Athena Zapounidi (10230998)
Professor Dr. G.E.H.I. (Gaston) Franssen 29 June 2012
MA Thesis
University of Amsterdam
Charles Bukowski: The poetics of The Flâneur, The Factotum, The Barfly. A Sociopolitical Study of Modernity through Contemporary Poetry.
ABSTRACT
too much too little
. . . there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
people so tired mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us that we can all be
big-ass winners.
it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides.
or the terror of one person aching in one place
alone
untouched unspoken to
watering a plant.
. . . people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were
meanwhile I look at young girls stems
flowers of chance.
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say "no."
“the crunch”(1, 19-41, 59-73), from Love Is a Dog from Hell: poems, 1974-1977 (p. 162)
Table of Contents:
Introduction ………..…… p.5 I. Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way
Biography, Methodology and the Literary Tools of Reading Bukowski ……...….. p.11 II. Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
Bukowski: Creative and Life Writing in a Modern World ……….…..…. p.24 II.a. The Flâneur
Subjectivity, Inspiration and Creative Process ………..……….… p.26 II.b. The Factotum
Industrialism, Capitalism and Labour Conditions ……….………. p.36 II.c. The Barfly
Modernity, City, Subjects and Society ………..……... p.42 III. Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
Reception, Academic Neglect and a New Way of Reading Bukowski …………...p.60 Conclusion ………..…………..…. p.68 Work Cited ………..………… p.73
Key Words: Contemporary Poetry, Flâneur, Barfly, Factotum, Alignment and
Commitment, Ideology, State Apparatuses, Modernity, Capitalism, Subjects, Labour, City, Reception, New Reading
INTRODUCTION
born like this into this
as the chalk faces smile as Mrs. Death laughs as the elevators break
as political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked
we are
born like this into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness into bars where people no longer speak to each other into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
born into this
walking and living through this dying because of this
muted because of this castrated debauched disinherited because of this fooled by this used by this pissed on by this
made crazy and sick by this made violent
made inhuman by this
the heart is blackened
the fingers reach for the throat the gun
the bomb
the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
the fingers reach for the bottle the pill
the powder
we are born into this sorrowful deadliness
. . .
“Dinosauria, we” (1-46) from The Last Night of the Earth Poems (p. 319)
In The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire introduces his readers to the concept of the flâneur artist. In the chapter “The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child”, Baudelaire describes the flâneur as follows:
In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. . . . he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!
Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent, and you will have the key to the nature of [Charles Bukowski]. (794-795)
Baudelaire’s text with its definition of the flâneur – a significantly important and essential term for this paper – provides the perfect start for this study which deals with a contemporary flâneur writer and poet, who spent his life wandering, observing
society and writing; his name is Charles Bukowski. Baudelaire further describes the characteristics of the flâneur, which will assist our understanding of the artist’s nature and mentality:
The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito
wherever he goes. (795)
Bukowski was a modern and contemporary American poet, a flâneur – as Baudelaire would argue and Bukowski’s biographers consent – renowned for his extensive observations of society and a troubling existence. He was a prolific writer and poet who loved music, alcohol, women and races; a person both admired and despised
because of his direct language and underground lifestyle. And though his turbulent life is an interesting story in itself (and many have already looked at a variety of its aspects), I am interested in the sociopolitical narrative found in his poetry and its social significance within the modern violent techno-capitalist era, on both a social and academic level.
Bukowski himself never admitted that he was a political writer and refused that his writing has a social significance. Still, as I will show, his poetry also has a political effect and deserves academic attention as far as literary studies and criticism are concerned. So far, Bukowski has been neglected by academia and dismissed as an unimportant literary figure because of his ‘different’, as will be shown, writing.
Throughout the many articles, interviews and biographies concerning Bukowski there are numerous hints and innuendos pointing to the political and the social that is reflected in his writing; yet, there has been no extended research proving such a thesis, because of the little attention he has received within the scholarly circles. The aim of this paper is to explore the political connotations and implications of Bukowski’s poetry through a selection of poems wherein the social and the political can be traced.
For such an analysis, I will summon Raymond Williams and Luis Althusser, in order to conduct a research proving the sociopolitical implications of Bukowski’s poetry. Williams will facilitate the understanding of the irrevocable link between the private and the social sphere, often represented through a change in language and style; while Luis Althusser will provide the tools for the analysis of the content of Bukowski’s poems through his theory on the “ideological apparatuses” that support and promote a dominant ideology. William’s literary and cultural theory and
Althussers sociopolitical model with provide the theoretical background for my paper, while Bukowski’s biographies and more crucially his poetry i.e. the imagery, themes and metaphors used, will surface the poet’s subjectivity, ideology and the political tint of his writing.
The first section of this paper will provide the theoretical background for my study with the use of Williams’ cultural and literary theory and concepts, along with commentaries from Bukowski’s biographers who often convey his own words and opinions relevant to my hypothesis. The second will focus on Bukowski’s work, including an analysis of a selection of his poems that deal with themes related to (among others) modernity, labour, consumption, alienation, the city and its subjects. It will also provide an analysis of Bukowski’s experience and subjectivity, as shaped within a specific social content. I will read these poems focusing on specific lines and words in order to reveal the social, political and economic creases of his writing. In the third section, I will show how this flâneur poet, who provides interesting snapshots of society, though neglected by the academia could not only be read in a new way but also transform subjects’ consciousness through a change in (their) worldview.
To sum up, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the political vein of Charles Bukowski’s poetry as a means of alarming subjects’ perception of their current living conditions; his reception and the broader implications of his poetry. For this reason I will attempt to answer questions such as: How can one understand
Bukowski’s writing i.e. themes, form and style in literary terms? Is Bukowski’s poetry political and does it have a social effect? How can one relate his poetry to existing
sociopolitical theories? What is the reception of his poetry? Why is he neglected by the academic community? And, is there an alternative way of reading Bukowski?
My paper aims in gradually answering all questions and proving that there is a specific social and political dimension in Bukowski’s poetry. I want to highlight this sociopolitical effect, for as Baudelaire states: “[f]ew men are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess the power of expression. . . . when others are asleep”(795). Baudelaire comments on the relationship of the artist with society and their interconnectedness as does Williams in the first chapter that is about to begin.
