The Misandrist

The Misandrist

I.

  Now I know what the shrill, hysterical, PC uber alles brigade will say.  You’ll say, between mouthfuls of gender studies argot, that the latest hefty, meaty tome from my desk is nothing but a swollen tribute to my manhood.  Bollocks, my friend.  I might be offended if it wasn’t so obvious that you have difficulty with the ironic mode.  My purpose is to see through the hypocrisy, and to help other people see through the hypocrisy, by lighting up the bleakness with laughter.  I’m not some monstrous phallocrat trying to reassert the mores of an antiquated male supremacy, or whatever ludicrous Bond villain goal you’ve attributed to me.  You can get those silly ideas right out of your pretty little head.  

  No, I do not vaunt masculine superiority, but nor do I see shame in the dirty dick.  It may be laughable, ugly, even a little bit grotesque.  The psychic importance accorded this preposterous piece of flesh certainly outstrips its utility to the species.  Yet feminist criticism, by identifying an absurdly broad range of cultural and technological artefacts, not to mention the full range of faunae and florae, as phallic symbols, has fallen into just this trap of inflating the moronic mushroom’s importance. I do not mean to insult these ladies – who would dare? – but I do mean to contest their strategy for overthrowing patriarchy.  By demonising manhood, they have bought into the cock’s absurdly over-stated power.  This is both comical in its absurdity, and tragic in demeaning a noble cause which has long lost its moral advantage.  It is precisely this tragicomic dimension of today’s sexuality that attracted me, drew forth my satiric venom, and enticed me to bite. 

  For the bewildered, for those who aren’t following this address because you have yet to inspect my magnum opus or what has passed for the ‘debate’ about its contents, and thus have not been exposed to the usual cruel, cock-shaming charade that follows any attempt to speak freely and honestly about our sexual hang-ups, quirks and inhibitions, allow me to explain.  I am John Babbitt (born Jonathan William Holliday Greer Babbitt).  I am a novelist, columnist, occasional panel judge on literary and arts competitions, a broadcaster – I am due to attend a recording for the ‘Late Review’ this afternoon - and a self-made intellectual.  An autodidact.  I was once known as the sort of chap who spoke up for the chapesses.  I was at the protests, the picket lines, the ad libbed street theatre.  Liberating literary eminences from their bourgeois cocks – only metaphorically - was a favourite past-time of a small number of pranksters of whom I was one.  We had élan and charisma, a confidence borne of our righteousness.  We did some fucking stupid things, I’ll grant.  But to behave stupidly, to experiment and be mistaken, to act downright childishly on behalf of a correct cause, was our birthright.  And no one who was not there and did not feel what we felt, and see the world as we saw it, and sear with exemplary anger as we did, can have anything of interest to say about it.  Take your condescension-from-smug-posterity, shove it and fuck off while you’re at it.

  Yet, there is such a thing as maturity, responsibility, the putting away of childish things.  There is no shame in at long last seeing without the Manichean lenses of youth, no betrayal in tempering a passion rooted in simplistic half-truths, and no sell-out in revising opinions in light of a more advantageous purview.  I have changed my mind on many things.  On my basic conviction that gender oppression, and not only gender oppression, is a moral evil that must be energetically combated, I have not changed.  It seems to me, moreover, that those who would most eagerly prosecute the case against me are singularly lacking in moral seriousness when it comes to attempts by Western democratic states to oppose and reverse the most egregious instances of sexist tyranny overseas. 

  But what I have changed my mind about is the chimera of ‘equality’.  I do not see it as a necessary or desirable attribute of justice.  This is because it is an assumption that does not stand up empirically, and because it imposes a rigid conformity on its adherents.  For all that egalitarians of all stripes insist that ‘equality’ is not identical to ‘sameness’, the levelling blade does tend to cut down all distinctions, good or ill.  The complexity and diversity of human experience is culled with the sickle and bludgeoned with the hammer, in the name of this abstraction, ‘equality’.  Burke, as on so many things, was right about this.  He understood too well the repressive, terrorist potential of abstraction.  The insistence on equality, by opposing human nature, denies our humanity. 

