The Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Kobo Abe

            Futility oppresses every man. That’s what this book is about. It’s about the futility of struggling against society’s current. If you try to fight they’ll grind you down with exhaustion and hunger. If you color outside the lines they’ll break your fingers. A disproportionate punishment for a exercising a privilege we all think we have--our “individuality”, our “freedoms”, our bourgeois dreams of self-fulfillment—things that we take for granted and so few of us ever utilize. If freedom can be stolen at someone else’s leisure then you didn’t have much freedom in the first place, you merely had a privilege that was allowed to you for as long as it was convenient.            

            
          I did some searching around on the internet and found information on Abe’s other books. I gather that they’re all some kind of kinky science fiction (plotline summaries: doctor melts his own face off in liquid nitrogen accident, invents artificial face so that he can seduce his own wife; doctor grafts well-endowed lower half of a dead man onto his back, transforming himself into some kind of super-sexual centaur so he can sexually please an adolescent girl patient who is slowly turning into a gelatinous blob as her bones dissolve from a mysterious disease; man invents artificially intelligent super-computer to predict the future and when the predictions become more and more uncomfortable for the guardians of the status quo the computer is banned from answering political questions, simultaneously the government is genetically engineering children with gills so that when the ice caps melt and the water level rises humankind can survive underwater) which is one of my favorite kinds of science fiction—I’d take Philip K. Dick’s urban loss-of-identity paranoia over Orson Scott Card’s crusade of heteronormative militarism and religiosity any day of the week, to say nothing of the dime-a-million trashy sci-fi and fantasy novels that pander to the saddest desires for wish-fulfillment—but The Woman in the Dunes isn’t science fiction or fantasy at all. It’s actually pretty normal. If not entirely plausible it isn’t totally impossible. It might be important to note that Kobo Abe, previous to being one of Japan’s most famous writers, attended medical school and graduated but only on the condition that he never practice medicine. He also spent a good portion of his childhood in Japanese Manchuria, where some of history’s most godawful atrocities were committed. Context is important!

             
           The book is really simple but not simplistic. A man, a poor schoolteacher and amateur entomologist takes a bus to the country for a weekend bug-collecting trip. He hopes to discover a new species of insect in the dunes near the ocean. It’s a mildly adventurous ambition, I mean, it’s not the Mercury Program or anything but about as adventurous as a person can hope to get on their own during a holiday weekend without zillions of dollars of funding from a global superpower, and really, how many people get to discover something new, classify it, have it documented in a journal? An insignificant fraction of our species gets to do that, that’s how many. Closer to zero than to one. When night begins to fall he goes to the local village and gets a bed at a widow’s house. Her house is unusual: a dilapidated shanty at the bottom of a funnel of sand. Other houses in the area, the ones on the side of the village closest to the beach, are arranged in a similar fashion. He soon discovers that he is trapped with the widow in the bottom of the quarry and is forced into laboring, digging up sand that the villagers sell for use in construction. The man tries several methods of escape but all are ultimately futile. The villagers control entrance and exit from the pit, and if he interrupts the work or doesn’t work, they withhold food and water. Eventually he gives up and accepts it. Nobody really misses him. The widow uses her body to ensnare him but she isn’t exactly a seductress, she’s just there and warm, and she’s more trapped than he is, she’s completely indoctrinated and has totally surrendered. The man clings on to his hope of escape—if only he could just think up something perfect he could get out of this pit—but all the woman wants is a radio and a mirror. What good would hearing the news or pop music do her, and who is she ever going to see? To the rest of the world she’s less than dead: she doesn’t exist and never existed. She doesn’t need amenities; she needs freedom and years of psychological counseling.

             
          The Woman in the Dunes was made into a movie in the 60s, and it is by all accounts a fantastic film, but I’ve only seen about half of it. Netflix sent me a few scratched copies and eventually I just moved on. What I did see I really liked though, but after reading this book I’m surprised that it could have been made into a great film. It’s a lot like Frankenstein (which has been attempted many times and never done well) or The Sound and the Fury (which as far as I know has never been filmed, probably for good reason) in that so much of it is psychological and internal, which doesn’t really make for the greatest or most viewable film experience, and always misses out on a good portion of whatever the point of the book was.

