys. Cooper does not hold his subject matter at an arm's length (like I literally did at one point with my copy of the book) by treating the rape and mutilation as a contextual plot device or as a signpost for "gritty" realism. Rather, he embraces the serial killer's perspective, and writes passionate, vibrant descriptions of really disgusting acts of sodomy and mutilation and combinations thereof. The killer is obsessed by the twilight stage between life and death of his victims. The killer consumes his victims with his lust and that desire is transferred to the reader in a dirty Trojan horse play on identifying with characters.

While "A Herd" is the longest story, it is easily not the most stomach-churning. In "A Herd" there is the small comfort of rationalizing that the main character is in fact a serial killer and that therefore some violence is only natural. In the titular story, a gay man named Mike kills at whim the guys he picks up for sex with none of a serial killer's compulsive orderliness or twisted reverence for his victims. Mike is callous in the disposal of the bodies, the randomness of his kills. In "Dinner" a boy is picked up at a club and in three short pages is fed copious drugs and sodomized in stomach-turning detail.

Cooper's writing is quite beautiful, for what it's worth. His gift for metaphor is quite impressive. Blue jeans gather "like accordions at his feet"; a self-involved writer's prose becomes so "chandelierlike it lights only its own mechanism, not the life happening under it"; an anus "handcuffs" a wrist. (Try not to vomit at that one.)

There are stories that do not feature murder. These feature instead nihilistic promiscuous young men contemplating their inability to love and their obsession with meaningless sex.

Cooper's world is, in a word, bleak.

Underneath the graphic descriptions of sadistic sex and acts of evil, however, I feel there is a definite moralistic undertow. Cooper seems to be commenting as much on our appetites (and aptitudes) for violence through these disgusting, tragic figures as anything else. The violence in this book is not meant to be discarded or ignored. It is at the forefront of his writing. He wants us to be forced to deal with the violence, to come to terms with our reaction to it.

Violence quite undeniably permeates our culture, from films and video games where the blood runs freely to nightly news reports on bloodthirsty, confused teenagers who commit unforgivable acts of violence (which are, of course, often blamed on those films and video games). We live in a world saturated with depictions of violence both sobering (nightly news, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) and gleeful (Hostel, Tarantino's recent Inglourious Basterds) in tone.

Cooper does not use his violence as a plot device for some trashy thriller genre exercise though. His violence is intentionally difficult to make peace with. Is this not what real violence is? Not aestheticized (Tarantino), anaesthetized (SVU).

Last night I saw Rob Zombie's slasher epic Halloween 2 a few short hours after finishing Mr. Cooper's book. Zombie's sickeningly blood-splattered half naked girls have seemingly everything in common with Cooper's mutilated naked boys. Yet Zombie's penetrating knives and crushed heads are meant to quicken the pulse and, with its MTV-era editing, fire your neurons. Cooper's violence merely sickens. One could argue this is a discrepancy between media, but this is not a Stephen King genre exercise. This book is not meant to be horror, it is meant to be quote-unquote serious literature.

It seems Cooper is trying to shake his reader from a complacent cultural attitude towards violence. As awful to confront as it is, his violence is more real inasmuch as Cooper refuses to dress it down or up.

Post-script: While the novelist Bret Easton Ellis (who blurbs on the cover of the more contemporary edition than I had, featured above) comes to mind immediately in reading this book (specifically American Psycho), the work this book brings to my mind most immediately is Michael Haneke's film(s) Funny Games, where a well-to-do couple is tortured and terrorized extensively for no apparent reason. That film's depiction of violence, too, is methodical, its mise en scene clear of distraction. And the young men who terrorize the couple repeatedly address the camera asking the audience how they identify with them and why they care about the story.