  All we can reasonably say is that some men are the superior of some women in some things, and that some women are the superior of some men in some things.  Since we are all unequal in our endowments, since we vary wildly in talent, ethical probity, commitment, self-possession, stamina, and so forth, what sense does it make to say that the sexes are equal in their inequality?  It is ludicrous, and beside the point.  It is just as wrongheaded, of course, to try to keep a mental scorecard of said attributes and their imagined distribution between the sexes, and award overall superiority to one or other gender.

  Having read the above, I don’t think any fair-minded reader would conclude that I am a chauvinist.  If I satirise the cultural Jacobinism that is creating havoc for both the sexes, it is not to glorify ‘man’.  As I have explained, ‘man’ does not exist.  There are only individual men, some of whom might passably merit glorification, most of whom plainly do not.  If I lance the abscess of putrefying sexual orthodoxy, it is not to wearily and drearily repeat the symbolism of the prick thrusting forcibly into the vagina.  I merely intend to free myself and hopefully some others from the deranging, stultifying effects of such delusions, to be free in my relations with women, and invite them to be free in their relations to me.  Let us have no prior expectations, no orthodoxy, no strict mores enforced by the commissar of conscience.  Let us simply be free.  Well, this is the stance which I dramatized and dilated upon in Sometimes It’s Just a Cigar, the comic novel for which I was kindly awarded a generous literary prize. 

  Sometimes... was reviewed variously as “a muscular, impassioned appeal for honesty”, “an elegant, elegiac, raging mock-epic whose tough, fibrous sentences support moments of blissful levity”, “the work of a masterly prose stylist with a transgressive wit, and a prodigious emotional intelligence”, and – my favourite review – “a sparkling, meticulously wrought manifesto of liberation, which leaves the seemingly weightier considerations of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex looking frankly jejune by comparison”.  I am touched by these tributes from my peers, and proudly frame the most prized.  Others are neatly folded in an album. 

  Of course, not everyone has been this thrilled by my book.  How could they be?  There are those whose very existence has been defined by their determination, admirable in its way, to uphold the very absurd fictions which I have made it my business to skewer – pun not intended, but inevitably read into the text at every opportunity by the puritanically prurient.  They are the remaining rump of the faithful, still following the God that failed, still studiously ironing out the inconsistencies and absurdities of their doctrine only to arrive at inconsistencies and absurdities even more sublimely stupid than before.  They have reacted, as I say, rather shrilly, hysterically and with the hot-headed intolerance characteristic of the tinpot despots which their ideology inevitably transforms them into. 

  Protests, eggings and hate mail have just been the start of it.  Those I can brush off with my usual deceptively bluff, laconic Lancashire persona.  But the latest campaign, to deprive me of an honorary degree from a university that I would be proud to have as my alma mater, is even more low and vile than I would have expected.  As a man with a working class background, for whom university life would have been as impossible for me in my youth as it is seemingly taken for granted by those ranged against me, I am revolted by the attack.  I mean, forgive me, but if I didn’t say it before, I’m going to now: the day a gaggle of silly fat slags is allowed to decide who gets a degree from whom and on what grounds is the day academic and personal freedom dies in this country.  So, to once again dally with the demotic, fuck them.  And they can take that however they like.

II.

INT: Evening.  Television studio, ‘Late Review’.  Susan Hamill, the presenter of the programme, sits in a large swivel leather arm chair with three guests in similar, slightly smaller chairs around a table with strategically placed books on the surface.  The guests are, in order, Helena Anand-Steele, a highly regarded playwright and critical essayist from Edinburgh, George Dixon, a former Big Brother house guest, and John Babbitt, our esteemed author.  Babbitt looks a little cantankerous, and a little pissed.  But his poise is reflective with his legs crossed, the back of one hand gently propping up his chin, and one eyebrow gently propping up his greying fringe.  He is striving to look debonair.  Lights fade, then rise.  Hamill sits perfectly still for moments, facing the camera, responding to occasional queries conveyed to her by her earpiece.  Then, on a countdown, begins to speak to the camera.