The other half of the book that isn’t about fruitlessly shaking the bars of our social construct prisons concerns sand and heat. That’s the first thing I really liked about this book. I loved how sensory it is without being purple. It’s even a little on the spartan side. Abe’s prose is fantastic, and he managed to make me feel, in a way that is almost very real, the throbbing sadism of the sun, the grit of sand on my skin, and the hopeless asphyxiating fog that rises at night to occlude the stars away. The second thing that I really liked about this book is how well Abe delves into the mental state of someone who is completely and utterly trapped. The trapped person retreats inward, his life becomes internal, he surrenders to pointless sad fantasies of escape and freedom. He’s totally isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, and eventually, when he’s exhausted enough, comes to accept his situation and the rules of conduct, as presented, become in his mind totally reasonable. The Woman in the Dunes reminded me a lot of Hubert Selby, Jr.’s The Room, another book about a trapped man deluding himself with fantasy.

This book is a bit surreal at points, but that’s okay. Unlike, say, Murakami, it’s not weird just to be weird, it’s a novel with a slightly fantastical bent that does what every book, and especially every fantastical book needs to do: engage the real world. I’m going to start digressing a little bit here, so, my apologies. Eventually on this blog I’d like to get around to writing about how I think that the fantasy genre is the genre that most specifically plays to our shared, unconscious, deep-rooted fascist tendencies, but for now I’m going to say that there are two major types of fiction books: the realistic (Grapes of Wrath, say) and the unrealistic (Gravity’s Rainbow) and that the unrealistic books can be further divided into two categories: those that use a device to make a point about the real world and those that don’t. The former includes some of the best books ever written (1984, for instance) and the latter are mostly trashy no good fantasy novels that your dumpy sister reads while drinking tea and petting the cat. The Lord of the Rings is a marginal case, but I’d definitely put, for instance, Game of Thrones in the latter category. I think there’s only really one thing that separates the two: that the author believes in something, and at this point, since I basically totally despair for humanity, I’m going to say that it doesn’t really matter what the author believes in, it could almost be anything at all, just as long as it isn’t about elves, wizards, dragons, and terribly pathetic anaesthetizing wish-fulfillment for a civilization that is totally devoid of real-world fulfillment for most everyone who has the misfortune of being alive.

I almost feel like I have less to say about this book than I did about Naked Lunch because unlike Naked Lunch I liked this book unambiguously, without reservation. I’m not conflicted about it at all. I don’t know if I’m going to rate these books with stars, or with numbers or what, or just talk about them because that’s really what I’d like to do, just talk about books, so I guess I’ll just say that I highly recommend The Woman in the Dunes on its literary merits and on my own belief that reading books, lots of them, that engage our internal and external worlds is a pretty simple way to alleviate a lifetime of slavery down in the pit.

           

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch (1959)
William S. Burroughs

     I first tried to read this book several years ago, when I was still in high school or just out of high school, and hated it, probably only read maybe a quarter of the way through, but recently another Burroughs book was recommended to me (Cities of the Red Night, one of his later books) and I read that and liked it. I found Naked Lunch unpleasant and off-putting the first time, but Cities was a nice trip down into Burroughs’ kinky and pervy world. So I gave Naked Lunch another go and found a book that is both vastly overrated but still pretty... I dunno... alright? I feel like “good” is a bit strong but it’s not a bad book by any means, and I can see why it really gets some people stiff.

