Notes on Young Kim's 'A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell' (Part 1)

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Who Knew (that Maupassant was an Objectophile)?

I.

As the clinical sexologist Amy Marsh rightly points out, whilst objectum sexuality is often regarded as a relatively recent phenomenon, it actually possesses a much longer cultural history, as revealed, for example, in classic works of literature, such as Victor Hugo's queer gothic novel of 1831, Notre-Dame de Paris, in which Quasimodo is as passionately attached to the bells of the cathedral, as he is to the beautiful sixteen-year-old gypsy girl Esmeralda: 

"He loved them, caressed them, talked to them, understood them. From the carillon in the steeple of the transept to the great bell over the doorway, they all shared his love." [1]

However, I think my favourite instance of objectophilia in 19th-century French literature occurs in Maupassant's short story Qui sait? (1890) ... [2]


II.

In this tale, the anonymous narrator - confined in a psychiatric unit - confesses that he has always been something of a loner, but possessing no particular animosity towards his fellow human beings: 

"I have always lived alone because of a certain creeping unease I feel in the presence of other people. I don't know how to explain it. I am not averse to seeing people [...] but if I feel they have been near me for any prolonged period of time, even the closest begin to get so much on my nerves that I have this overwhelming, increasingly urgent desire to see them gone or to go off and be by myself.
      It is actually more than a desire. It is a real need, something absolutely essential to me." [275-76]

I used to believe, like the narrator, that there must be many thousands of people who feel this way. But, actually, it turns out that most people don't; they are perfectly content, rather, with being part of a vast, seething mass of humanity. It's only a rare few souls, for example, who cannot travel on a rush hour tube, or step into a crowded lift; and only a queer type of person who finds solitude blissful, rather than a huge, unremitting burden to bear.  

Similarly, despite the narrator's insistence on the perfectly normal nature of his (introverted and solipsistic) psychology, it's actually very unusual - or what we might even term perverse - to become emotionally and/or erotically attached to inanimate objects. (It should be noted that I use the term perverse here without any negative connotation or moral judgement attached.)

The narrator informs his readers:

"My house has, or had, become a world in which I lived a solitary yet active life, surrounded by familiar objects, furniture and bibelots as lovable to me as human faces. Little by little I filled my house with these things and I lived in their midst as happily as in the arms of a beloved woman whose warm, familiar embrace has become a prerequisite to a calm, untroubled existence." [277]

That's very lovely, I think. Unfortunately, the tale takes a bizarre twist when the beloved objects stage a revolt and abandon the amorous subject by one night marching out of his house, whilst he watches with astonishment from the garden:

"What I could now hear was the extraordinary sound of steps coming down the stairway and on to the parquet and the carpets - the sound not of shoes or of human footwear but the clatter of wooden and iron crutches clashing like cymbals, or so it seemed. Suddenly, what should I see waddling over the threshold of my own room but the big armchair in which I used to read. It came out into the garden. Others from the drawing room followed it and were followed in turn by low settees crawling crocodile-like along on their squat little legs. All my other chairs leapt out like goats, with footstools lolloping alongside.
      You can imagine what I felt like! I slid behind some shrubbery and remained crouching there watching the procession continue to pass by, for they were all leaving, one after the other, quickly or slowly, according to size and weight. My piano, my full-size grand piano galloped wildly past me with a musical murmur in its flank; the smallest objects such as hairbrushes and crystal chandelier droplets crawled like ants on the ground accompanied by glass goblets on which the moonlight cast little glow-worms of phosphorescence; curtains, hangings, tapestries spread like pools and stretched out octopus-like tentacles of fabric as they swam past. My desk hove into view, a rare eighteenth-century piece now containing some photographs and all the letters tracing the sad history of my painful love-life. 

      I suddenly lost my fear. I threw myself on it and held it down as if it had been a [...] woman attempting to flee. However, there was no stopping it and despite all my angry efforts I could not even slow down its inexorable progress. In my desperate struggle against this appalling power I was thrown to the ground, then rolled over and dragged along the gravel. In no time, the rest of the furniture [...] began to trample all over me, bruising my legs in the process. When I let go of the desk the rest of the pieces careered over my body as a cavalry charge mows down a fallen rider." [279-80] 

Talk about revenge of the object ...! Is there anything else even remotely like this in all literature?

