A master of everything.

The title of Bukowski’s second novel is actually stolen property, pilfered by English, like so many others, from Latin. The implications are worth noting for a factotum is a “master of everything” and in the case of Henry Chinaski this means not just repairing bicycles and factory work, it means gambling, drinking and womanising. Just as Karl Marx viewed production as a sensuous human activity, as much a part of our species-being as it is our alienation, Bukowski seems to take a more literal line – he is production.

Henry Chinaski makes his way across the States often desperately penniless and drunk. He works any job he can find and hangs his hat wherever he can. We follow Hank as he sleeps on park benches and rides the rails from place to place. The only thing going for him, in the world of work, is the time he can afford to sell and the sweat he can shed for meagre wage-packets. Inevitably Chinaski is propelled forward by crises. He never seems to hold onto anything for too long, whether it’s jobs or a place to stay. In a society where everyone is supposed to be middle-class, or working to be, Bukowski writes about the gutter and for the gutter.

All in all, I found Factotum (1975) was a much more focused piece of work than Post Office (1971). What do I mean by this? It doesn’t wander too far from its themes. Perhaps because the latter was the first completed book it was inevitably going to encompass a lot. Both read as aimless, staggering odysseys through American society. But it’s Factotum which takes aim at work.

To the reader Bukowski levels his anti-work ethos and prods and pokes the assumptions we hold about work and its demands on us. At one point Bukowski writes: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” It’s a good question.

In one chapter Henry loses his job and pushes the boss to make sure that he gets his welfare payments. He speaks as ‘the working-man’ here, not the poet of skid-row. The moment fits well. After all Bukowski stands out from the petty-bourgeois universalism of American society, – pretentions to meritocracy, individual liberty, and even democracy – it’s all up for grabs in this world. Chinaski is in one way an exemplar of the Protestant work ethic. He proves his father wrong by being able to go from job to job. But the story is hardly an advertisement for the ‘American Dream’.

Of course, the narcissism of the dirty old man is on show in the work. He’s both proud of his life as a working-class Joe, but he’s also imbued with self-love over his knowledge of just how worthless it all is. He feels he has profound insights to offer. And even as Hank leads a meaningless life, as we all surely do, his prose makes it meaningful. This is the heart of the heartless world.

A Dirty Old Man.

The poet and self-described dirty old man Charles Bukowski died twenty years ago. He passed after a battle with leukaemia in which he finished his novel Pulp (1993). He gave up the ghost with a sigh of relief. He was the American equivalent of Céline. He lived his work. It was the end of the Beatniks and the Hippies when Bukowski burst onto the scene, having been crowned King of the Little Magazines, and churned an incredible bulk of poems and short stories from the 1940s onwards. It was a hard struggle, writing from the gutter, mainly for others who found themselves there too.

Other poets such as WH Auden had seen structure, order and stability (not to mention hard work!) as the vital components to the life of a writer, Charles Bukowski was the manifest opposite and revelled in it. The writing was meant to be as alive as you are, so it was meant to sweat and bleed and reek to high heaven. It's all on show. As Nietzsche put it "Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." He had little time for formal questions, and regarded the matter with scorn, as a retreat for the writer, carving out a minimalist body of work instead. He hated rules and regulations and quickly found enemies and friends. The novels were a fictionalised autobiography centred around Henry Chinaski. It is a portrayal of life in the darkest corners of American society, at times absurdly comic, inexplicable, and it all comes with an authenticity in its gritty texture as each word has to carry its own weight.

A friend of mine told me she feels like having shower after reading Bukowski's prose. As readers we follow the travails of Chinaski through dirt cheap apartments, menial work, drunken brawls, gambling, sexual escapades, and eventually to Hollywood. He opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook "It began as a mistake." And with that he reels you in to read a tale of a dozen years as a postie. He had written the book in about a month, after John Martin came to him and made an unconditional pledge. Martin promised to give Bukowski 25% of his earnings for life - it amounted to $100 at the time - every month if he quits and writes full time. Whether or not they succeeded the money would be there. It was this guarantee of a minimal income that gave him the motivation to leave the post office and start work on a novel. It was also what John Martin needed to build up Black Sparrow Books.

It was in the late 60s that Bukowski became a part of the countervailing forces of American culture and society. He had a column in the LA Free Press and Open City - with a column called 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man'. The Beat Generation was on the wane and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on the lookout for the next big thing when he came across Bukowski. It should not surprise anyone that he was not too impressed with the Hippies. After all, this is the same poet who loathed Walt Disney for creating Mickey Mouse. He shared this disdain for the Hippie with Jack Kerouac, Much like Kerouac the dirty old man would be hoovered up by the prevailing spirit of Western life. It's almost as if there was no escaping it. The Hudson driven by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957) now sits in a museum with the same dust on it. There is Jack Kerouac Alley, just as there is Bukowski Court.

