Judith Butler and Materiality (from dissertation)

"Butler’s definition of materiality may differ from those who consider the body as that which is before signification but still, there is a kind of materiality to be found in her work; that which can be best be described as materialisation. These emerging bodies, implicated as they are in discourse, are important because their very presence, which can never truly be made abject, has the power to threaten and subvert the hetero-normative matrix. However, she is also insistent on the contingent and non-foundational nature of identity referents as this is the only way to ensure that it can become ‘a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance’ (Bodies That Matter, 231).This is a hugely important statement and one which I believe must be taken seriously. We cannot presume that it is possible to discuss materiality as a pure and sanctified ontology. As we continue to navigate the complicated terrain of materiality in terms of female bodies, Butler’s work becomes more important than ever in its commitment to the opening up and democratising of the terms in which we speak of the body."

© 2011 Emma Mould

Mutual Predators

My dad was at the pub in his usual seat. He didn’t look up when I came in, didn’t look up until I was standing awkwardly right in front of him. He looked tired. He didn’t have a drink in front of him and his fingers kept rearranging themselves in restless lattice patterns. His yellowed nicotine fingertips looked strangely beatific, like stigmata. The pub air felt heavy like the start of a migraine.

‘You gonna get me a drink or what?’

I automatically put my hands in my pockets, traced the outlines of a few coins. What I had to live on for the rest of the week.

‘Buy one yourself’.

He sneered at me. He had a devastating sneer. It felt like someone pulling your trousers down in front of a girl you really liked. And of course, she catches a glimpse of your sad flaccid cock and laughs, all mean-mouthed and gorgeous. ‘Look, it’s the least you can fucking do. I’m the one that’s been dead a week, after all’.

‘That’s why I’m quite surprised to see you here’.

‘I’m not going anywhere without a drink’.

I glanced at the bartender. I knew her, sort of, and was pretty sure that she’d sub me one if I put in a few words about my current circumstances and looked suitably distraught. I had been hoping for a bit of privacy, a bit of space to drink myself into somewhere new. I was in no mood for a reunion.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’

‘Are you thick or something? I want a drink’.

‘That’s what killed you’.

‘So? Better to be killed by that than something less enjoyable’.

We eyed each other, on guard, mutual predators. He broke the silence. ‘Alright, forget it. Just sit down here for a minute. Come on, sit down next to your old Dad’.

‘Why?’

His eyes flashed and I knew then that the tug-of-war was over. I was to do as I was told. ‘Just fucking sit down’.

I sat down.

‘Do you remember when I first caught you with one of my beers?’

I tensed up with the cold steel of bad memories. I waited for a second until I was certain my voice was steady. ‘Yeah. You took me down to the off-licence and we spent the whole of your dole money on alcohol. All kinds. Then we went home and you poured it all together in several of mum’s mixing bowls. I remember that it smelt horrible. Then you made me fill up every cup in the house with the stuff. Then you made me drink it. After a while, when I felt really sick and started to refuse, you held me down and pinched my nose until I opened my mouth’.

He nodded. ‘Well, you had to learn. You threw up a lot, do you remember? I got you to throw up into that piece of shit fruit bowl your mother found at a jumble sale’.

‘And then you made me drink the vomit as well’.

‘Well, I wasn’t about to clean up after you’.

‘No. Of course not’. It was the texture of it all that was actually worse than the taste. The remains of my school dinner swimming in bile and acid. To this day, I can only drink vodka, neat, over ice. Anything else tastes like a contamination.

‘Anyway. That’s why you owe me a drink. I got you drunk once; you can return the favour’.

I’ve had enough. Even dead, he can be an unimaginable bastard. I get up to leave but then suddenly, he grabs my hands from across the table. His eyes bore into mine and they look like dead space.

‘You should hate me’, he says. ‘Why did you never hate me?’

I have no real answer for this. ‘You were my father’.

He shakes his head slowly, deliberately. ‘You should try to start hating me. It might help. Promise you’ll try’.

I pull my hands away, wipe them on my jeans. ‘I’ll give it a go’, I say as I turn my back on him and leave the pub. Outside, it’s beginning to get dark and it’ll keep getting dark. Nothing can stop the night from falling.

© 2011 Emma Mould

Image: Larry Clark, 'Untitled 1963' from Tulsa

Adventures

This was how it started:

He cut a kind of Dickensian figure, curly red hair, skin and bones, sad eyes. You liked how he said your name, how he emphasised the MA. Your friends, all girls, watching Monty Python and laughing, then you in your new world, your different world, on the sofa with him. You were shy because you were shy with everyone. It took touch to open you up. You kissed and your teeth clashed, he tucked his hands under your shirt and up your boyish body, you planted a hand on his crotch because it seemed like the right thing to do. You'd describe it to your best friend later as like trying to tame a snake. You were eleven.