I. SIFTING THROUGH THE MADNESS FOR THE WORD, THE LINE ,THE WAY1
Biography, Methodology and the Literary Tools of Reading Bukowski
at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity. some understanding and, at times, acts of courage
but all in all it is a mass, a glob that doesn't have too much.
it is like a large animal deep in sleep and almost nothing can awaken it.
when activated it's best at brutality, selfishness, unjust judgments, murder. what can we do with it, this Humanity? nothing.
avoid the thing as much as possible.
treat it as you would anything poisonous, vicious and mindless.
but be careful. it has enacted laws to protect itself from you.
it can kill you without cause.
and to escape it you must be subtle. few escape.
it's up to you to figure a plan.
I have met nobody who has escaped. I have met some of the great and famous but they have not escaped
for they are only great and famous within Humanity.
I have not escaped
but I have not failed in trying again and again.
before my death I hope to obtain my life.
“what can we do?” from bukowski.net (initially published in blank gun silencer - No. 9 – 1994)
Charles Bukowski, the flâneur - as defined by Charles Baudelaire - twentieth century American poet, records his experience and observations in the modern city, thus offering an interesting sociological study throughout his writing. His poems, which bear sociopolitical connotations, manifest how the social is reflected through Bukowski’s consciousness and demonstrate how the social is affected by the author. This interaction between society and the author becomes clearer when we look at Raymond Williams’ 1977 text Marxism and Literature, which provides the tools for a socio-cultural and literary analysis of Bukowski’s poetics.
To begin with, Williams concludes his book by hailing a critique and
reconceptualization of literary theory in order to understand the inevitable link and interaction between the private and the public sphere. In other words, Williams contemplates on how the social is reflected through the consciousness of an author:
It is the special function of [literary] theory, in exploring and defining the nature and the variation of practice, to develop a general consciousness within what is repeatedly experienced as a special and often relatively isolated
consciousness. For creativity and social self-creation are both known and unknown events, and it is still from grasping the known that the unknown- the next step, the next work- is conceived. (212)
Williams proposes an inductive methodology of reading and interpretation and stresses that there is a dialectical relationship between the author and society. His observation also applies to poetry, which through its transformation in form, style and language, has served as a means of reflecting and commenting on society, modernity and humanity. In Williams’s terms, one can argue that Charles Bukowski, as his
biographer Barry Miles observes in Charles Bukowski, “needed to look at humanity: ‘and when you look at Humanity you’ve GOT to react. It’s all too much, a continuous horror show ’” (261). Charles Bukowski was a poet, a deviant writer, “‘a student of hell’ . . . he could observe humanity and charge his batteries . . . he could be the flâneur, the invisible spectator” (Miles 261). Or, as Howard Sounes remarks in another biography, a poet Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, leading a suicidal life (52). The ‘pen’ of this flâneur artist, gives eloquent voice not only to his own experience, but also to the subjects living in a modern society, driven by sociopolitical, cultural and economic forces within a capitalist reign; thus bearing a non-negligible political significance.
In his book, Williams revises the basic concepts of literature and literary theory, thus calling for a new understanding of the literary works and creative process. Williams stresses that literary activity can bring difference and change into being:
To write in different ways is to live in different ways. It is also to be read in different ways, in different relations, and often by different people. This area of possibility, and thence of choice, is specific, not abstract, and commitment in its only important sense is specific in just these terms. It is specific within a writer’s actual and possible social relations as one kind of producer. It is specific also in the most concrete forms of these same actual and possible relations, in actual and possible notations, conventions, forms and language. Thus to recognize alignment is to learn, if we choose, the hard and total specificities of commitment. (205) In the light of Williams’, Charles Bukowski lived in a different way, wrote in a different way and thus needs to be read in different ways, in different relations. Williams defines the relationship of the author and society through the analysis of alignment and
commitment, meaning that “writing, like other practices, is in an important sense always aligned: that is to say, that it variously expresses, explicitly or implicitly, specifically selected experience from a specific point of view” (199). Thus, authors are bound to “conscious alignment, or conscious change of alignment,” acknowledging “the realities of their social relations, and in this sense their alignment” (204). Authors, says Williams, ought to choose their alignment and thus initiate to commitment while perceiving the real social relations they live in. Therefore, if we are to analyze such an author, we must incorporate his political alignment and commitment, in order to understand the consequences on his writing and its reception by the reader.
Charles Bukowski’s alignment and commitment starts at the bottom of the social ladder in the American society, and calls for a fundamentally different writing and an understanding of a different way of living. Bukowski is the flâneur poet who writes from the margin or, as Stephen Kessler adds in the San Francisco Review of Books, “from the frayed edge of society” (The Poetry Foundation). His style, language and form are incompatible with the dominant notion of poetry and thus resistant to classification. What is more, he supports his ideas by constructing his authorial subjectivity on the basis of a rebellious and non-conventional way of living.