Hamill: Tonight, we discuss the latest novel from Nigel Bury – is it a heart-breaking and incisive account of illness and mental decay, or, as the Evening Standard reviewer put it, “the solipsistic diary of a barfly whose friends are rapidly deserting him”?   And at the Tate, the story of refugees is told with the aid of music and a wind tunnel, but how convincing is it?  But first, the movie Open Grave has only just hit UK cinema screens and is already attracting the awe-struck praise of critics coupled with the indifference of wider audiences.  While box office receipts have been low enough to worry the film’s creditors, reviewers are frantically enthralled by the arrival of a new talent, hailed as the new Mike Leigh.  (Turns to greet the guests.)  Helena Anand-Steele, the ‘open grave’ of the title is the bed, if you look, and I suppose there are a lot of visual puns, metaphors concerning necromancy, ‘raising the dead’, mocking the tranquil greyness of domesticity.  Did this impress you as much as it did others?

Anand-Steele: No, I found it tiresome.  The visual metaphors – we’ve seen it before, it’s all been done before with much more humour.  I’m surprised that Mike Leigh’s name has been mentioned because there’s a real hatred for the poor, for the working classes, in this film.  So he has the curse scene in the back of the bus with the children trying to out-gross one another... okay, who hasn’t heard children swearing, but all the semiotic cues were inviting a feeling of repulsion, I felt they were screaming ‘chav’ at me.  It’s obviously a film that has been heavily influenced by Jeremy Kyle, and ‘Mock the Week’.  And the slapstick was straight out of Benny Hill...

Babbitt: Bollocks, love.

Anand-Steele: Pardon me?

Hamill: Can I just turn to John Babbitt?  What did you -?

Babbitt: I thought it was that rare thing, a comedy that’s funny.  It’s got jokes, it’s got puns, and it’s got slapstick moments that recall the best of ‘Morecambe and Wise’. 

Anand-Steele: Or ‘Little and Large’.

Babbitt: Yeah, I’m talking, sweetheart.  Can youse edit that bit out?  Because I think it looks bad having her interrupt me when I’m trying to make a point.

Hamill: Erm...

Dixon: I have to say, I enjoyed –

Babbitt: Just a second, sunshine, you’ll get your fifteen seconds. 

Dixon: (amused) You’re very rude.

Babbitt: And you’re what?  A celebrity?  I’m a fucking artist, mate, what the fuck have you done apart from flash your arse on national television?  Look at you, you’re smaller than life.  I’m fucking talking, so shut it.  I won’t interrupt you if you -

Hamill: Ah, John, could we get you to what you were saying a moment ago...?

Uncomfortable silence

Babbitt:  Right.  Look.  It’s funny.  It isn’t just a string of absurdities, surreal non-sequiturs, and humourless conceptual jokes that have long exhausted their ability to surprise or amuse.  It’s based on real people with real dilemmas.  The living heart of any comedy is tragedy, and the director of this film has understood that.  He’s got to the sadness in human relationships, the inescapable... fuck... edit that, the word will come to me... the unquenchable longing that love doesn’t so much satisfy in us as fuel.  It’s a small miracle of a film.  And the slapstick I just found to be incredibly, life-affirmingly, wonderfully funny.  And true.

Dixon: I loved the soundtrack –

Anand-Steele: Oh please, the slapstick scenes aren’t true, they’re incredibly sexist.  The first slapstick sequence depicts women as prick-teasing sluts who turn frigid the second men, portrayed as sex maniacs, come anywhere near them.  This is true?  It’s hateful.  It’s not even supposed to be true – it’s a self-consciously un-PC film, intended with all the telegraphing of a child’s provocations to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Babbitt: Hold on a minute.  He was trying to make an important observation about the music on the film, before you interrupted.  Go ahead, George.