The tale's English translator, Siân Miles, reminds us that the French composer Paul Dukas used the idea of a "mysterious and threatening proliferation of avenging objects" [3] in his symphonic poem L'apprenti sorcier (1897) and that Bret Easton Ellis also incorporated a scene into American Psycho (1991) in which Patrick Bateman is stalked by an anthropomorphised park bench, but that's really about it (I think, though would love to know of further examples). 


Notes

[1] These lines from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, translated by  Walter J. Cobb (Signet Classics, 1964), are quoted by Amy Marsh in her article 'Love Among the Objectum Sexuals', in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, (Vol. 13, 1 March, 2010): click here.

[2] Guy de Maupassant, 'Who Knows?', A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, trans, Siân Miles, (Penguin Books, 2004). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

[3] Siân Miles, Notes to 'Who Knows?', by Guy de Maupassant, in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, ibid., p. 320. Miles mistakenly claims that Dukas composed his work twenty-five years earlier than Maupassant wrote his short story, but, as a matter of fact, he only completed it in 1897, i.e., seven years after Qui sait? was first published. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, as it is known in English, was, of course, based on Goethe's poem Der Zauberlehrling written in 1797. 

Those interested in knowing more about the role of objects in fiction and the manner in which inanimate things infiltrate our desires, fantasies, and concepts of self, might find Babette Bärbel Tischleder's The Literary Life of Things (Campus Verlag, 2014) worth reading. I agree with the book's central argument that one of the most important things about literary texts is that they "encourage us to see our practical, emotional, and imaginary engagement with the nonhuman environment in modes that resist any clear-cut distinction of subjects and objects, the physical and the metaphysical, the animate and the inanimate" [18]. 

Bret Easton Ellis: Towards a Non-Magical, Non-Elvish Gay Life

Bret Easton Ellis 

Photo: Iris Schneider for The Washington Post 

According to the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis, the liberal insistence on sanctifying homosexuality is a kind of inverted homophobia, which results, ironically, in a new form of victimisation that transforms complex human beings into little more than fairy tale characters (Gay Magical Elves). The heteronormative majority cheer every time another man or woman in the public eye dares to come out and appear before them as some kind of saintly figure whose primary purpose is to remind them of their own virtues as a people: Look at us! So tolerant, so loving, so inclusive! 

This desire to embrace and celebrate every queer individual on the LGBT spectrum, is not only patronising in and of itself, but it denies the individuality of the person concerned; they become merely a stereotype and symbol. And, in the process, they become neutered and neutralised. Because the deal is, if they want to be loved and accepted within wider society, then they must make themselves lovable and acceptable by becoming like the sweet and sexually nonthreatening persons seen on TV (bitchy clowns and queeny best friends). "God help the gay man", writes Ellis, "who comes out and doesn't want to represent, who doesn't want to teach, who doesn’t feel like part of the homogenized gay culture and rejects it."

Ultimately, to be liberated, is not to feel pride in your identity (be it sexual, racial, or religious); it means, rather, having the freedom to be flawed (and often full of self-loathing) just like everybody else. In other words, it means having the right not to smile and have to be so (HIV) positive all the time. Not all queer individuals wish to promote healthy mainstream values; they don't all want to be married and raise a family; don't all support left wing causes or aspire to be politically correct. According to Ellis, however, a lot of gay men today "feel they can’t be provocatively raunchy or politically incorrect in the mainstream media because it doesn’t represent The Cause".

He continues:

"This is where we're at now, I guess. Within the clenched world of the gay PC police there has been a tightening of the reins. It's as if in this historic moment for gay men we somehow still need to be babied and coddled and used as shining examples of humanity and objects of fascination - the gay baby panda - and this is a new kind of gay victimization. The fact that it is often being extolled by other gays in the Name of the Good Cause is doubly stifling."