In Factotum (1975) Bukowski rails further against the Protestant work ethic and instead preached the refusal to work: "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" He was an individualist who hated rules, but he offered a counter-individualism to the pretences of the 'American dream' and its false promise of paradise by hard labour. He spat on its sunny optimism and expressed antipathy towards society at large. Solitude was the alternative. It was a conservative solution in that it had no care for the problems of society, or of people more generally. The solitary alternative was a kind of isolationism, an active policy of non-intervention with the world and its social ills.

It wasn't just a literary trope as we find if we examine his life. In the days when his father called him Heinrich, the young Bukowski studied at LA City College in the late 1930s just on the onset of the War. Once it had started he had moved to New York City and would explore the East Coast. He worked whatever menial jobs he could - even irking a living in a pickle factory - and filled his spare time with typing and drinking. He was first published at the age of 24 and that same year he was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of draft evasion. Bukowski was held for seventeen days in Moyamensing Prison before going on to fail a mandatory psychological exam. He had escaped conscription. Given the militaristic culture of the US there has been some discussion on whether Bukowski harboured pro-Nazi sympathies in those days. It seems more plausible that the young Bukowski simply evaded the draft because he didn't see any worthwhile effectuality in military service. It doesn't take a Nazi to believe that.

Besides, the most laden prejudice in Bukowski's work is not anti-Semitism by any match. It is misogyny, not racism. If Bukowski had been a fascist it would have been obvious. He had a lot to hide, but he chose not to. He was certainly a male chauvinist. In Post Office Bukowski puts it bluntly "Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love." Misogyny is certainly a major part of Bukowski's writing. The same year that the book came out Bukowski wrote in a letter to a friend "Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." We got a glimpse into this 'living hell' in The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985) in which we can witness him verbally abusing and kicking his wife Linda off of their sofa.

We shouldn't turn a blind eye to Bukowski's misogyny even if we do take pleasure in the unexpected exuberance in his melancholic free-verse. It's charged with a life-affirming spark. Unlike the domesticated version of individuality Hank Chinaski finds more life in the bars than in the sweat and toil of the factory. This was at a time when the US was a major industrial and manufacturing hub, yet it was on its way to deindustrialisation. It's not clear where this man would fit in today. It was a different America where Chinaski roamed free. It's plausible he would have much more company in a post-industrial capitalist society. He writes "The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me." Elsewhere the dirty realist invites us to "go all the way" even at great cost to ourselves.

'Dinosauria, We'.

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

'So Now?'

So Now?

the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die. 
I wish I could ring in some bravery.
it's a lousy fix
but the tree outside doesn't know:
I watch it moving with the wind
in the late afternoon sun. 
there's nothing to declare here,
just a waiting.
each faces it alone. 
Oh, I was once young,
Oh, I was once unbelievably
young!

Charles Bukowski, 1994

The Proper Task of Life.

 

The anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche deemed art “the proper task of life.” He had moved on much farther than the view of Schopenhauer's, where art is a means to deceive the Will and escape from the treadmill of its domination. Nietzsche advocates a radical acceptance of the imperfection of the world and this life in resistance to the otherworldly. He associates art with this embrace of the domination of the Will. This is far from a glum acceptance of a horrible existence. He wants us to rejoice in existence and laugh at the world in all of its absurdity. The knowledge of our existence beyond the precepts of religion provides us with a certain freedom. It is not that man should be freed from emotion, rather life is made meaningful by the passions - which are a source of insight, orientation and understanding. The attachments we build through our passions provide meaning, whether it be the attachments we form with people, ideals or aspirations. The creativity involved in art is particularly important here, especially the attachment forged with a work of art.

It is in this light that the Will to Power is to be understood as a celebration of the passionate life rather than in terms of metaphysics or motivation. Art is not just an escape route but an affirmation of existence, as it can even serve as the process of revaluation insofar as art allows us to participate in the nature of things. This is the development of culture out of the unfolding of human capacities. It is not simply instrumental, works of art may be seen as ends-in-themselves. For this very reason culture is not undermined by heterogeneity, far from it. It is homogeneity which leads to culture going stale and even becoming a lifeless scroll rolled up in the canon. Before you know it, we are to impart this stale culture to the next generation without reflection. Yet high and low culture are not fixed in stone. As Terry Eagleton has observed, there are works once considered canon-worthy which are much less brilliant than the early episodes of The Simpsons. Culture is not ahistorical or unchanging, it is forever transient.
 

 

Loving Decay

 

Too often culture is taken to be ahistorical and unchanging. Only for change to be received as deeply threatening to the artefacts preserved in formaldehyde by a cultural elite. To presuppose this is to accept a rather narrow conception of culture. Even still it is a widespread understanding of culture. We even find it in the work of Michel Houellebecq, a new self-styled Céline, in his nihilism. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh wanted.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific history and the material pre-conditions for the society which we inhabit. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in anhedonic distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. 

 

Grand Catastrophes


The cultural revolution of the 1960s had an undeniably profound impact on the people who lived amidst its birth pangs. In 1986 a film crew came to make a short documentary about the writer JG Ballard. In the interview, Ballard pointed out that the world which we inhabit requires a certain amount of oil to make the cogs go around and keep the wheels turning. For Ballard it was sex which played such a role in the 1960s, but now sex is no longer a new frontier and increasingly violence has become the oil which keeps the wheels turning. The media landscape of narratives thrives on sensation and requires sensation to go on, like a drowsy beast we find ourselves in need of constant electric shocks just to stay awake. Ballard suggests that the electric shocks are provided more so by violence today.