Dixon: I thought the soundtrack was wonderfully -

Anand-Steele: Sorry, can we do this debate properly?  Susan?

Hamill: Let’s just have one person at a time.

Anand-Steele: Because I was making what I thought was a valid point, and for him to pretend that it’s superfluous next to a point about – no offense, George – a detail of production, just illustrates the sneering, contemptuous, swaggering approach he has had to this discussion so far.

Babbitt: I’m sorry, but it’s not that I’m cocksure, it’s that I hate your fucking guts and can’t stand the sight of you, you snobby two-faced cow.  (Steele rolls her eyes and throws up her hands in incredulity, but is clearly distressed by the insult).  I want to talk about the viscera, the living, breathing guts of drama, but you want to drown it all in the icy, frigid waters of politically correct orthodoxy.  Don’t you understand that it’s this which makes your own potentially powerful plays so absolutely fucking unwatchable?  You’re a talented girl, I’m not denying that –

Anand-Steele: (sarcastic, but with a slight wobble in her voice) Oh, thank you!  A girl.  Did you want to apply a diminutive epithet to my skin colour as well -?

Babbitt: I’m not interested in that.

Hamill:  We have to stop this.

Babbitt: I don’t care about that.  You could be from Mars for all I care...

Hamill: We have to stop this here, because we’re starting to enter into risky legal territory.

Babbitt: So sue me.

Hamill: Let’s just adjourn it here, and come back.

Babbitt: She’s just implied that I’m a racist.  I think I should have a right of redress.

Hamill: Can we come back to it?

Dixon: There was an excellent song near the end of the film which –

Babbitt: I have taken many positions on immigration, cultural cohesion and Islamic fascism which make it imperative for me, for my reputation as a serious writer, to be able to state quite clearly that I reject the idea that I’m a racist.  This Muslim woman –

Anand-Steele: Sikh, actually, or atheist even, but hey...

Babbitt: Like I said, I don’t give two fanny farting fucks about that.  You have implied that I’m a racist –

Anand-Steele: I’ve implied no such thing.  I’ve taken exception to you using offensive, patronising and frankly sexist language about me, and compared it to an equally offensive use of racist language which I notice you didn’t avail yourself of.

Babbitt: Of course I didn’t, because I’m not a racist!

Anand-Steele: No one said you were.  I’m saying you’re a misogynistic creep, and that you should notice how your moral compass prohibits one form of discriminatory behaviour while allowing others.  The fact that you feel you have to deny racism suggests that you have a guilty conscience on the issue, but that’s not for me to unpick –

Babbitt stands, emits something between a snarl and a roar, and throws his water at Steele, who ducks and avoids the intended soaking. He stumbles across the chairs, over the table, and storms out of the studio.  Steele watches, astonished.

Hamill: George Dixon, you were saying that you rather liked the soundtrack.

Dixon: I loved the soundtrack...

Fade out.

III.

  Following the BBC debacle, Babbitt took a taxi back to his residence in a middle class area of Stoke Newington, Hackney.  Humiliated, loathing himself furiously, he remembered every piercing moment in a review, every swipe from another author, when he was belittled as a sour, resentful, hostile boor.  The phrases “bristling with resentment” and “chip on his shoulder” came up quite a bit.  He was sure that this reflected the snobbery of the literary establishment, who did not quite know where to place a bruiser of his ilk.  He was a self-made man, a fighter who had gained every inch through relentless, hard-bitten, back-stabbing, front-stabbing, arse-licking, air-kissing determination.  He brought with him the comportment, the attitudes, the social expectations of a working class that was only one generation away from rickets and tuberculosis in the slums.  They could smell it on him.  They had adopted him, of course, found him amusing enough to take up, scrub up and display to the public, like a shabby mutt.  But the stinging injustice of it was that they seemed to resent him far more than he resented the Oxford-centred belle-lettrist establishment whom he had in fact tried to emulate.

