In the Country of Contradiction the Hypocrite is King: Defining Dirty Realism in Charles Bukowski's Factotum
2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mfs.2001.0002
ISSN1080-658X
Autores Tópico(s)Crime and Detective Fiction Studies
ResumoIn 1973, ten years before Bill Buford invented the term "Dirty Realism" 1 in issue eight of the literary magazine Granta, Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text made a startling, and prophetic, observation on literary consciousness. Though Barthes located this consciousness in "the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure" (3), Buford's dirty realism transfers it to the writer at the moment his or her pleasure requires. The dirty realist hypocrisy aesthetic--demonstrated in Charles Bukowski's novel Factotum--flagrantly enacts the Barthesian fantasy: "Imagine someone [. . .] who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old spectre: logical contradiction [. . .]" (3). Bukowski not only "discards [. . .] logical contradiction," but flaunts his disdain for consistency, logic, and accountability. He is not only conscious of contradiction within his text, [End Page 43] but celebrates a willful hypocrisy, indiscriminately exhibiting (and conscripting to his own ends) the incongruities of postindustrial capital. Bukowski turns passivity into a subversive practice by self-consciously displaying his subjection to capital's indeterminacy, in effect replicating and co-opting that indeterminacy to empower himself.
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