Slumming Angels
2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2019.0095
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoSlumming Angels Stefan Beck (bio) The French call it nostalgie de la boue, "yearning for the muck." It's an affliction endemic to young people who hope to become writers, and its symptoms are easy to spot: the shuffling gait and bloodshot eyes; the Salvation Army wardrobe, redolent of OTB parlors; the florid fascination with the Beat Generation; the equation of debasement with authenticity, which presents as an unthinking reverence for criminals, addicts, sex workers, the homeless, and Charles Bukowski. Often it proves fatal to emotional maturity and sound judgment. Once in a while it is a blessing in disguise. Where does it come from, this compulsive attraction to the seedy, the seamy, the salacious? In literature, it has a tortuous pedigree. We trace its spiritual origins to Diogenes and his barrel, to Jesus and his low-life companions, to the parable of Lazarus and Dives and to the Beatitudes, and to stories like Leo Tolstoy's "Martin the Cobbler." It branches off in darker directions: the life and works of the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, Isaac Babel joining a Cossack regiment in order to experience "what we grown-ups call the essence of things." It is in Babel's Red Cavalry Stories that we find the blueprint for that muck-wallowing masterpiece of cult literature, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Johnson was also influenced by Graham Greene, not least by Greene's Catholic identification with the "poor in spirit," but like most contemporary writers working in this nearly collapsed vein, he owed a debt to the Beats. His first novel is called Angels—cf. the "angel-headed hipsters" of Allen Ginsberg's Howl—and his early poetry is shot through with muck-beatifying imagery: "Our Lady of the Wet [End Page 543] Glass-Rings on the Album Cover"; "Heavenly lady, / I'm drinking coffee / and you're dripping mucus"; any line at random from "The Confession of St. Jim-Ralph." But Johnson was a better writer than any of the Beats, in part because he rejected the superstition that substance abuse is a boon to creativity, but mostly because he treated his down-at-heel characters not like symbols, fetish objects, pincushions, or jokes, but like people. In this Johnson was, if not unique, at least unusual, and he is the gold standard by which today's gutter-chroniclers should be judged. ________ Ross Macdonald said of Raymond Chandler that he wrote "like a slumming angel," and this phrase is useful to keep in mind when considering the use and abuse of nostalgie de la boue in literature. "Slumming," of course, means being in low places where one doesn't belong; it suggests tourism, gawking, exploitation. Like many in my generation, perhaps, I learned the term from Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, which is essentially a literate person's fantasy of having it both ways, of being a tough guy and a bona fide genius. I saw the term more recently as the title of a story in Homesick for Another World, a collection by the Garbage Pail Kid of literary fiction (I say this not without affection), Ottessa Moshfegh. And here it is again: "Are you a cop?" "No." Mona snorted. "Why, do I look like a cop?" "Sort of." "Well, I'm not," Mona said. "Just slumming then, I guess," the woman said, but not unpleasantly. She shrugged. You may have bigger tits than I do, she thought, but otherwise we're not so different. We both have jobs that require us to work on our knees. The exchange, between a prostitute and a cleaning lady, is from Jen Beagin's debut novel, Pretend I'm Dead. The book, first published [End Page 544] by Triquarterly/Northwestern in 2015, was reprinted last year by Scribner, which has just released Beagin's follow-up, Vacuum in the Dark. Both novels are about Mona, a cleaning lady in her midtwenties, and both are based (as the jacket copy is careful to mention) on Beagin's own experiences in that line. Cleaning houses, the book tells us, is an occupation thought to be so infra dig for an attractive, articulate white woman...
Referência(s)