Is there any way to make it sound less sordid? How about that he was only a few years older and your friend's brother, that it all happened in his room surrounded by Star War's posters and school certificates, that it was your direction, your idea, your need to know what made these creatures work? Boys. It was a fascination because it felt good without you knowing why it felt good. And from that moment onwards: boys on the brain and sex like an adventure before it began to feel like a battle.

© 2011 Emma Mould

Bukowski on cats

'Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better, because they know everything is, just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.'

Excerpt from short story-in-progress

"She could count on one hand the number of men she had loved. She knew now that, like viruses or the weather, love could change unexpectedly, that it could mutate into surprising shapes. Sometimes a feather, sometimes a blade. Too often, a blade. She was tired of this inconsistency; she could no longer stomach it. Love was making her nauseous. Her body was rejecting it like bad medicine. She would pass couples on the street; slobbering all over each other, their needy bodies desperately intertwined and bile would rise in her throat. It wasn't hatred or even jealousy, not anymore. It just made her feel kind of gross. It made her want to take a bath. She wanted no more of its strange sickness, its strange weather. She wanted to feel clean and healthy. She wanted nothing but a stable, reliable climate."

© 2011 Emma Mould

Bookmunch review now live

Read my review of 'Mr. Fox' for bookmunch here.

Folks of Bristol can see Oyeyemi be interviewed as part of ShortStoryVille on July 16th.

Sweat Collects: Chuck Palahniuk's 'Snuff'

(Written to convince the editor of bookmunch to make me a contributor)

With ‘Snuff’, Chuck Palahniuk continues to explore a kind of post-modern macabre where all human relations descend into ridiculous and gross depravity. Porn legend, Cassie Wright, is intending to end her porn career by putting Annabel Chong to shame- having sex with six hundred men and breaking the world record. The event unfolds through the perspective of four interlocking narratives; three nameless men waiting for their turn plus Sheila, the talent wrangler who initially pitched the film to Cassie and is in charge of organising all six-hundred ‘pud-pullers’ as she calls them. The male characters range from the naïve to the disgusting- Palahniuk is fantastic at creating everyday monsters, characters whose inhumanity are never as showy or glamorous as say, Bret Easton’s Ellis’s. Instead, they are empty and cold in a dull and pathetic way and Palahniuk manages to convey this superbly in sparse and unforgiving prose. Sheila too, seems as cold and detached as anyone who has spent too long turning sex into a commodity but her cynical denouncements of the men around her and the sex industry are both humorous and astute: ‘Going to Spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn’t an act of personal empowerment. It’s you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what’s best for yourself’.

Of course, none of these characters are quite what they seem and as much as they think that they’re in control of the preceding actions, they’re not. As Mr. 600 says, ‘didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie’. Even the wannabe Macaveillian of the novel cannot anticipate how things end. ‘Snuff’ essentially portrays individuals who desire power but are in fact trapped- literally and figuratively- in a squalid environment. Palahniuk’s ability to invoke just how gross this environment is, is effective to the point of nausea: ‘Dudes swallowing and farting at the same time. Belching up gas bubbles of black coffee from their guts. Breathing out through wads of Juicy Fruit gum’. Human beings are nothing more than animals bathing in their own filth and Palahniuk makes sure that the reader can feel this in their own gut.

Most of the novel involves waiting. The woman all these characters are circling around does not appear until towards the end of the novel. Until then, Cassie Wright looms as a spectre over the character’s memories, her image as porn star queen continually re-circulated through the TV monitors erected in the green room. As might be expected from a porn star, she exists as a dream or a fantasy, a springboard to restart a faded career or a maternal sanctuary. But Cassie does, in fact, have her own plans for how her porn career and her final film will end and Palahniuk builds up the tension with a deft hand as the reader is drawn compellingly forth towards a culmination that has car-crash appeal. You just can’t look away. And actually, the ending is still unlike anything that was expected. It is brilliantly deranged and dark to the point of gothic. It manages to be both surprising and disturbing, an absurd and gruesome finale to a novel that begins quietly as a study on the mundane barrenness of a culture where sex is product.

Any good? The source material, detached prose and underlying nihilism will be nothing new to fans but with ‘Snuff’, Palahniuk proves that there is still plenty to found when mining this particular type of dark vein. And he still has the ability to shock.

© 2011 Emma Mould