son and heir #2: victimhood
Aug 3 2023, past midnight. Just got back from seeing A Little Life the stage play starring a British TV actor who went to Ampleforth. In 2015 I read the book at the beach and threw it across a picnic table by an ice cream stand because Willem got hit by a truck. Not because I was so sad, but because I thought it was stupid. Actually it is a perfectly acceptable thing to happen in a book about bad things happening to the protagonist that are not his fault. In the stage play they stand there and yell, 'It's NOT YOUR FAULT!! It's NOT... YOUR... FAULT...' That is what A Little Life is about: a man, whose fault it is not, getting told it is not his fault.
I am so familiar with the conventions of this type of fantasy that after reading the book I could not understand why everyone else seemed to think it was so surprising and new. The point is not just to enjoy his suffering but to enjoy vicariously the kind of total innocence a real human being never has. Of course that innocence can only retain its purity if it is perpetually denied. If Jude ever did accept that none of it was his fault, he would suddenly be boring and perhaps a bit pathetic. A bad victim. The fundamental characteristic of a martyr is rigidity. K said he was reminded of the period of late 15th c Christian art in which the aesthetic quality declined because the focus of the audience was on the work's ability to create an affective connection to the suffering of Christ. Christ was also a person whose fault it never was.
The thing I dislike about A Little Life isn't the suffering. The suffering is fine. It is fine, actually, to enjoy when characters suffer in novels. I recently learned that there was an era of the earth's history called 'the boring billion' in which the earth was basically just bacterial sludge. It is fine when characters suffer. The thing I dislike is just that flavour of suffering, that particular logic of suffering, in which there is the protagonist who does nothing wrong ever except cut and burn himself and say he deserved to be abused, and then there are the good people who all unquestioningly adore the protagonist and tell him it isn't his fault, and then there are the bad people who hurt him. The simplicity isn't pleasurable to me. But it would be even worse if the creators tried halfheartedly to give Jude some kind of relatable flaw, a Bella Twilight clumsiness. I wonder if the most interesting thing to do with A Little Life would be to make it seem possible that perhaps Jude really was culpable for his own abuse. Then the audience would enter properly into his experience of the world and of himself. What's kind of cheap about A Little Life is that it relies on the audience to possess this pre-existing moral system which allows them to align with the narrative's Jude-lovers in recognizing that IT IS NOT HIS FAULT! NONE OF IT WAS EVER HIS FAULT! It's true that any victim can discover some formula according to which the abuse really, really, really, really was their fault, but no enlightened audience exists to maintain the reassuring certainty that it wasn't.
Actually I think A Little Life is too much of its time in this respect. I said this to K in the interval. By the way in the interval I was afraid I was going to get trampled in a liquid physics crowd crush situation because there was such a crush of people trying to get to the stalls bar. A woman behind me said, 'You must persevere.' Anyway in mid-2010s NYC at least there did seem to be this increasingly established consensus that like, abuse is bad and no means no and it wasn't your fault and men can be victims too and it's okay to go to therapy etc etc etc. So the novel's audience could be relied on to provide that part of the equation (God, wasn't the math stuff annoying? x equals x...ugh). But things were different in the past and things are different now. Now men are men again, and homosexuals are dirty again, and victims are liars and whiners again. The world of A Little Life seems so naïve.
I had the sense, watching the play, that the actors didn't believe in it, that they couldn't convince themselves the suffering really existed even in that ephemeral space of the performance. At least I did feel the suffering existed in the book. The play seemed to insist on a certain propriety -- concealment of embarrassment through the production of dignity, I think -- the lack of which is Hanya Yanagihara's greatest strength. The play never let us linger long enough in any one instance of blood, of rape, that we might really start to worry about our own morality as spectators. The social worker, the adoptive father, the actor boyfriend, stay on stage to witness the horrible things and yell: THAT WASN'T YOUR FAULT! We know. Oh my god. We know it wasn't his fault. Or do we. I mean maybe the force of the denial does threaten the possibility that the good people are wrong. Well, no, not really, because it's an extraordinarily unsubtle play. So we do know it wasn't his fault. So we know. So at least let us take a little more pleasure in the martyrdom, let us pause in front of the picture of sexy St Sebastian.