Bukowski writes in direct language and realistic prose style. “Bukowski’s ideas” as his biographer Barry Miles remarks, “are expressed by actions and events in his slow, spare, Los Angeles drawl: ‘no ideas but in things’ as William Carlos Williams demanded. It was spelled out in detail by Raymond Chandler in an essay contrasting British and American English” (224). Bukowski’s raw material for his writing is found in his experiences and social interactions. In his lines, he delivers a medley of
experiences based on things and people, “written in everyday speech, recording small, commonplace events and using them to reveal often brutal facts of life and nature” (203). Milles recalls:
He was writing from experience, most of which had been in bars. With his grounding in 20s High Modernism, in William Carlos Williams’ notion: ‘No ideas but in things’ he did believe, to quote Williams, that ‘Art can be made of anything,’ and, as Williams constantly demanded, that American poetry should be the voice of the American streets, with the raw cadences, the phrasing and delivery of the working people, not the aristocratic voice of English
intellectuals. ‘The American idiom’ Williams called it. Williams himself never delivered this, but Bukowski did.(102)
Bukowski indeed delivers the portraits, voices and thoughts of the decadent figures scattered in the streets of America through a clear voice and a straightforward
language. Bukowski doesn’t sing nor is he lyrical, as one of his friends observes (Miles 102); in fact Bukowski defies the rules and conventions of the dominant conception of poetry and instead claims to have no rules. He reveals in one of his poems –included in the new poem collection Sifting through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems – titled “So you want be a writer”, that he writes because “it [comes] bursting out of [him]/in spite of everything,” (1-2); he addresses new writers by saying : “don’t be like so many thousands of/people who call themselves writers,/don't be dull and boring and/pretentious,” (38-41), and further states that there is no point in writing “unless it comes out of/ your soul like a rocket,”(49-50). Yet, Bukowski is not naïve; as Miles reports:
Though he often presented himself as an unacademic, callow practitioner, Bukowski was actually very aware of what he was doing. He was well read on poetic theory but didn’t like to discuss it. Clarity of vision and simplicity were matters of great importance to him: ‘I thought, let’s open up and clear up the line – be able to hang out a clothesline, a simple line, and be able to hang emotion on it – humour, happiness – without it being cluttered. The simple, easy line, and yet having the simple easy line to hang all these things – the laughter, the tragedy, the bus running through a red light. Everything.’ (126) Bukowski comprehends the need for a simple language in the modern world and that is why he chooses to write in a language that can be understood by everyone, a
language that shocks, a language that is repetitive and easy to recall. Raymond Williams would argue that this is Bukowski’s way of “opening to the world” (24); through a unique language and style. Williams understands language as a living organism evolving and shifting in meaning within the continuum of time and space. He refuses to see language as a stable object constitutive of individual thinking but instead stresses that “[l]anguage has . . . to be seen as a persistent kind of creation and re-creation; a dynamic presence and a constant regenerative process” (31). He further opposes “the familiar bourgeois categories in which an abstract separation and
distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ have become so habitual that they are taken as ‘natural’ starting points” (28). Williams sees language as ‘a practical consciousness’, as ‘active and social’, and expands on his idea using Volosinov, believed to be the pen-name of Bakhtin, to underline the dialectical relationship between the writer and the social:
What we have, rather, is a grasping of this reality through language, which as practical consciousness is saturated by and saturates all social activity,
including productive activity. And, since this grasping is social and continuous . . . it occurs within an active and changing society. . . . language speaks. Or to put it more directly, language is the articulation of this active and changing experience; a dynamic and articulated social presence in the world. (Volosinov quoted, Williams 37-38)
Williams goes on to argue that language is irrevocably linked to society and individual speech and engages the two in a dialectical relationship. For Williams, language is the articulation of “practical consciousness” aligned with society (37). The poet, in our case Bukowski “screaming from [his] cage” (Miles 164), speaks for society, by giving voice to his taste of the world. Miles describes the way Bukowski articulates this experience contingent on and reflecting society and further quotes Chandler, who comments on the American language, to manifest Bukowski’s consciousness and writing skills:
It is a style fraught with danger; as Raymond Chandler, one of its greatest practitioners put it: ‘American is an ill-at-ease language, without manner or self control. It has too great a fondness for the faux naïf, by which I mean the use of a style such as might be spoken by a very limited sort of mind. In the hands of a genius like Hemingway this may be effective . . .When not used by a genius it is as flat as a Rotarian speech.’
In his ten years of study, Bukowski had internalised the shape and rhythm of American language, and now it came pouring out of him, almost effortlessly. ‘Once I sit there, there is no planning, there’s no effort, there’s no
labour. It’s almost like the typer does it by itself. You get in a kind of trancelike state . . . [the words] come out sometimes like blood, sometimes like wine.’ (103)
Bukowski’s ecstatic state and style are mirrored in his writing, especially in his poetry and prose, thus creating a form of art, often bearing a political critique of society thus alarming its subjects through the process of reading. Williams - in his chapter on “Structures of Feeling” - calls for “active ‘readings’ ”, for “the making of art is never itself in the past tense. It is always a formative process, within a specific present” (129). Williams observes that:
[N]o generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. The difference can be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications, but these do not exhaust it. What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and the description that often fits the change best is the literary term 'style'. It is a general change, rather than a set of deliberate choices, yet choices can be deduced from it, as well as effects.” (131)
Consequently, Bukowski’s style is shaped within a social environment of a modern techno-capitalist world and is enunciated through a straightforward language often echoing everyday speech and colloquial (American) expression. Bukowski does not discard the importance of style, which underscores the poet’s uniqueness. Miles quotes Bukowski who admits that “‘[a] good style is important. Style is what makes you different from the run’” (223).
Charles Bukowski shuffles the images and ideas in his authorial pouch and lays the letters, words, or signs as Williams would argue, in the lines of a board he controls.
Bukowski wants his message to be simple, legible and decipherable by everybody. He speaks the language of a generation struggling in a capitalist world which enforces its neoliberal ideology on its subjects, “the defeated, the demented and the damned” as Adam Kirsch observes in his article “Smashed: The pulp poetry of Charles Bukowski” (The New Yorker 1). Bukowski’s poetry describes these subjects that are trapped in a suffocating modernity, controlled and manipulated by invisible means and subliminal ideology; thus, shedding light to the dark creases of modern society though the
observations of his wanderings around the city as the flâneur artist.
Miles identifies Bukowski with the flâneur and describes how Bukowski claims to give form to his own unconscious through his writing by seeing himself as a
photographer recording humanity:
I’m not so much a thinker as I am a photographer . . . I have nothing to prove or solve. I find that just photographing is very interesting. Especially if it’s people you see and then you write it down; it can get a little bit holy here, but there’s a message or sense of direction after you’ve written it down. It says something which you didn’t even quite know. So that works better for me. (208-209) Bukowski admits that his main interest lies in the realm of everyday banality, the negligible space that defines subjects’ existence and is reflected in his poetry. Miles acknowledges the limited themes in Bukowskis writing and yet their universality:
Rarely . . . has a writer focused as intensely on such a small body of experience as Bukowski: the daily grind in the factory or warehouse, the racetrack, bars and bar fights, tempestuous relationships with women, drinking. There are no memorable characters other than himself, the setting is almost always Los
Angeles, the action more or less predictable. It is a restricted pallet, but the formula is infinitely variable. (204)
Bukowski arranges the colors and shades on his authorial pallet and draws with his brush strokes, an obscure and somber canvas of modernity, depicting subjects in an alienated and hostile society constantly accentuated as modernity and late industrial capitalism progress. A pallet in the hands of an artist, the flâneur ‘painter’, who, while orbiting around the kernel of the socially acceptable, is at the same time monitoring and depicting the subjects’ strolling in the vortex of the center.
Bukowski’s poetry and reception can only be understood through Williams definition of writing, its function and significance (as we will see in the next sections):
Writing is so central a material social art that it has of course been used, and continues to be used, in all these forms and intentions. What we find is a true continuum, corresponding to the at once ordinary and extraordinary process of human creativity and self-creation in all its modes and means. And we have then to reach beyond the specialized theories and procedures which divide the continuum. Writing is always communication but it cannot always be reduced to simple communication: the passing of messages between known persons. Writing is always in some sense self-composition and social composition, but it cannot always be reduced to its precipitate in personality or ideology, and even where it is so reduced it has still to be seen as active. . . . Writing is often a new articulation and in effect a new formation, extending beyond its own modes. . . . [enfolding] the social in one of its most distinctive, durable, and total forms.