    I think I appreciated this book mostly for what it represents and barely at all for what it contains. Naked Lunch is the definition of a book that is “great” but not “good”. I can feel its greatness on every page; it’s a totally unique, inventive, iconoclastic artifact from America’s Literary Golden Age (I dunno, the end of the Second World War until like... 1980) that will never be duplicated. It has little to no plot and the characters are just cardboard, just little wispy ghosts, which I was expecting. It’s confusing, disjointed, and achronological. I understand where Naked Lunch sits in the American Canon (and despite the druggy pretensions it is very American) and I know why it is there, but man... I think there are a lot better books out in the world. One thing I really appreciated was that Burroughs used randomness and chance in his writing (cut-ups, etc.) something that’s noticeably absent in literature. There’s randomness in music (silly beat-off jazz music, for example) and in painting (Abstract Expressionism) and even in filmmaking. One of my favorite things in The Wire is a scene where a drug dealer gets shot in the leg and for a brief moment the camera assumes his viewpoint looking down the barely lit block and in that second of vision a big old fucking rat runs out from under a car and across the street. You know that was completely on accident. Baltimore is probably a place with a lot of rats, and someone just happened to have a camera at that exact moment.

     Instead of approaching it as traditional novel (with a narrative and other things novels usually have) I think this book really looks best when you think of it as a collection of really vibrant, well-drawn images, probably every image Billy Burroughs thought up for a couple of years put into one book. Filthy, disgusting, revolting images but mostly well-executed. It has about as much emotional depth as a mid-80s Ministry video. I can imagine the video now, it’s mostly made up of horrifying and ugly archival and news footage, lots of quick cuts juxtaposing embarrassing moments in human history. Like they’d show a clip of B-52s saturation bombing North Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives, and then a cut to a handheld video of a cop shooting a black man in the head with a shotgun, and everyone who made it (the director and Al Jourgensen) would pat themselves on the back over how clever they are for connecting the Military-Industrial Complex to Domestic Racial Violence. Meanwhile, at Jupiter State University-Ganymede, under a big glass and steel dome two students, college types, slack around their dorm room on the couch ingesting space drugs while watching MTV’s 120 Minutes, beamed in from Earth. One turns to the other and says, Paul.. do you... wanna? and Paul says you don’t know how long I’ve waited for you to ask me that, Jordan. Jordan gets down on his knees and unzips Paul’s space suit and pulls out Paul’s quivering pink erection and begins administering a suckjob so potent that Paul is rendered instantaneously senseless from homosexual ecstasy, he puts his hand on the back of Jordan’s head and unconsciously begins muttering incantations he studied in the Sex Magic 220 class he took last semester. Paul’s magic and the suckjob magic mix and merge and Jordan’s face and Paul’s ding-dong start melting, fusing together like two pieces of plastic doused in model airplane cement until the two of them become one quivering mass of gelatinous anger, like a tumor with hair, teeth, eyes and a murderous rage. The jelly undulates its way out of the dorm and down a storm drain into the sewers. Of course, the jelly gets hungry sometimes so it captures an engineering major and drags him or her (but probably him because Burroughs doesn’t really include women into his worldview) down to its underground lair where it jacks off acidic semen all over its prey, like a nightmare penis fly, the student melts into a mushy sludge which the Paul-Jordan Jell-O sucks up with a hideous proboscis. After ten or fifteen students and several dozen Hispanic janitors disappear the campus authorities alert the Man who sends in a platoon of Men in Black all wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and down in the sewers they burn the jelly to death with government flamethrowers. Because the Man is always oppressing (destroying) things that are unique and beautiful. And BAM I just explained Naked Lunch by William Seward Burroughs to you, I shit you not.

     I’ve been thinking about Naked Lunch more than I ever thought I would, and you know what this book reminds me of? Eraserhead. They’re both very vivid and lurid, a clear collection of disturbing images but I’m at a loss trying to figure out if either of them actually mean something. I’m not sure that they need to mean anything, and that's a point a lot of people would make, and when I think about Naked Lunch this way I like it a lot more than when I think about it as a regular ol’ book. I’m positive that it’s not a coincidence that Naked Lunch and Eraserhead seem related to me. They’re sort of puppies from the same litter. I can't possibly be the first person to see similarities between Naked Lunch and Eraserhead, and if I am... that's fucking sad.