  In the back of the taxi, he allowed a thimbleful of moisture to trickle over his cheeks, more in anger than sorrow, musing that he had only tried to help.  There he was, trying as ever to liven it up a bit, raise it above the usual Polytechnic-educated first-year cultural studies bollocks.  Yet everything he said was picked apart by that middle class shrew, who obviously – however much she denied it – held a grudge against him for the things he had said about the Muslim religion.  Such a person could not be reasoned with, he knew from bitter experience.  But for the BBC to let it happen the way they did... well, he had no axe to grind with the corporation, unlike some, but he understood the axe-grinders that bit more now.  How obvious the bias must seem if you didn’t share the liberal elite’s attitudes.  How loaded every camera angle, every question, and every nuance of their supposedly balanced coverage, must appear.

  When he arrived home his wife, Jenny, was watching some erotica for the property-obsessed on television.  The camera was lovingly lingering over some sleek surfaces, which the narrator described with a husky, tremulous voice.  It would seem perfunctory to say hello, and anything more than this was ruled out of bounds.  They had their own lives now.  What they offered one another was security, someone to be seen with at a restaurant or event, and occasional companionship.  This made them both very happy.  There was no bitterness between them, as bitterness was an attribute of love.  Babbitt did feel a little glow upon seeing Jenny, perhaps a little echo of the passion that had resulted in their marriage.  He could do with her tactile comfort now, her embrace, her patient mothering, but decided not to impose himself.  Instead, he retreated to his large study, a well-lit room with bookshelves and optics, antique typewriters ostentatiously displayed next to crystal decanters, and a desk facing outward toward the door.  Sitting in the outsized swivel chair, he fidgeted in the desk drawers for sources of chemical regeneration.  There was some ching in a jewellery box, some Lucy, some opiates and a few tabs of MDMA.  He opted for the former, deciding that what he needed was the confidence boost.

  Pouring a drink, he hammered the table with his fist and cursed aloud.  He really hadn’t meant to be that way, to come across as such an arrogant, fat-headed pillock.  He was provoked, but he didn’t have to rise to the bait.  What was supposed to be gentle mockery, a light-hearted skewering, turned into a white hot duel in which he, inevitably, looked like an ungallant boor and a bully.  For christ’s sake.  It was so unjust.  He genuinely felt a sort of kinship with Helena.  She was, when genuinely allowed to be herself, and not the uninteresting thing the theatre-going elites wanted her to be, a brave anatomist of the human soul.  He liked her, admired her – more than that, he fancied her.  Perhaps the most humiliating aspect of this, then, was that his bluff, dismissive behaviour may have been an adolescent attempt to cover up this fondness.  Like a stupid boy kicking a girl in the playground because he likes her.  And his subsequent overreaction was provoked by nothing more than his hurt at being rejected.  What an arse.

  It would perhaps not be inappropriate, Babbitt reflected, to send flowers by way of apology.  Chocolates too, with a small card.  Something like ‘Dear Helena, please forgive an old man his...’.  Oh no, that won’t do.  ‘Dear Helena, kindly accept this token of...’.  Christ no.  ‘Dear Helena, a thousand apologies for my part in our little contretemps.  I seem to have confirmed the worst stereotypes about myself.  Believe me when I say that my respect for your work...’.  No.  ‘...admiration for your work is as boundless as my regret over how appallingly I conducted myself.  I hope we may one day call ourselves friends.  Yours, etc.’  Not too shabby. 

  Or would the whole effort be taken the wrong way?  Or, disastrously, the right way?  Perhaps it would be such a transparent gesture that a mortified and sickened Helena would redouble her efforts to avoid him at all costs in future.  Or maybe it would be seen as a feckless, patronising attempt at gallantry from a leering misogynist.  You see, this was the problem with the rule of received wisdom, the dominance of the feminist caste, their sorority’s grip on the national cobblers.  It created so many misunderstandings, so much needless hostility.  He just wanted to say he was sorry for being arse, and he already felt like he’d been fucking emasculated.  He decided he could settle for having a quick ham shank.  That would get it out of his system, the whole sordid feeling of infestation and pettiness and resentment issuing from him in a sticky residue.  That done, he would be freed from even the nagging of conscience, which was probably just his frustrated libido finding an indirect means of self-expression.