Creative practice is thus of many kinds. It is already, and actively, our practical consciousness. When it becomes struggle-the active struggle for new consciousness . . . . it can take many forms. (211-212)
Bukowski conveys his consciousness in a colloquial form and style, yet, as he claims, his writing is neither complex or sophisticated nor social or political. However, Howard Sounes reads one of Bukowski’s poems titled “something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks, and you . . .”, as “a polemic against capitalism, although Bukowski maintained he was not a political writer. ‘I am not a man who looks for solutions in God or politics,’ he said” (72). Sounes also remarks:
The refusal to conform to the convention of honest work for honest pay, to take a subservient position in society because that is the capitalist order, is close to Orwell’s socialist ideas. . . . In Bukowski’s case, the rejection of society went further and was almost anarchistic, although such terminology would have stuck in his throat. ‘My writing has no meaning,’ Bukowski said,
disingenuously.’ ‘It has no moral aspect, it has no social aspect.’ (146-147) Even though Bukowski denies any deliberate sociopolitical critique of his society and the capitalist economic system, his poetry (along with his subjectivity) reveals the opposite. Bukowski’s opinion about the death of President Kennedy, as recorded in Barry Milles biography, discloses his sense and sensibility, his mentality and
perception:
I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead. Cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with
television souls and high school ideals . . . How can I be over concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown down into the masher.(180)
Bukowski’s poetry comments on modernity, social formations-such as the media and education- and ideological manipulation thus articulating the Althusserian society model. In his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation), Louis Althusser describes how a social formation survives relying on Repressive State apparatuses (RSAs), such as the police or the army, and on
Ideological State apparatuses (ISAs). The ISAs are conceived as “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (1489) that support the dominant values in a society, by ensuring “subjection to the ruling ideology” (1485). Among the variety of ISAs, the most influential and effective are: the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘Schools’) and the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.) (1489). According to Althusser, the RSAs and ISAs function both by repression and by ideology, an ideology which “interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (1504), the ideology of the “ruling class” (1491).
Subjects’ conduct, needs and desires, are subtly designed and dictated to sustain a specific social balance and impose an ideology, which shifts according to economic games always favoring those bearing the capital. This subconscious play stretches like a spider web and has penetrated all spheres of life in the shape of the State Apparatuses Althusser describes. Still, he also reveals that “the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there [in the
ISAs], either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle” (1491). According to Althusser “the class struggle . . . is rooted . . . in the relations of production, which are relations of exploitation and constitute the base for class relations” (Althusser’s note 1491).
Althusser’s theory is mirrored and highlighted in Bukowski’s poetry, which bears a sociopolitical dimension and challenges subjects’ perception of their current living conditions. His poetry has the power of alarming subjects’ consciousness by hailing reconsideration of their life quality, and summoning a wind of change. This is one of the many reasons why Bukowski’s poetry is worth a closer observation and analysis and could contribute to the illumination of subjects locked in the darkness of a frantic society as we will see in the next section.
II. CONFESSIONS OF A MAN INSANE ENOUGH TO LIVE WITH BEASTS2 Bukowski: Creative and Life Writing in a Modern World
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about that--
it had kept them going when all seemed
truly hopeless.
"question and answer" (1-11) from The Last Night of the Earth Poems (p. 172)
When we look at Bukowski’s poetry we understand that writing for him was a way of living or, better a way of surviving. According to Miles, Bukowski once wrote: “‘a good book/ can make an almost/ impossible/ existence, / liveable’” (40). Indeed books and writing were the means Bukowski chose to deal with the physical and psychological abuse by his father during his childhood, and a kind of escape from a later turbulent life. He found shelter in the words and worlds of renowned authors and poets. For him, writing was an outlet for he could articulate his daily thoughts,
experiences and observations on the white pages of his typewriter. Sounes recalls: “[i]nfluenced by reading the work of poets including Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, he decided that ‘poetry is the sweetest, bangingest way’ to express what he wanted to say” (26).
Bukowski embraced poetry and found in it a way of expression and communication with the rest of the world, enunciated through a unique voice, minimal style and a simple form and language. A language, one could argue that in Williams’s words, is:
[a]t once individual and social – as historically and socially constituting. What we can then define is a dialectical process: the changing practical consciousness
of human beings, in which both the evolutionary and the historical processes can be given full weight, but also within which they can be distinguished, in the complex variations of actual language use [sic]. (43-44)
Bukowski’s work mirrors this dialectical process through his writing, which exposes a specific social dimension and has a deep social impact on his audience. It is a work that inspires both admiration and disgust, exactly because Bukowski’s confessions shed light to a reality most subjects choose to ignore due to its grotesqueness.
II.a. The Flâneur
Subjectivity, Inspiration and Creative Process
they don't make it
the beautiful die in flame –
suicide pills, rat poison, rope what – ever. . .
they rip their arms off,
throw themselves out of windows, they pull their eyes out of the sockets, reject love
reject hate reject, reject.
the beautiful can't endure, they are butterflies
they are doves they are sparrows, they don't make it.
one tall shot of flame
while the old men play checkers in the park one flame, one good flame
while the old men play checkers in the park in the sun.
the beautiful are found in the edge of a room crumpled into spiders and needles and silence and we can never understand why they
left, they were so beautiful.
they don't make it, the beautiful die young
and leave the ugly to their ugly lives.
as the old men play checkers in the sun in the park.
“what’s the use of a title?” from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (p.183)
Bukowski constructs an anti-conformist identity, over and against the masses, still seeking for a way to express and reach to the other, most often the exclusionary other, the stray dog in the eyes of society. Bukowski’s subject matter orbits around the rats of society, those excluded and despised; including himself. Sounes quotes Carl Weissner and reveals that “[i]t was his attitude: not wanting to belong, and largely writing about himself and things he had gone through. . . . In fact, a lot of people thought he was a proletarian writer’” (174). Yet, Bukowski claimed he was not a political writer and despised classifications.