There is a single scene of technically consensual but ultimately unwilling sex, and the actors are inside this sort of bathtub-shaped sofa thing, covered completely by a blanket, except for Jude's arm poking out and clutching at the air. In some scenes there is the nudity that one has come to expect in stage plays -- why pay upwards of £100 for a theatre ticket if you're not going to see a moderately well-known TV actor's cock, the people of 2023 ask -- but when the abusive boyfriend bends Jude over a table and rapes him, or when Jude is made to fuck the abusive monk, the actors are fully clothed. The abusive psychiatrist does make Jude strip, but a sequence of repeated rapes is represented by the psychiatrist (fully clothed) pacing the perimeter of the stage and counting to ten. This is the repayment he demands for the ten days of antibiotic VD treatment he provides upon taking Jude away from the monk-pimp who has been selling him to a series of unimaginably grotesque and violent johns, including a fat man with eczema whose enormous belly hits Jude's head as Jude is giving him a blowjob. And after the psychiatrist gets bored of Jude he forces him naked out of the house in which he was being kept prisoner and chases him with his car. This is very bad and sad. We would not want to come away with the impression that the depiction of this narrative was done with anything but the most lofty intellectual and moral concerns. So the actor playing the psychiatrist chases the actor playing Jude in circles around the stage while holding a big spotlight. Also every time Jude cuts himself there is horror-movie string music, played I think live by musicians in the pit, but I was way back in the stalls and couldn't see anything but a bow coming up occasionally.
I am so thankful that when I was editing my novel Brandon's advice re: the depiction of sexual violence was to make it clearer and more explicit. It is happening, it happened, decorum will not get us out of that. My earlier, unpublished writing had been much more explicit and in writing a novel that I hoped to publish, I had the feeling I should be a bit more decorous, that I was already pushing it by writing a novel about a man who is sexually abused by his father and also has a lot of gay sex, and if the novel was to be Publishable it would have to exhibit a certain quality of Modesty which all Decent Persons are thought to possess. In fact I think the agents and editors who would have rejected it for lack of modesty would have rejected it no matter how decorously I rendered those scenes of abuse and I should have just done exactly what I wanted from the beginning. But really thank God that Brandon was there to want to publish the novel and also to give me permission to write, like, 'his hand was on his cock', or whatever. I mean Jesus Christ. We live in the world, don't we, the world where people have bodies and terrible things happen. Everyone knows that, even if they pretend not to... I want there to be a stage play and I want them to believe in it.
The most interesting character in A Little Life, I realize now, is JB, because he is the only one of the Good Ones who actually does things that are wrong. This makes him Judas. The play rushed the best moment, which was JB mocking Jude's disability: I'm Juuuude! I'm Jude St Fraaancis! The only people who might possibly defend this are like, 4chan posters, twitter users with Hitler meme profile pictures, etc, and they are not reading or seeing A Little Life. So the audience will all agree that this is bad and that he was wrong. But the horror of it is that JB is the closest thing to a real human being that exists in this narrative and he is trapped there, perpetual inferior to Jude, the adult man who despite all his suffering has never been really cruel, has never looked down on anyone, has never made fun of anyone, has never talked behind anyone's back, has never betrayed anyone's confidences, has never said or even thought that a person — other than himself — deserved a bad thing that happened to them. No wonder JB went mad. He is like the shitty boyfriend Hamlet in an Ophelia-centric retelling. Jude ascends to heaven (there is a big black box that descends onto the stage and takes him up and away) and JB stays stuck on earth, with his body, with his mistakes, with the audience's disapproval, with the knowledge that when he has suffered, it has been his fault.