  Tip-toeing to the study door, he quietly closed it over, removed his trousers – damp with sweat and rain – and stripped down to his socks and silk boxers.  His slightly gnarled body was still in decent nick, he reflected, as he stood before a floor-to-ceiling mirror built into the wall.  No need to suck in the gut too much.  Dark chest hair, square pecs, only a slight sag in the arse... he would do.  Sitting before his PC, he switched the machine on, and guided his internet browser, using a peer to peer anonymity network, to one of the more hair-raising bestiality news groups.  The darkness was settling outside, and a rough wind occasionally scattered rain flecks across the high window.  Gripping his shaft with one hand, he cradled his balls with the other, and began to pound his parson.

 

IV.

  I have been spoken to by... well, I can only describe it as a cat.  And if that’s too laughable for you, then I’m afraid it’s tough.  It was a cat, alright, or something like a cat.  In its aspect, there was some element that suggested a long-haired Siberian tabby cat.  And it spoke to me.  And yes, my friend, I can already hear your sniggering, wide-grinning queries about what I’ve been smoking.  As it happens, nothing.  My life does not require nicotine or psychotropic supplements, any more than it needs ‘self-help’, ‘crystal healing’ or any of the other pseudo-remedies for pseudo-problems that pseudo-people indulge in.  I do not say that this literally happened, merely that it seemed to, that I was spoken to in a quiet, authoritative voice by some entity, and that it appeared to have been a cat.  In another light, it could have been a sharp-suited, dapper little man with cat-like eyes.  Reminding me of a childhood friend...  Or maybe it was a lady, a female of the opposite sex, a lass as we say... I fear I’m losing my grip on sense here.

  I was writing.  You were wanking your bloody socks off!  Say it!  I was writing.  Wanking!  Say it!  I was trying to solve a plot problem.  Graham Greene says somewhere, I think it’s in The End of the Affair, that writers do much of their work while out shopping, or doing the dishes, or carrying out some menial task of that kind.  What the fuck has Graham Greene got to do with it, pretentious wanker!  It’s not just plot problems.  The wordsmith’s job is to craft his sentences much as a carpenter works with wood, or a metallurgist with metallic elements, compounds and alloys.  It is a manual labour, really, which makes the dominance of effete upper class ponces a real mystery to me.  Think about the text as a textile.  Think about words and their resonant, aesthetic, sensuous qualities.  These are material elements in a corporeal construction.  Wanker!  Tell the truth!  The novel isn’t to be treated as some more or less charming bit of whimsy, fancy or introspection, but as a sculpted, wrought, piece of the author’s substance.  It is an ideograph of his life, the viscera, the ephemera, the blood and guts, the micro-organisms... the novel is an oblong of turbulent psychomatter.  Look at you, you’re wanking even now, right in the reader’s face!  And bending this matter to my artistic will is no disinterested, affectless process, but an act of sweating, exhausting self-application.  Yes, it’s just like wanking, isn’t it?

  This problem, as I say, concerned the plot, specifically how much to reveal and feign, how to mislead the reader, then surprise him.  There’s an element of legerdemain – get to the fucking point! – of handicraft and deception, of the thaumaturge’s art, in all this.  But then perhaps that is because the magician’s trade is merely a lower, derivative form of the dramatic and literary art forms, centred around one rather egomaniacal character who summons apparently miraculous powers for the sole purpose of embarrassing and bemusing onlookers.  So, as I say, I was wanking over some animal porn, and I was addressed by a cat.  And, for some reason, I think I know what it is, my hand will not avail itself to me to press the backspace button. 