Bukowski stubbornly resists integrating himself in any kind of category. Sounes observes that “[i]t is a philosophy of non-participation that runs through Bukowski’s work and is one of the reasons he appeals to the young and disaffected” (221). A few pages earlier he also states that: “Bukowski liked to mock the counter-culture, having little time for drugs, pop, music or radical politics” (83). Referring to Bukowski’s The Genius of the Crowd, Sounes also observes that “although he was against many of the conventions of society he was not for the counter-culture either” (84). Miles reports that Bukowski “felt ambivalent about being placed alongside the Beats” (124), again claiming a ‘different’ authorial subjectivity and a non-conformist character. Bukowski refused to conform or belong, bearing instead the image of a loner. Miles explains that
“[t]he loner image is an American archetype” (61), and further describes Bukowski and his status as the flâneur poet, to comment on his inspiration through observation and the depiction of his subject matter in his poetry:
He may not have known the word but Bukowski was the epitome of the French flâneur: the solidary observer, invariably male, originally strolling about Paris, though by definition he could occupy any urban space. Encyclopédie Larousse defines him as a fritterer away of time, a loiterer. The idea of the flâneur has been written about most extensively by philosophers Walter Benjamin, who described the lone individual in the crowd, his leisurely strolling, his aimless wandering, most notably his alienation or detachment.(76)
Bukowski’s inspiration is contingent on social interaction and communication. He admits that he is the observer and recorder of his own life and experiences. But this life and experiences belong to a social domain, and derive from interaction with, and observation of other subjects, within a modern social context. Bukowski constructs and establishes a unique authorial identity, bearing the qualities of the flâneur artist and philosopher. Miles reports:
The flâneur is the solidary walker as a detective, a philosophical stroller, an urban reporter. In ‘59 Cents a Pound’ Bukowski wrote: ‘I like to prowl ordinary places/and taste the people -/ from a distance, / I don’t want them too near.’ If they got too close, that was when attrition started. He liked to view them in supermarkets, laundromats and cafes, on street corners, at bus stops, hot dog strands and drug stores. Then he could look at their bodies and faces and their clothing and observe the way they held themselves or walked or completed an
action. He compared himself to an X-ray machine. He liked to see them on view like that. He felt sorry for them all, including himself, and glad for them all ‘caught alive together’, awkwardly living their lives. (76)
Bukowski insists on being an outsider and a loner, while he is wandering and
travelling incognito in a social terrain which he cannot ignore or resist, and provides the inspiration for his writing. He writes from experience without pretense and with no effort to beautify his speech, or include romantic themes, as prescribed by the literary ‘rules’. He seems to discard conventional notions of the dominant literary and social conceptions, and instead shifts his interest to the debris of modernity, which rejects the subjects it cannot digest.
Yet, writing for Bukowski, was also a way of survival. Bukowski admits: “‘I have to keep living in order to write . . . I have to get burnt in order to write at all, to
intermingle. And that means women, jails, various strange spots, you know, whatever happens. I have to taste it before I can write. I can’t lose contact. Just memory alone I can’t work on’” (Miles 200). Miles also states that: “[h]e knew that writers needed first-hand experience to draw on, and this restless, seemingly random, movement from city to city served no other purpose than to place him in situations where things might happen; . . . He was consciously accumulating material: stories, images, pictures of cities and people” (66).He further reveals that another reason for Bukowski’s loitering and recording of his respective surroundings, was a means of fighting his suicidal tendencies:
One way to fight the suicidal impulse was to drive: when the thought of suicide would suddenly surface he would drive for several hours, choosing strange
streets in unfamiliar neighbourhoods, driving up and down, at times slowing down carefully whenever children were playing on the street. He would find a coffee shop, park, enter and sit drinking coffee, reading the newspaper,
listening to the staff and customers exchanging the usual dull banalities of everyday life. He would return to his car and start driving again: ‘and at once/everything will lift.’ This is also Bukowski as the flâneur; the distant, removed observer, seeing, reporting, not just other people, but watching himself. (166)
Bukowski conducts an examination of the self and society, and thus becomes its representative through his poetry; which he offers back to the crowd. According to Miles “Hank is the protagonist in virtually all of his writing, he shapes his experiences into a text, his thought and actions modified for clarity so that the chaos becomes order” (103). Bukowski reflects on and gives form to his conscious in his poems, which narrate a social experience. On this basis, Williams’ concept of language as a
dialectical process between society and the author is more than evident in Bukowski’s writing driven by his sensitivity and acute descriptions of his surroundings as a flâneur artist. Bukowski’s flânerie, though at first glance aimless, is not idle. His experiences feed him and his writing bears a universal inclusiveness as Miles observes:
Hank’s withdrawal, his dislike of his fellow humans, his three-day-four-night bed marathons parallel the bedroom patrol of the greatest of indoor flâneurs, Marcel Proust. Part of the definition of flânerie is that it produces little but the flâneur accumulates a great deal. Hank’s ten-year drunk accumulated the raw material for his subsequent career as a writer. Though not working from a
cork-lined room, his position on the end barstool enabled him to join in or not, to observe or take center stage as a raconteur or bar brawler; he was in control, he was a barfly and yet he was far removed from that community of regular
drinkers who were to supply so much of the material for his work. Baudelaire wrote, ‘he [the flâneur] makes it his business to…distil the eternal from
transitory.’ That was the great genius of Charles Bukowski. (76-77)
Bukowski’s crowd monitoring as a barfly becomes the subject matter of the flâneur artist, who strips random moments and incidents off their ephemerality, and turns them into lasting experiences and facts. Bukowski pursued such moments for he realized their importance in his work:
He writes that writers set themselves up to be writers by doing the instinctive things which feed both them and their work. Things that protect against death in life. These things are different for every one and they continually change. For Hank it meant alcoholism, drinking to the point of madness so that the
drunkenness shook him violently out of his shell, provided that jolt needed to create life. It sharpened his words, gave them an edge. Another way of receiving that necessary jolt was to put himself into dangerous situations: bar fights, stormy relationships with women, driving dangerously, almost starving to death, the thrill of gambling. For many decades all of it fed the word, his word. (Miles 261)
Bukowski is not afraid to expose himself and draw a portrait of self-destruction. The ostensibly meaningless wandering around the city, his bar crawling, rampant alcohol abuse; along with his marginal jobs, his interactions and sexual intercourses with
women; are all materialized in his poetry. His quest and conquest of extreme experiences, takes real substance in his poems, which describe a modern society, wherein subjects desperately seek for an outlet. Bukowski himself, found this outlet in the races:
The crowd put Bukowski off at first; so many people and all apparently mindless, drunk, yelling like maniacs. Then he began to get interested in the psychology of gambling and factored the stupidity of the crowd into a system of laying bets. . . .
