Bukowski the Alien

Where does Bukowski fit in? Is he the voice of the working class? Is he a womanizer destined for the pits of misogynistic Hell? Is he a Beat with grey hair? Should the universities listen a little closer to what he has to say?

I'm not sure there is a perfect place for Bukowski, but he is certainly not The Proletariat's hero. Bukowski is subject to as much miss-treatment, insubordination, degradation, inequity, inhumanity, disregard, and flippancy as any other member of the working class. Like most humans, he is held prisoner to a primordial 'fight or flight' instinct. With fingers bent back by bosses, conventions, and expectations of a society he debases with spectacular acuity he'll eventually break the grip and run like mad over the hills, arms flailing, or give a hard left followed by several rights to the perpetrator. When it comes to the work place, he tends to advocate running. He does not square off for the rights of the worker, dropping the gloves out back of the factory or on the docks for a fair man-to-man battle with the suit in power. Winner take all. Rather, he cowers like a hurt animal moving from one low paying job to another, cutting out midway for a drink, hoping against hope that the next stop will be a little less painful than the last. He offers, after all, little more than his time "I've given you my time. It's all I've got to give-it's all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour."(Factotum) He peels each day of work off his back like a scab not quite ready to fall off, baring unprotected baby skin underneath still not ready to face the world alone. Let's not confuse the iconic wordsmith with the unions of our nations who have brought us true equity and fair treatment in our factories!

So where does he fit in, then, if he's not the working class saviour touted on so many book jackets, on-line reference-pedias, and essays on the writer? He seems to me to have evaded compartmentalization. Both his own writing and several valiant efforts at biographies on the writer reveal a certain period of flirtation with The Beats. Burroughs is the only beat known to have openly snubbed him. The friendships he did keep were incomplete, partially due to a sort of unfortunate series of compromises. The Beats were stationed in San Fran., he resided in L.A., they were recreating sexual identification, he believed men mated with women, they enjoyed drugs and hallucinogens, he loved his alcohol and so on. He had a tenacity for breaking friendships by bastardizing them in exaggerated, defamatory stories where, by default, he was the hero. Many close friendships were destroyed this way. The academics invited him with open arms into their universities. He responded with piss poor readings, insults, and trashing their homes during the after party. Healthy heterosexual relationships were not for him, as we well know. Unless you consider excessive verbal abuse and occasional fist fights to be status quo. For this, he has been duly beaten with the sceptre of the feminists. Homosexual acquaintances were also in the firing line of verbal degradation and extreme prejudice. One might go so far as to say homophobia. Where else can we find a place for him? With his parents, perhaps? Unconditional love, right? Only if that includes weekly beatings with a strap from his father while his mother looks on uninterested. It is documented that his slow speaking style is not natural, but rather environmental. It emerged when he was a child. He planned each word very carefully before he said it to ensure there were no slip-ups that would inadvertently anger his whip-happy father.

So where does one put Charles Bukowski? On my bookshelf  he stands, shaking just a little, in front of William S. Burroughs and Judith Butler, both of whom would be happy to blow his head off for their own reasons, I am sure.

Abjection in Love is a Dog From Hell

In her essay The Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva explores abjection. Abjection is a dark and vile threat that, at once, the subject is attracted to but repulsed from, something that 'beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.'(Kristeva, 1982) Abjection exists outside of the subject and the object, but dangerously close to both.  In it's most elementary form, abjection can be described through food loathing. The teary eyes, bile build-up, and stomach spasms caused by a food I have no taste for is an example of the repulsion abjection stirs up. My draw towards the food in the first place exemplifies abjection's cruel game of summon and repulsion. We see abjection surface in Bukowski's narrative relations to women. He is at once drawn to women while also (and immediately) jettisoned away from them. In one poem he might celebrate the glory of a good fuck, while in the next he may lament the shortcomings of the woman from whom he most recently split or swiftly show her the door followed by expelling waste from his body. A casual reading of Love is a Dog from Hell reveals this erotic tennis match the poet plays with himself. He is at once caught up in a desire so strong, so overwhelming he declares:

"I feel her inside of my
wrists and the back of my eyes,
and the toes and legs and belly
of me feel her and
the other part too,
and all of Los Angeles falls down
and weeps for joy,"
(Bukowski, 1977)

 And his readership collectively feels the splashdown of a storm after a Summer heatwave, windows wide open and wood floors bubbling under the weight of the water. In this verse, the poetic voice is drawn to women within a symbolic order he considers within the scope of the 'possible, the tolerable and the thinkable' (Kristeva, 1982). Women fall within a set of laws he can understand and live by. This relationship to women is symbolic but does not challenge his capacity to formulate what 'woman' is beyond that which is before him. It is akin to viewing pictures of personal items belonging to victims of the Auschwitz gas chambers, without connecting them to death. They are both sanitized, symbolic representations of something far less possible, tolerable or thinkable for the respective viewers. Abjection reaches its apex when the connection to meaning is made. For Bukowski, this means a woman who falls short of replacing his mother. He runs, haphazard, to the other end of the court returning his own serve, in repulsion,