A major focus of Ballardian fiction is a secondary world which has been constructed on the media landscape of television, film, radio and the press etc. For Ballard we live in an environment saturated to the extent that we live in a two-tier world, we inhabit a dual reality. The immediate reality of everyday life and the secondary reality forged as the media acts as a map in search of a territory. It is a search for something in ordinary reality which meshes with this secondary reality, only to magnify disasters, confrontations, personal tragedies and so on. At once this secondary world is the subject matter of Ballard's novels, it is described and developments within it are predicted. Too often do we assume that the violence on television is bad for us, the truth about violence is good for us and cannot be repressed. The edge is a cautionary one, e.g. “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Slow Down!” with the paradox being Crash (1973) in which Ballard bellows “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Speed Up!” All in an appreciation of the chaos underneath the surface of modern civilisation. Ballard may have basked in the fires of this chaos, but he was ultimately on the side of it.

Living the Dirt

 

 

If we turn to the post-Beat scene of writing from the American West Coast we find another noteworthy literary creature. The poetry of Charles Bukowski stands in contrast to Houellebecq's nihilism. Bukowski's dirty realism pulsates with the same themes as Houellebecq albeit with much more in the way of exuberance. He doesn't so much languish in complacent affluence as live and breathe the filthier side of life. Bukowski remains an essentially American writer in his unabashed individualism, which serves to complement the reservoir of squalor and misanthropy in his prose. He has no coherent social message to convey only defiant exultation in the decline of civilisation. Take the closing lines of Dinosauria, We “And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard” only to add “Born out of that./The sun still hidden there/Awaiting the next chapter.” Thereby Bukowski turns the Apocalypse into another twisted turn in the anfractuous road of progress. We are to be superseded, along with the transient stage which we have made for ourselves. Perhaps Bukowski and Houellebecq share an appreciation of the flux of this world because they were both poets.

In his reasoning Bukowski derided other writers for starting out with pretentious attempts at setting a captivating scene for the readers. It was dead prose, no longer wriggling with life. Instead Bukowski went for the jugular and opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook “It began as a mistake”. He was a working-class poet, often unemployed, usually drifting and forever inebriated. He found the bottle analogous to a fine symphony - something he knew plenty about in his love of classical music. His publisher John Martin considered Bukowski the Walt Whitman of the 20th Century in putting pen to paper in the gutter. He conveyed the grittiest of experiences in his own melancholic brand of free verse. Black Sparrow Press marketed Bukowski as the poet who wrote for the average man in contemporary America. Yet Bukowski was much more misanthropic and self-centred in his alcoholism to be concerned with the wants of the masses. Even still the dirty old man chewed up Wagner and Kant only to spit them back out in his portrayals of a life lived in the darkest corners of American society.

Beautiful Chaos


As Ballard was the middle-class doctor who ventured into bohemian territory after the death of his wife, Bukowski yearned for a normal life and Houellebecq accepted that it would never be found. With Chuck Palahniuk it seems more so that there is more joy to be found in the absurdity of modern society. Picking fun at society by highlighting its more obscure and obscene side is not a new method for satirists. Neither are the themes developed in Palahniuk's work particularly earth-shattering. If you haven’t read Chuck Palahniuk then you should rush out and obtain, possibly by violent means, a copy of Survivor (1999) or Fight Club (1996) as soon as possible. He originally set out to emulate much more conventional modes of writing, but ended up in Tom Spanbauer's workshop. There Chuck took on a radical minimalism which has become the form for the transgressive content of his novels. Though transgressive in content Palahniuk's corpus contains thematic links reaching back to the origins of English literature. You can find courtly love in the deliberate variations made on the boy-meets-girl frame of events in his writing. The foreground stories with their dysfunctional and deranged characters falls against a background worth further examination. Fight Club is not just a tale of madness, or even the love story concealed within it, there is the emergence of an anti-capitalist terrorist network working to bring down America's credit system.

Unlike Houellebecq and Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk is not a nihilist for he still clings to modernism and romanticism at heart. He may have much more in common with the existentialist tradition. He sets out to carve out a unique place as a writer, dismissing the likes of Martin Amis as a purveyor of “beautifully padded sentences”. It is not enough to try and posture as a living classic as Amis and McEwan does. To put it as Chuck has “We're living in a different world than Charles Dickens lived in”. A radical minimalism strips down the prose for all to view, but this is not a reductionist task as the battle is to build deep layers into the narrative in themes, allusions, symbolism and ideas. To this end Palahniuk may have recycled old themes and fed them into his projects. The mission of dangerous writing is to seek out and cover those aspects of life most uncomfortable, embarrassing and unsettling for us to confront. That is the locus of transgressive fiction and its purveyors. This is the flux of culture before our eyes.