. . . – a crescendo of excitement – then a collective sigh of disbelief, of being gypped, because the crowd never won. But Bukowski found he held a winning ticket and, like many people trapped in low-paid work, he came to see racing as a way of getting free from everything that oppressed him. . . . ‘The track does help in certain ways – I see the faces of greed, the hamburger faces; I see the faces in early dream and I see the faces later when the same nightmare returns. You cannot see this too often. It is a mechanic of life.’ (Sounes 34) The races were for Bukowski a simulation of the real world and its people, who seek a relief from their daily frantic and ‘mechanic’ lives. In the races, Bukowski sees the same bruised faces and bodies as those in the streets. Yet, what frustrates him, is not their physical pains or sensitivities, but instead, their empty lives and soulless
existence. Bukowski draws the picture of shadows strolling on a social chessboard slowly pushing them into the void. Miles, commenting on his racetrack dashes, remarks that this was his way of investigating humanity:
The racetrack became his beat, his personal space. It was here he really became a flâneur, the observer, the man of the crowd as opposed to the man in the crowd: ‘the secret spectator of the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city.’ As Keith Tester wrote in The Flâneur: ‘Flânerie can, after Baudelaire, be
understood as the activity of the sovereign spectator going about the city in order to find the things which will occupy his gaze and thus complete his otherwise dissatisfied existence; replace the sense of bereavement with a sense of life.’ The flâneur needs the city and its crowds, yet he remains aloof from both. Hank was dissatisfied unless he visited the track regularly, he felt
incomplete, he needed to watch the world go by. He told Jon Webb: ‘Nothing is quite real to me. Streetcars. Bombs. Bugs. Women. Lightglobes. Areas of grass. All unreal. I am outside.’ He investigates traces of human activity, like a
detective story. He is like Christopher Isherwood: ‘I am a camera, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ (Miles 116)
Bukowski is the flâneur photographer, on the side of the common people; he is a common person, giving voice to the lower layers of society, by exposing the
photographic film in his camera lens, on the pages of his typewriter. Miles observes that “[h]e took everyday events, no matter how trivial, and gave them a certain universality” (125). Yet, not all things are of interest to Bukowski:
There were many things that did not interest Hank, and he listed them all in a hilarious passage in Shakespeare Didn’t Do This. ‘That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all.’ Among the things which were of no interest to him were: ‘social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos,
picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games, going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children’s plays, adult plays… I am not
interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Years, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of art’. He said he wrote about what was left over: ‘a stray dog walking down the street, . . . life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that.’ (Miles 228)
Bukowski is untouched by the interests of the majority (of people), many of which are prescribed by a specific ideology as introduced by Althusser. He says he is interested in those underground and often disturbed human beings -most probably just to
provoke- and the decadent social realities, such us street or factory conditions and life, which bring subjects to their mental and moral decay.
Bukowski declares he writes about modern life and its people. Still, he does not exclude himself from the modernity he eloquently describes, for he himself leads a suicidal life, “slowly killing himself with drink, though, as he saw it, it was someone else’s fault: ‘They beat you down with their factories, their booze, their women, until you are no longer any use to them or yourself [sic]’”(Miles 146). Bukowski’s statement denotes Althusserian manifestations of power structures, through its subtle comments on contemporary and modern circumstances.
Bukowski projects a decadent persona and a caricature of subjects under the reign of capitalism, which uses its “ideological apparatuses” to secure “the
enervate, mislead and manipulate the crowd. Bukowski deals with the concept of the “reproduction of labour power” (Althusser 1484) and the theme of the worker.
As, seen so far, Bukowski’s counter-cultural subjectivity defines his authorial identity; his words are like flaming arrows aiming at the core of power structures and vested interests. Bukowski’s flânerie becomes the basic source of inspiration for his writing. His themes derive from his observations and personal experiences within his social network and working environment as we will now see.
II.b. The Factotum
Industrialism, Capitalism and Labour Conditions
sometimes you’ve got to kill 4or 5 thousand men before you somehow get to believe that the sparrow is immortal, money is piss and that you have been wasting your time.
“Man in the Sun” (23-28) from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (p.85)
The labour motif is one of the most prominent in Bukowski’s poetry. Bukowski is on the side of the worker and his themes include images of everyday life and
common people. “His world view was shaped by the problems of everyday life, as a postal clerk trying to make the rent” (86); Sounes remarks, and further quotes Russel
Harrison, who “in his critical study of Bukowski, Against the American Dream, . . . writes: ‘No contemporary American novelist has treated work as extensively or intensively as Bukowski . . . Indeed Bukowski’s outstanding achievement is his depiction of work, most notably in Post Office’” (105).
Miles reveals Bukowski’s insight through a conversation with Sean Penn, where “he confirmed: ‘What I’ve tried to do . . . is bring in the factory workers aspect of life . . . the screaming wife when he [the worker] comes home from work. The basic realities of the everyman existence . . . something in the poetry of the centuries’” (209). A few pages earlier, Miles also remarks that: “[d]espite the diatribes about being a
misanthrope, about hating humanity, Bukowski had a tremendous empathy for the plight of working people. He sympathised with and cherished them, using terms which in Europe would be regarded as left wing” (94):
my dear, I say. There are men out there now picking tomatoes, lettuce, even cotton,
there are men and women dying under the sun, there are men and women dying in factories for nothing, a pittance . . .
I can hear the sound of human lives being ripped to pieces . . .
you don’t know how lucky we are . . . (18-26)
Miles quotes part of Bukowski’s “the sound of human lives” (here including two more lines), which describes the subject worker “picking tomatoes, lettuce, even cotton,” (19) and “dying in factories/ for nothing, a pittance” (21-22); thus commenting on the
(still) existing harsh labour conditions in the industry market. Bukowski targets labour power and its reproduction (Althusser 1484), which “rip[s] [human lives] to pieces” (23-24) through the “reproduction of the relations of productions” (Althusser 1491), secured by the “state apparatuses” (1492).
