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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Passionate Destruction, Passionate Creation: Art and Anarchy in the Work of Dennis Cooper Diarmuid Hester PhD in English University of Sussex June 2015 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX DIARMUID EOIN HESTER PHD IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE CULTURE AND THOUGHT PASSIONATE DESTRUCTION, PASSIONATE CREATION: ART AND ANARCHY IN THE WORK OF DENNIS COOPER SUMMARY The subject of this thesis is the life and work of the American writer Dennis Cooper. It is the first book-length appraisal of his career, which regards his poetry, prose, and innovative employment of new media from the perspective of his avowed anarchism. Situating his work within the context of American and French literary history and traditions of anarchist thought, I identify and pursue a dialectic that recurs in his work between, on the one hand, a commitment to subjective experience and individuality and, on the other, a desire for community and communion with others. Comprising five chapters, the work is roughly chronological in organization. I begin with an examination of Cooper’s early poetry collection Idols, in order to establish the basic features of an outlook that is hospitable to anarchist thought. I next consider Cooper’s attempts at microcommunity-building in Los Angeles and show that his efforts brought together a vibrant community of young poets off the Venice Beach boardwalk in the late 1970s. Staying on the West Coast, the third chapter compares Cooper’s work with that of San Francisco New Narrativists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, in order to examine radical and reformist approaches to writing homosexuality in the wake of Gay Liberation. The penultimate chapter is devoted to Cooper’s most famous work, the five-novel series called the George Miles cycle: I uncover the intricate systems he uses to structure the cycle and ask what his experiments might mean for anarchist writing. Finally, I turn to Cooper’s largest project to date, his blog, and argue that he uses its simple apparatus to produce ideal conditions for the ephemeral appearance of an anarchist cyber-network. Acknowledgements I thank my supervisor, Dr Daniel Kane, for his support and guidance. His enthusiasm for the project right from the beginning has motivated me throughout and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to benefit from his knowledge and acumen, which he has offered without reserve. This research was carried out with the assistance of an Arts and Humanities Research Council PhD studentship, administered by the School of English at the University of Sussex. I am very much obliged to the School for granting me the opportunity to pursue this project and for generous financial assistance along the way. I thank my friends in the School of English graduate community for fostering a stimulating research environment and I am especially grateful to my friends Thomas Houlton and Laura Ellen Joyce for taking the time to read drafts of this thesis and offer their invaluable insights. For help and exceptional research support, I am sincerely indebted to the staff of the University of Sussex Library, the John W. Kluge Humanities Center at the Library of Congress, and the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dennis Cooper, whose compassion and boundless generosity are a constant source of inspiration. Thank you also to the distinguished locals of his blog, especially Paul Curran, Mark Gluth, Jonathan Mayhew, Thomas Moore, Michael Salerno, and George Wines. I thank my family: my mother and father, Doireann, Cathal, Harry, Roisín, and Helen. None of this would have been possible without your unfailing love and encouragement. Finally thank you to those whose love has drawn me from my solitude and taught me to live as variously as possible: Cary Aurand, Rob Blackburn, Jo Budd, Dr David Bramwell, Vincent Como, Mark Dishman, Siobhán Feeney, Antony Groves, Mira Mattar, George Mind, Osgar O’Neill, Michael O’Rourke, Josh Schneiderman, Marvin J. Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Watkin, Bernard Welt, and Holly Wilson. I dedicate this thesis to Samuel Nesbit. Table of Contents Introduction A punk, a queer, a monster, an anarchist 1 Chapter 1 Adolescence and Isolation: Idols 11 Rimbaud and adolescent poetics 12 Insurrectionary adolescence 18 Sadean egoism 21 Subjective isolation 25 Egoism and Idols 29 Chapter 2 A Poetics of Dissociability: Little Caesar and Beyond Baroque 34 Little Caesar and the “little” 34 The Little Caesar of L.A. poetry 41 Dennis Cooper’s young punks 45 Origins and afterlives of O’Hara’s coterie poetics 54 The one and the herd 60 Chapter 3 Anarchism, Activism, Critique: Safe and San Francisco's New Narrative 66 Safe and New Narrative 66 A New Narrative for the gay community 72 Anarcho-homo radicalism in the 1980s 78 Homocore 83 Safe from the common 87 Chapter 4 The Subject and the System: The George Miles Cycle 93 Downtown dreams 94 The George Miles Cycle 97 Structures and systems 101 Procedural anarchism 109 Frisk: the subject and the system 112 Chapter 5 Networking the Cyber-Social: The Sluts and Dennis Cooper's blog 116 The Sluts: void and multitude 117 What is a network? 121 Dennis Cooper’s a blog 126 Commenting and community 130 Dennis Cooper’s becoming-idol 134 Hotel Cooper 138 Solitude and the swarm 144 Coda Encoded: The Marbled Swarm: A Novel 147 Decoding The Marbled Swarm 148 Encoding queer desire 1930 – 1970 152 Anarchist artifice from 1901 157 Works Cited 161 1 Introduction A punk, a queer, a monster, an anarchist “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” (Mikhail Bakunin)1 This thesis centres on a career retrospective of the controversial and critically acclaimed writer Dennis Cooper, situating his work within American and French literary traditions and regarding his oeuvre from the standpoint of his avowed anarchism. I examine the way he perceives the relationship between the individual and society and trace the development of his engagement with anarchist ideas, from his early poetry to his better-known prose, right through to his most recent use of new media. Given that Cooper’s interrogations of and improvisations upon anarchist thinking are themselves idiosyncratic, I approach my subject in a flexible and non- programmatic way: he does not apply his anarchism systematically (although his work is vitally concerned with systems) so it does not seem productive to apply anarchist thought to his work in a systematic way. I do not analyse each and every one of Cooper’s many books: instead my thesis illuminates those moments when Cooper’s writing seems particularly consonant with anarchist thought but I stop necessarily short of presenting a unified vision of his anarchist aesthetics. Of course it depends on who you ask but most people who have read Dennis Cooper’s work are unlikely to know him first and foremost as an anarchist writer, despite his insistence that “my own politics, which I identify as anarchist, are fundamental to how I make work” (Cooper and Higgs, 2011). Many readers may think of him more as a “punk poet” and, as labels go, it isn’t the worst one: I show in my opening chapters that by the late 1970s the sound and style of New York punk rock had escaped the confines of Downtown Manhattan and had made their way to Cooper on the West Coast; influenced by his friend Patti Smith, he started self- publishing punk-inflected poetry in Los Angeles as early as 1978. The “punk poet” tag originated with Warhol’s assistant and muse, Gerard Malanga, who said in a promotional blurb that 1 From “The Reaction in Germany: From the Notebooks of a Frenchman” (see Bakunin, 1842) 2 “[Dennis Cooper] may very well be the first punk poet” (qtd. in Cooper 1978a). Critic Rudy Kikel would lend credence to Malanga’s claim, finding the “punk frisson” of Cooper’s poetry between “attacks on his ‘audience’… an acceptance of vulgar or circumscribed desire (the influence of rock ‘n roll, the press, television, and American cinema are felt in his poetry), and an unembarrassed association of sex and violence” (1978). Although privately Cooper expressed ambivalence about the association of his poetry with punk – writing in his diary in October 1978 that “I’m referred to as a ‘punk poet’ again, don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing in the long run” – the term stuck and continued to define the aesthetic of Cooper’s poetry for years to come (1978b 10 Oct 1978). Cooper is also called a “queercore” writer: despite his influence on the Los Angeles poetry scene in the 1970s and 1980s, Cooper’s writing only started to gain widespread recognition in the late-80s and early 90s, just as queer theory began to gain traction in discussions of gender and sexuality. As I show in chapter 3, like queer theorists Judith Butler and Diana Fuss, Cooper is antipathetic to normative ideas of sexual identity – straight and gay – and his work has sought to expose and critique attempts to have the diversity of sexual experience coagulate into even a strategic essentialism.