"then I said goodbye
hungup
went into the crapper and
took a good beershit
mainly thinking, well,
I'm still alive
and have the ability to expell
wastes from my body.
and poems.
and as long as that's happening
I have the ability to handle
betrayal
lonliness
hangnail
clap
and the economic reports in the
financial section"
(Bukowski, 1977)

 We turn our heads away, close our eyes so as to shut out the images as though they were graphic illustrations on the page. Some readers may even close the book and put it on the shelf, or worse, dismiss it from their collection. Occasionally, he flirts with giving up this game while resting between sets and speaks lucidly of women as "that thing that no longer signifies anything"(Kristeva, 1982) . He speaks of

 "another bed
another woman
more curtains
another bathroom
another kitchen
other eyes
other hair
other
feet and toes.
everybody's looking.
the eternal search."
(Bukowski, 1977)

 Despite abjection and flirtations, however, he continues the search for the woman that fits his living universe. This is where we (and the writer) catch our breath, return pulse rates to normal and maybe reach for a glass of water.

Charles Bukowski's sexual poetics in Love is a Dog from Hell   exemplify Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Woman, as both object and subject, exists for Bukowski within a restrictive symbolic system. He is at once attracted to what he thinks woman ought to be and repulsed by what he finds she is not. For Bukowski, the cycle continues "unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion"(Kristeva, 1982) Confrontation with woman as an ontological being in opposition to him thrusts him into a state of abjection, then back again and so on.


Citations
Bukowski, Charles. (1977). texan. In Love is a Dog from Hell (pp. 39-40)  New York, Ecco. 
Bukowski, Charles. (1977). me. In Love is a Dog from Hell (pp. 31-32)  New York, Ecco. 
Bukowski, Charles. (1977). another bed. In Love is a Dog from Hell (pp. 33-34)  New York, Ecco. 
Kristeva, Julia. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection New York, Columbia University Press.

My Introduction to Bukowski

I first encountered Charles Bukowski as a first year undergraduate student. The exact details are, fittingly, a little blurry and probably involved some amount of alcohol. I was an avid poet at the time, attending many open stages with my laconic and sweat-stained work. I was a tough nut as a youngin' and my poetry was even tougher. Another writer in the crowd was reminded of Bukowski after one of my readings. At the time, I had no idea who Bukowski was but being compared to somebody- anybody- who actually had real live published work was enough to stimulate my nerve endings all night, like someone was playing an endless game of Criss Cross Applesauce on my back. Later, I would come to regard the comparison to Mr. Bukowski with disdain. It seemed so many writers around me were posturing as the drunk and vulgar poet persona and, thus, were often considered fraudulent. Upon reflection, I think it was more likely my simplistic word choice and low brow subject matter that inspired the original comparison (not to mention the monotone, snail's pace at which I delivered the work in oral presentation). The comparison was enough to drive me to the library. I took out his novel "Pulp" probably because of the revolver on the cover (like I said, I was a tough nut) and ate it up. It is a good thing, because it sent me back to the library where I could sink into work more 'typical' of this author. I would spend many hours over the next years of my degree program sitting on the floor in the Bukowski section sinking myself into his world and his words.

He was an ugly bastard in all the author photographs which juxtaposed so sweetly to the stuffy suit and tie academics that graced the spines of my required readings. His pock marked face and fat at once disgusted me and endeared him to me. I waxed nostalgic about the old men in starched shirts I had left behind in my hometown diner. The ones who played euchre, calling me honey and tipping me more if I let them slip the money into my breast pocket themselves. Is this who this man was? No, his writing would show me that he has both respect and class towards women. Had his characters sat in my diner, the nervous teenage waitress would have been ignored, but a more mature waitress in daisy dukes with big hair and talking the talk would have gotten back all she dished out. His characters were culturally responsive; they spoke to a woman in a context appropriate to her representations. I do not pretend to think that this is a model approach to differentiating treatment of women. Having said that, I'd rather have served him a burger than most of the men in my south western Ontario small town!

As my degree program continued, I found myself interested in the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Simone de Beauvoir. I took many feminist philosophy courses, developing a strong foundation in body politics and women's role as 'other'.  My appreciation of  Bukowski became increasingly harder to uphold within my personal ethics while also growing and developing exponentially. How could I effectively implement social change as it pertains to women while holding in reverie the very bricks that have kept us captive? It is my intention to try to reconcile at least some of this disparity in these pages.