Bukowski shows a genuine interest towards workers and the subjects trapped in the means of production, which favor the capital and enslave their lives. Bukowski was a factotum, and thus has firsthand experience of what he describes:
At each of these jobs he entered into someone else’s world; the workers had often been there for some time, and most saw themselves as staying there for the rest of their working life. Hank observed the menial jobs, the petty world of bickering, of officious managers and mean foremen, of jealousies and feuds, of meticulously observed precedent and job descriptions. He saw it all and
remembered it. He could never have faced the foremen ‘with their little rodent eyes’, were it not for drink. He despaired of his fellow workers with their group insurance and holiday plans: ‘the actual/human slavery/of men who
didn’t/know/that they were/slaves’. He dreamed all day about getting home, stretching out on the bed, unscrewing the cap of the bottle and taking his first long swig. (Miles 70)
As Sounes observes “he could write about ‘the real world’ of rooming houses, factory jobs and bars” (20); in jobs he found the material for poems such as “‘Sparks’ which is about working for The Sunbeam Lighting Company: after ten hours/ of heavy labor . . .” (31). In other poems, Bukowski describes the supervisors’ totalitarian attitude and
imperative orders during never-ending jobs that leave scars on the workers. Miles also reports that:
His poetry describes the physical effects on his fellow workers: people who got up to take a break and found they couldn’t walk anymore or who suddenly developed speech defects or were shaken by tremors or rapid blinking of their eye. They reacted by coming to work on drugs or drunk- as in Hank’s case – or both. Nervous breakdowns occurred, people went to bed so tired that they set themselves on fire by dropping burning cigarettes on the mattress, and there were accidental shootings. (131)
Bukowski sketches the bruised bodies and scarred souls, whose suffering leads to mental breakdowns, exhaustion, depression and lunacy. He describes how healthy people become drug and/or alcohol addicted; how they become dependent on medication, such as sedatives and tranquilizers; how labour conditions cause the physical and mental deterioration of labour-subjects. In “the workers”, one of the poems written by Bukowski concerning labour, he describes people “wrinkled and imbecile” (14), who “. . . are chained to return/ by chains they would not/ break” (24-26); whose “. . . nerves revolt/ and cause trembling,” (54-55); he says:
they laugh continually even when
a board falls down and destroys a face or distorts a
These are “. . . the workers/ without faces” (88-89) and “the heads without eyes –” (92); and “sometimes one dies/ or goes mad” (75-76). Bukowski’s sensitivity towards
subjects is based on real experiences. He is an insider, in the sense that he has been one of the workers he describes and bears the bruises of labour and the traumas of the psychological abuse of the supervisors. Miles reports that “[h]e knew the harsh reality of the unregulated labour market and the reciprocal harshness that this produced in its victims: the hard case, the domestic violence, the bar-room brawling, the
wisecracks and cold-fish unemotional attitudes of the period as expressed in the hard-boiled fiction that the era produced” (47). He meticulously records the consequences of the suffocating jobs on the subjects, thus critiquing the gears of capitalism and revealing the devastation of the lower classes. Sounes reports that:
[S]ome of the poems in Crucifix in a Deathhand, and later work like Factotum, show an interest in the problems of the urban under class. ‘What I’ve tried to do, if you’ll pardon me, is bring in the factory – workers aspect of life,’ he [Bukowski] said. ‘The screaming wife when he comes home from work. The basic realities of the everyman existence . . . something seldom mentioned in the poetry of the centuries. . . . ’ He achieved his goal in ‘something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you . . .’ without political posturing. (72-73)
In the poem Sounes refers to, the speaker talks of “torn butterflies”( 3), “Cadillac souls”( 7) and “melting faces” (10); “men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs” (77-78); “people in wax museums frozen into their best sterility”( 110-111); says it’s “no wonder sometimes the women cry, no wonder the mules don’t want to go up the hill”
(118-120). The poet describes men succumbed to materialism, trapped in “slow days” (38) and “new politics” (93), corrupted to the core by modernity, oblivious of history and devoid of feelings and emotions. The subject stands numb and languid, watching the frantic film of modern reality revealing its muck and rot.
Bukowski writes from the bottom of society and is not attached to
consumption. Though he eventually fulfills the ‘American dream’, by obtaining a house and becoming successful at a late age, he still remains faithful to a decadent and suicidal attitude towards life, through his excessive alcohol abuse, random sexual adventures and an addiction to gambling (horse-racing). Sounes records:
Bukowski did not attempt to disguise the fact that he had bought a house and a BMW, removing himself from the low –life world he had always written about, but used these symbols of his newfound wealth to comic effect. In the poem, ‘the secret of my endurance’, he wrote that he still received mail from men with terrible jobs and women trouble, men like he had been. (191)
Just a few lines before and after this quote, Sounes subtly comments on social preconceptions and the change of people’s attitude towards Bukowski when he
became financially secure and comfortable. This, however, didn’t change him but gave him more freedom of expression and new subject matter to ridicule. Miles recalls Bukowski’s words:
At the worst of times, in the worst of cities, if I could have a small room, if I could close the door of that small room and be alone in it with the old dresser, the bed, the torn window shade, I would begin to fill with something good; the unmolested tone of the singular self. I had no problems with myself, it was
those places out there, those faces out there, the wasted, ruined lives-people settling for the cheapest and easiest way out. Between church and state, the family structure; between our educational and entertainment systems, between the eight hour job and the credit system, they were burned alive. Cloning the door to a small room or sitting in a bar night and day was my way of saying no to all that. (61)
Bukowski’s statement along with many of his poems echo Luis Althusser’s theory of the social formation, the ideological control of subjects and their interpellation (1502). Bukowski attacks the social institutions, which control subjects through subliminal ideology and sustain a socio-economical system that squashes those unprivileged.
Bukowski’s poetry slowly unfolds the skein of Althusser’s theory. His poems are the knitting yarn weaving a representation of the texture of modernity, whereon the concept of the ideological manipulation and interpellation of subjects through “the (Repressive) State Apparatuse, [and] the Ideological State Apparatuses” (1492) – as described by Athusser- is embroidered. Bukowski’s words are the needles and pins on the flesh of the class(es) in power and their ideological constructions, which squeeze the masses. Bukowski gives no thimbles, but instead, pierces the core of the dominant ideology, thus straining and exposing its hollowness through, as we will now see, his description and depiction of the modern city and its subjects.
