The Aesthetics of Degradation

The Aesthetics of Degradation

Adrian Nathan West

For Beatriz, and for my family

I would like to be able to write a tragedy in thoughts.

— Grillparzer

1

On his way home from a market around the corner from his apartment, where, in lieu of cooking for himself, he often goes on free afternoons to buy a sandwich that is a specialty there and a bottle of Gerolsteiner water, the narrator pauses to look at the display window of a video store, the TLA, where a placard advertises excess stock of DVDs for sale at cut-rate prices. He walks inside, examines and decides against the titles on offer, most of them Hollywood films from the foregoing season and maudlin documentaries, and begins browsing through the store, pausing at the new releases and especially the films from Austria and Germany, because he is considering learning the language of those countries. It feels like something less than a coincidence when, after five or seven minutes, he pushes open the spring-loaded saloon doors leading to the adult section, where rows of garishly lettered empty jewel cases are lined up on horizontal wooden rails affixed with hooks hung with aluminum-edged, round paper tags to be taken discreetly to the counter in exchange for the title of one’s choice. The narrator is indifferent to pornography in the main: it is monotonous, most of the women look, or are made to look, the same, conforming to an ideal too bare of idiosyncrasy to be arousing, and the acting — not as concerns any semblance of plot, which effectively vanished years back, despite its persistence as one of the most conspicuous clichés surrounding pornography in the public imagination — the acting rather in the sense of the attempt to persuade the viewer that erotic and not merely mercantile motives have brought the bodies together onscreen, is ordinarily dismal. Like other industries subject to faddish revivals in recent years — restaurants are another example — pornography has attracted armies of parvenus with little talent, preparation, or sensibility, lacking in scruples and spurred by greed. But a new title by Rocco Siffredi, showing a black woman on the cover, makes him stop. On the back, a man is sodomizing her. His face is not visible in the photo, so the narrator cannot see whether it is Rocco Siffredi himself or a different person who is fucking her. (In an interview the narrator will read months later, the Italian director states: in a movie like Tarzan I have to do it with black women. I don’t complain, for Tarzan lives in the jungle. If it’s necessary for the job, I will do it. But otherwise I won’t.) The narrator asks himself why, although there are hundreds of films displayed in this room with titles like Ass Worship, Up Your Ass, and Anal Trainer, it is only the thought of anal sex with a black woman, and in the violent and obsessive manner for which this filmmaker is famous, that attracts him. Though he will never know the answer to this question, or to any question about the nature of his sexual desires, with certainty — the term certainty being, so far as he can tell, a mere feeling independent of the fact of being in the right — the origins of this enticement must lie, at least in part, in the long history of the enslavement of blacks in his country of origin and those that neighbor it; in the risible magnanimity he cannot help but feel for his refusal to renounce his attraction to black women, whom many of his race steer clear of, and in the air of the transgressive that accompanies this self-indulgence; in the peculiar conception of the life of blacks as partaking at once of object, animal, and human, which has sanctioned their oppression for hundreds of years; in their persistent relegation to the poorest fringe of society, which makes them seem somehow disposable or unworthy of the generosity and consideration that still impend, in part, upon our notion of sexual conduct in its ideal form; and in the extravagant fancies whites have held concerning the sexual lives of blacks since the earliest days of colonialism. Beside this film is another one, Kelly’s Lost Movie, starring Rocco Siffredi’s ex-girlfriend, Kelly Stafford, a blonde British woman with large breasts and irregular dentition. On the back of the box, amid photos of the actress being doubly and triply penetrated by groups of men of various races, or looking like the lobe of a daisy in the center of a circle of radiating dicks, is the melancholy phrase, There will never be another Kelly. She has died early, the narrator presumes, like many members of her profession, and he is downcast as he looks at the other boxes of films she appeared in, as if, by scrutinizing the lewd photos that appear there, he might arrive at some clearer sense of the weight of the words There will never be another Kelly and the nature of the person they refer to, who once was and who now no longer exists. How often it has been said, even if wrongly, that life only acquires its definitive form in death.

Irreversibility means, quite simply, the obligation to a single course and sense.