     Supposedly Naked Lunch has some sort of anti- Capital Punishment message but I don’t see it, and I defy anyone to explain that to me. I’m not sure it’s about anything except teenaged boys masturbating while being hanged, and zombified drug addicts sucking each other off. The real world Bill Burroughs shot his wife in the head, so I guess if I were a murderer I’d probably be against the death penalty too. There are some folks out there who say you shouldn’t judge a piece of art by the life of the artist but fuck that nonsense, a biography is context and you need a lot of context to analyze and understand anything. Knowing about Greek civilization will give you a better understanding of a Greek statue. Hey, here’s one thing the ancient Greeks and Willy Burroughs have in common: they were both massive pederasts.

     One thing that really struck me is how hugely misogynistic Burroughs is. He’s sort of this homosexual supremacist woman-hater who is totally incapable of writing about a woman as anything more than a piece of meat. And not just any old piece of meat. A regular piece of meat would be much better. I could go down to the supermarket right now and get me a steak and cook that and it would be filling and delicious. No, in Burroughs’ world a woman is a stinking, rotten piece of meat crawling with maggots and covered in slime and it’d kill you to eat it. Or at very least give you the squirts. He’s worse than Yukio Mishima in this regard, and I’ll get to Mishima later, but at least Mishima wrote female characters who were still human beings, whereas Burroughs sees them as unnatural, revolting mutants who invariably die hideously, a death usually caused in some way by their womanhood or female sexuality. Off the top of my head I think there’s only two female characters in Naked Lunch, out of a book with a zillion characters, and one dies in a gangbang, and the other is hit by a car and miscarries a mutant fetus right in the middle of the road. Of course, everyone in a Burroughs book lives and dies hideously but when a woman has sex (or even just breathes in, really) it’s some kind of blood sucking perversion of nature that results in disturbance and death, whereas if three dudes suck each other off and take it up the ass over and over again and then two of them kill the other (of course it’s a redhead adolescent boy with a perfectly formed penis and a tight little asshole) and rub his blood and entrails and semen all over themselves it’s the most beautiful expression of love and some sort of supernatural mystical experience. I think if one were to sort of assemble a spectrum of misogyny you have at one end your Rush Limbaughs, your Rick Santorums, your Jerry Falwells, your Taliban, just real actively, aggressively misogynistic types, and at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got Naked Lunch and Bill Burroughs, whose misogyny manifests as sort of a total apathy. He was also as gay as the day is long so maybe he didn’t write about women because they didn’t interest him, but I’m pretty sure that most gay men don’t think that women are virally contagious mutants who need to be completely immolated to ensure their total destruction and when they're all gone we can build a homosexual junky utopia where there's no death penalty and we can just indulge our hedonism with drugs and passive poopchute sex with teenaged runaways whenever and however we want.

     You know what else this book is like? It’s like Ron Paul. To the simpleminded and gullible Ron Paul seems like a revelation (yeah man legalize weed, and rights and shit, rights) but a good solid think about it reveals that at the heart it’s quite ugly. Burroughs doesn’t want a libertarian utopia because he believes in the inherent dignity and goodness of mankind or any such thing as positive as that, instead he dreams of a libertarian utopia so he can shoot heroin and screw around with adolescent boys without having to worry about the cops.

     All in all Naked Lunch is a fairly... decent... book, and it probably deserves its place in the Hall of American Literature. It’s full of lurid, lingering imagery and is completely, totally unique. There’s nothing else out there like it, not that I’ve read. I’m actually really surprised that I have this much to say about it, because I think that Cities of the Red Night is a much better book and I certainly enjoyed reading it a lot more. I doubt this book is for everyone, or even, I dunno, ten percent of everyone. What percentage of the population do you think has sufficient tolerance for rambling junky nonsense and kinky gay porn? Certainly not a very high percentage. Most people can't even sit through a long movie with zero explosions. But despite how negative this has sounded I'm glad I read it: it’s an important piece of America’s literary history and I’d be negligent if I missed out. Burroughs may have been a completely deplorable human being and I wouldn't want to spend any time with him at all, but he was a talented, skilled, thoughtful writer and if I had a fraction of his skill at crafting memorable images I would be fucking set for life, I'll have you know.