II.c. The Barlfy
Modernity, City, Subjects and Society
history –
the most memorable concern of mankind is the guts it takes to face the sunlight again
“nerves” (12-16) from Burning in Water Drowning in Flame (p.192)
Bukowski is one of the “few writers of literature [who] have been so closely associated with, or so lovingly described the city, a place often dismissed as ugly, dangerous and culturally desolate”(Sounes 9). He describes the city, mostly the American city, which however has amazing similarities to any modern or
cosmopolitan city around the globe. In “vegas” he says: “and I went down to live with the rats/ but the lights were too bright” (6-7). The city of the capitalist ‘aurora’ is too intense for Bukowski’s idiosyncrasy, which cannot bear its blinding colors. He records everything he observes: “[m]odern Los Angeles: crime-ridden, divided by racial
conflict and economic inequality, choked with pollution, its citizens ‘slapped silly’ by heat waves, frustrated to the point of violence by traffic congestion, and all to pay taxes to a government drowning in debt” (Sounes 226).He draws the picture of the city and its subjects who are struggling to survive.
Sounes recalls Bukowski’s description of Hollywood and Los Angeles: “he subverts the popular perception of Los Angeles as a place of endless sunshine, just as he subverted the image of Hollywood as being glamorous” (88) , and later: “Bukowski found himself increasingly embroiled in the machinations of the movie business, for which he had intense distrust” (192).Still, despite his loathing, he implicitly uses the cinematic vehicle to disseminate his observations of society and its decadent state.
In his poem “the sunday artist”, he reveals that modernity among others
shutters his moments of leisure and invades his conscience, even when he is painting: Cadillacs have crawled my walls like roaches,
goldfish whirl my bowl, hand-tamed tigers yes, I have been painting these Sundays-
the grey mill, the new rebel; it’s terrible really: (21-24)
Bukowski cannot find peace in the city of Cadillacs and greyness. The noisy city and its frenzied subjects disturb his composure and siege his composition. And though
modernity invades his personal space: “Cadillacs have crawled my walls like roaches/ . . . hand-tamed tigers” (21-22), Bukowski also sees an ambiguous “new rebel” (24) thus – if read in an optimistic spirit – insinuating resistance, which however, is of unknown and even obscure outcome as indicated in the following lines which leave little room for an ‘escape’ from modernity: “it’s terrible really” (24).
In “the house” he returns to the theme of workers and labour, taking it a step further by stretching it and giving it a new dimension, while reflecting on subjects’ decline, emanated by modernity:
and still the house is not done and in the morning the men will be back
walking around on the house with their hammers,
and it seems people should not build houses anymore,
it seems people should not get married anymore,
it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms
on second floors
under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do,
and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built; (27-44)
As already seen in “something for the touts, the Nuns, the grocery clerks, and you . . .” this poem too, depicts exhausted subjects, tangled in conventions and obligations. Yet, one can infer from the context that both animate and inanimate matter refuse
reproduction, again implying either resistance or, abandonment. Althusser would argue that they are trapped in a prescribed body of ideas, which whips them and inserts (to take our reading a step further) individualist ideology, as seen in “the singular self”:
and all around me are the lovers, the two-headed beasts
turning to stare at the madness
of a singular self; (14-18)
Bukowski describes the insanity of egocentrism inflicted by the modern capitalist world. He insinuates an emotional cannibalism between “desperate men” (7) and “desperate women” (9), as he states in “john dillinger and le chasseur maudit” where “two hollow emptinesses [are] looking into each other” (13), caught in the iron cage of modernity:
and always the stoplights, always red, nightfire and defeat, defeat . . . scorpions, scraps, fardels:
x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,
. . .
a malversation: today I walked in the sun and the streets of this city : seeing nothing, learning nothing, being nothing, and coming back to my room
I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;
she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires: telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,
and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire or the smiling of wire
and I closed my door (at last) (22-25, 42-51)
A philosophy of nothingness, triviality and nihility, pervades Bukowski’s lines, which talk of horrid people and an even more horrifying death. Bukowski’s describes
materialism and consumption that whirl like an iron rope around their necks reminding them of their hollow existence, as tackled in “the body”:
I have been hanging here headless for so long
that the body has forgotten why
or where or when it happened (1-8)
Bodies are bruised and minds are lost; oblivious of the moment oblivion occurred. Yet, Bukowski understands the subjects’ exasperation, disorientation and deceit, as seen in “the intellectual”, where he talks of apathy while at the same time, subtly comments on the institution of marriage and its conventionality:
it’s like being married: you accept
everything as if
it hadn’t happened. (38-42)
For Bukowski the institution of marriage is a social convention leading subjects to impassiveness and indifference, because “love is a piece of paper torn to bits” as he states in the same titled poem. Subjects are incapable of emotions, like empathy and affection towards the each other, as he declares in “nerves”:
love begins at the meeting of two
strangers. Love for the world is impossible. I’d rather stay in bed and sleep. (17-21)
Bukowski prefers the softness and warmth of his mattress and covers, instead of the cruelty and cold of the world outside. The world of “madmen in stone houses/without doors,” (2-3), as he remarks in “sway with me”. A world filled with “decay, and you've got to be strong in the shadows/ to ignore it, to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself” (42-43), as he observes in “crucifix in a deathhand”. In the same poem he states:
this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided, held like a crucifix in a deathhand,
this land bought, resold, bought again and sold again, the wars long over,
. . . near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms listening to glazed recordings
and I think too of old men sick of music
sick of everything, and death like suicide (10-13, 19-22)
People are sick and tired of their lives, trying to fill in their gaps through consumption driven by the materialist ideology of capitalism, which traps them in a vicious circle of reproduction of the relations of production and consumerism. In “dreamlessly”, the
flâneurpoet states:
I see people in department stores and supermarkets
walking down the aisles buying things
and I can see by the way their clothing fits them and by the way they walk and by their faces and their eyes that they care for nothing and that nothing cares for them.
I can see a hundred people a day who have given up
entirely.
if I go to a racetrack or a sporting event I can see thousands that feel for nothing no one
and get no feeling back.
everywhere I see those who crave nothing but
food, shelter, and
on that, dreamlessly. . . . they feel no terror at not loving or at not being loved
so many many many of my fellow
creatures (21-46, 66-75)
Yet, why are these subjects like the living dead? Going back to Althusser, Bukowski provides the reasons for their condition in a variety of poems such as “education”, and “class” wherein he observes that “these boys have got class/ they ought to make kings” (1-2), thus targeting the educational state apparatus (1489). In “the way” he observes that subjects are “educated in the dark for the dark” (1-4), while in “kiss the worms goodnight” he states that:
it is up to each of us to live in whatever way we can
as the generals, doctors, policemen warn and torture
us (29-33)
One more time, implying how subjects are caught in the tentacles of the state, such as the army; and how they are tormented and manipulated by Althusser’s “ideological apparatuses”(1488). Still, education is just one of the themes bearing Althusserian