What is the definitive form of this woman’s life?, the narrator asks himself. And it is the desire to know whether there is such a thing as the definitive form of a person’s life, and the extent to which an examination of such relics as recordings and photographs of that person’s abuse may assist in the acquisition of such knowledge, that lies at the depths of these meditations. In one picture, she crouches inside a glass box a worker with a dolly wheels through a public square in Rome, where she will be loaded into the luggage area of a bus filled with men who will later ejaculate and piss on her, as the narrator will learn that evening when he has returned home and read an interview with her from a porn-industry gossip page. In another, she licks the hirsute asshole of a man on all fours with a lumberjack’s bristly beard; Rocco Siffredi and a tall, thin man in a yellow cyclist’s jersey and cap pull apart her buttocks and those of another woman, revealing the pinkish orifices at their center; and she lies across the domed stomach of the recently deceased Italian dwarf Oliviere Migliore, who performed in sex shows for decades at Sala Bagdad in Barcelona under the perplexing sobriquet Holly One, and squeezes the tip of his bowed penis between her lips.

The narrator turns to leave. On his walk home, where he will learn that Kelly Stafford has not died, as he imagines, but only retired temporarily, and founded a talent agency to supply actresses to the directors of pornographic films, the narrator recalls an early chapter in a self-help book he came upon after a breakdown in his twenties, in which the author, hoping to inspire readers to leave off with their idle and deleterious pastimes and live by the dictates of their hearts, enjoins them to imagine their own funeral. He lists the various hypothetical attendees: immediate and extended family, friends and coworkers, acquaintances from charitable or religious associations. Think deeply, the author said, and imagine what you would like people from each of these groups to say about you on this occasion. The highlights of these imaginary funeral orations were to provide the grounding principles for the better life the reader would pursue when the book was finished.

Considering Kelly Stafford’s possible virtues, and what her funeral guests might say about her, the narrator opens his apartment door and walks inside, sits on his couch and rests his computer in his lap. He reads that she has not died, that her work remains popular in Europe, that she would like to return to acting, preferably on the internet, where there are fewer restrictions. He listens to her praise herself and a small coterie of fellow actresses with the words hard, real, and extreme, and denigrate others who are soft or vanilla. She proclaims her willingness to swallow sperm, piss, or shit, saying, I believe as a woman you should take anything that comes from a man. When an interviewer asks about her adolescence, apparently curious whether her fixations are the result of trauma or abuse, she replies, I never had a bad experience when I was young, I was always very skilled in getting men to beat me and fuck my ass. When he inquires whether her career in porn has occasioned unforeseen frustrations, she answers, I only ever think for the day, as you never know when it’s your time. But when I had my son, I found it hard when I was in the street and people would say, Oh, that’s Kelly, she loves getting fucked in the ass, or people would yell things at me when I was with my family.

The narrator had refused to accept the author’s prescription in the self-help book. It is an error to account for the proper ends of life without explicit consideration of life’s transience, he thought. If he were asked, he would say he abjured the idea of legacy; and yet he continues to regard his life as a matter of purposes, and to ignore the incompossibility of meaning and extinction. To do otherwise is impossible, because, apodictically, we cannot apprehend our own absence, the narrator thinks. Hence we cannot imagine our own funeral. We are told to think of what others might say of us and how we would feel as we heard them, but our corpse in its coffin will hear nothing and feel nothing and will not care about what it cannot hear and cannot feel. We envision ourselves as though concealed behind a screen, basking in others’ praise or gritting our teeth at their scorn; but this is something that will never occur.

What the self-help writer invokes is a continuation of consciousness, and of the sense of pride and dishonor, but in a domain bereft of all possibility of reform. The fear induced by the thought of irreparable shame, and the warmth that fills us when we consider that our finest moments might define us eternally, are meant to impel us to a more moral way of being when this thought experiment ends, and we realize we are not dead, and our entire lives lie ahead of us; but the absolute discrepancy between present and past renders expiation proper an illusion, the narrator thinks, and I consider pride not a virtue worthy of cultivation, but rather arrogance in its muted and socially acceptable form. When the self-help writer’s funeral scenario is deprived of the remnants of Christian eschatology and the illusion of the eternal, it becomes nothing more than an arresting image to focus the reader’s attention on the persistence of recollections of pride and shame over the course of lived time. Thus, what is at issue is the integrity of inherited notions of pride and shame, our comportment in respect of them, the extent to which they are evitable and in what measure we