  You see, I was ready to orgasm, bringing myself to the brink, imagining that I was the stallion in the pornographic feature...  Yes, I was the satiate, or about to be.  The blood was thumping in my ears, and my face was drenched with oily, sweaty moisture.  My eyes creased up at this point, closing out the hard, jagged edges of the phenomenal world, as I withdrew into an exploding smorgasbord of movements, images, expressions, spoken words, primeval emotions...  And it spoke to me.  Striding out, from a dark corner, tail aloft, it sat before me.  It said my name with a quiet power.  I felt... I felt... it’s hard to explain.  I felt its will enter mine.  I felt it penetrate me, like a... what?  A cat burglar?  Maybe it was a hallucinatory pun, I don’t know.  It did feel something like that.  It spoke to me, and I spoke back, and when I did I could feel it overwhelm my will, like an arm-wrestler effortlessly swinging your wrist down hard onto the table.  And I felt its perspective, its particular subjective vista, overrule mine, dominate mine, become mine.  It is hard to describe the exact nature of the conversation.  It was like a hex, a spell, something like... witchcraft.  I was in a trance-like state.  I do not say that this literally happened.  But something happened.  And I’m fucked if I know what it is.  A trip, perhaps.  An acid reflux.  But if so what a terrible trip, and what psychic material it has been feasting on. 

  I have found myself thinking that... I’m vermin.  That I am worse than vermin, a predatory beast, a flesher, a stalker, a psychopath... I’ve found myself standing before that wall-length mirror, and seeing something monstrous, and satanic in the reflected visage.  I’ve found myself thinking that I’ve always had this suspicion.  There is a stench of putrefying, diseased flesh, of an exposed abscess, of fish guts and expired innards giving way to micro-organic pro-generation, of roasted skin.  Daddy’s abattoir, where I was not allowed.  I see that my books are melting on my shelves, that they are decomposing into viscera, curdled blood, seared flesh, micro-organisms, parasites and half-digested matter... pages and pages of this carnal ephemera on the desk and floor, the carpet stained, soaked through and stiff with some copper-coloured residue... the decaying heads of animals, moulding eyeballs...

  A materialist theory of the novel... The novel is a corporeal construction.  I make it from the organic matter of my life.  I apply a bolt pistol to the skull, hang the cadaver upside down from a meat-hook, cut the carotid and jugular, collect the exsanguinated fluid in a vat, cut away the head and feet, tear off the hide, remove the digestive tract and organs, and shear away the meaty chunks.  I bury my mouth and nose in each of the disaggregated body parts, gnaw, sniff, and chew... burying my hands in there too for the full multisensory experience.  I marinate the meat in the collected plasma, sauté it with some aromatic florae and intestinal seasoning...  I see myself standing in the tall mirror, in a bloodied apron, carrying a butcher’s knife.  I see my manhood, stupidly pronging out of the apron, almost pushing it aside.  I see its repellent insistence, its urgency, pleading with me to continue, to write more, to skewer the hypocrisy, to lance the abscess, to flay the ignorance and dissect the idiocy... c’mon pal, don’t stop now, you’re close, so very close...

  I am the stallion.  I am the theatrical thaumaturge, sawing the woman in half.  I am the flesher.  The wave of self-disgust, the feeling of infestation and horror that arises from within has, I see, been there for a long time.  I imagine that it escapes in vaporous emissions, that it rises from my trachea and forms an aura around me, to warn others.  Their instinctive reaction is to keep their distance.  The stupid phallus grows, prods, presses on, and I see that my disgust is not just self-centred, but a radiant, warm inclusive Sartrean nausea for all men, for manliness itself, for the protocols and behavioural indices of manhood, for the prerogatives of masculinity, for the barbaric cock and its triumphalism in victory and self-pitying, graceless wheedling in defeat.  I take the butcher’s knife and begin my incision into the base of the swollen membrum, slicing through the erectile tissue as if it were melted butter.  I exsanguinate heavily until the illusion passes.

  I look at the bestial grotesque in the mirror, and I growl to myself: “The novel is an oblong of turbulent psychomatter.”