Saying this predictably resulted in a lot of criticism for Ellis - not least from others in the gay community. But, to his credit, the author of American Psycho ultimately chooses to affirm himself as a writer who believes in free speech, rather than as part of a community whose members must conform with the prevailing orthodoxy in order to display their solidarity. The fact that some wish to promote a fantasy of queer life that doesn’t really exist, is not something Ellis is prepared to comply with. He may write fiction for a living, but he prefers gay reality no matter how painful and fucked-up that reality is:

"We are not all well-adjusted Good Gays. We’re not all happily queer - meaning the queer part doesn't make us happy or unhappy - just that some of us are cranky, depressed wrecks. We're complicated. We're angry. We can be as rude about our sexuality as our straight counterparts. Some of us feel the need to express our 'gay' selves any way we want to, even if that doesn't conform to 'gay positive' stereotypes. (A lot of us think these so-called 'gay positive' stereotypes are, in fact, 'gay nightmares.') Some of us reject the notion of how Gay Life is defined and don’t want to be a part of it, and so we create our own."

Ellis continues in a passage with which I'm very sympathetic:

"Where's the not-famous, slobby, somewhat lazy gay dude who is fine with being gay but just doesn't care about being PC or being an example of 'moral uplift,' who just wants to get on with his life, the guy who wants to be himself without becoming a label? A gay man who doesn't equate gay with dignity? The gay man who feels he doesn’t have to march in the parade while smiling? The inclusion and promotion of this common gay man by the Gatekeepers of Politically Correct Gayness would be something shattering. It would be a massive move toward eliminating The Gay Man as Magical Elf."

Notes

Bret Easton Ellis, 'In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves', Out, (13 May 2013): click here to read online. 

I assume that Ellis still stands by this essay, as he repeats the views expressed here in his new book White (Picador, 2019). 

American Psycho and the Slave Revolt in Morals

Patrick Bateman is one of the great fictional figures within contemporary culture, even though the question of his identity remains ambiguous and his reliability as a narrator suspect. Stylish,  charming, and with a dandy's eye for detail, he's a postmodern Dorian Gray living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.      

However, it's clear that the author of American Psycho doesn't wish for his readers to admire Patrick Bateman. On the contrary, Bateman is someone we should repudiate; a man trapped in a world that lacks depth, meaning, and reality and his story serves as a warning about the dangers of surrendering one's soul to Mammon. This is why Ellis opens the novel with a line from Dante - 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' - an allusion to the hell that awaits those who choose to lead a life lacking in firm moral foundation and worry more about looking good than being good. 

Thus, for all the protests from various concerned quarters that greeted publication of the book, American Psycho is above all else a moral fable and not a celebration of schizo-psychosis, or a nihilistic advocacy of murder and mayhem. Its central teaching is one subscribed to by all good Christians: love of money is the root of all evil. Ellis even goes so far as to imply there might be a causal connection between serial consumption and serial killing. 

And this is why as much as I admire the work as a piece of writing, I despise it for reinforcing the great conceit of the poor and badly dressed: namely, that whilst the rich and powerful might have money and lead superficially fabulous lives, they are all unhappy and corrupt and heading towards eternal damnation. This resentment-ridden philosophy of secret envy and hatred is what underlies slave moralities everywhere and it ends not merely with contempt for material well-being and good fortune, but with an apocalyptic desire for worldly destruction. For as Lawrence writes:

"It is very nice, if you are poor and not humble - and the poor may be obsequious, but they are almost never truly humble, in the Christian sense - to bring your enemies down to utter destruction ... while you yourself rise up to grandeur." 

- Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (CUP, 1980), p. 63.

American Psycho is meant to scare us back onto the straight and narrow path that leads to heaven. We are asked to accept that salvation belongs exclusively to those who are honest and hard-working; i.e. those who think their meekness and self-restraint is a voluntary achievement or accomplishment, rather than simply a sign that they lack the power to act.

Sadly, not only do lies turn impotence into virtue, but they make us suspect and despise those things which the heart needs even more than love: splendour, pride, good shoes, and expensive-looking business cards.