When the Whip Comes Down: On Mary Gaitskill

The culture has caught up with Mary Gaitskill, and she's not happy about it. "Things are not like they once were," a journalist says in Don't Cry, an awkwardly self-conscious new collection that seems to represent something of an artistic midlife crisis. "Sex and the City is on TV." The journalist is thinking about a famous "feminist author" who writes about pornography and prostitution with a television glibness that fails to acknowledge the "darkness and mystery" that lies between "intelligent words on one side, and mute genitals on the other." The author is a kind of anti- or counter-Gaitskill, the sort of writer she's worried we might mistake her for. "The feminist author...read her disturbing stories as if she were a lady at a tea party, as if there were no mystery, no darkness, just her, the feminist author skipping along, swinging some charming little bag, and singing about penises, la la la la la!"

When Gaitskill published her first collection, Bad Behavior, in 1988, sex, in the city or otherwise, was most certainly not on TV. Her blunt stories of prostitution, sadomasochism and other flavors of sexual degradation came as a lash to the cultural system. ("A book that was like a little box with monsters inside it," she calls the volume at an autobiographical moment in the new collection. One story, "Secretary," was committed to film, but only many years later and only in what Gaitskill has called "the 'Pretty Woman' version.") In other respects, the book arrived right on time. As Ariel Levy noted recently in The New Yorker, feminism had passed in the 1980s from the era of egalitarianism, consciousness-raising and nurture to a harder-edged embrace of lust and power, a desire to appropriate rather than abjure stereotypically masculine energies, that was exemplified by S&M. On Our Backs, the first women's sex magazine, debuted in 1984. Herotica, the initial book in what became a long-running series, came out in 1988, the same year as Bad Behavior.

If women's relationship to sex was changing, so was sex itself. The sexual revolution had flown the flag of freedom, self-expression and guiltless pleasure: The Joy of Sex and The Sensuous Woman, Norman O. Brown and the almighty Pill, hippies, swingers, vibrators, orgies, "free love" and the zipless fuck. Sex was fun, sex was wholesome, sex was natural. By the late '80s, things had long since ceased to be so simple, and not just because of AIDS. Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Gaitskill's second book and first novel, published three years after Bad Behavior, made the connection between what was happening in the bedroom and what was happening in the country. Sadomasochism became the master metaphor for human relations in the Ayn Randian dystopia of Reagan's America, a landscape of domination and persecution, littered with the broken and the homeless, where the ideology is winner-take-all and the only rule is fuck or be fucked. Sex, like everything else, was now about power. Two Girls is a novel of the '80s and a novel of New York; the psychic relations that Gaitskill had made her subject she saw inscribed all over the city, written on its faces and its streets.

A second collection, Because They Wanted To, appeared in 1997. Taken together, Gaitskill's first three books established a tightly coherent vision expressed through a narrow but powerful array of themes and techniques. For Gaitskill, Rand and Reagan are only extreme expressions of a universal condition, and the social world itself is a Hobbesian jungle of the hideous, the merciless and the weak. Its paradigm and training ground is childhood, which Gaitskill returns to throughout these three books as if it were a wound she can't stop licking:

The assigned classroom was filled with murderously aggressive boys and rigid girls with animal eyes who threw spitballs, punched each other, snarled, whispered, and stared one another down. And shadowing all these gestures and movements were declarations of dominance, of territory, the swift, blind play of power and weakness.

Given such conditions, the only viable strategy is to bury your feelings as deeply as possible. In Two Girls, the most despised of the classroom outcasts is nicknamed "'Emotional,' the worst insult imaginable": "Every answer seemed to come out of some horrible complex individuality reeking with humanity, the clarity and trust in her soft voice made them squirm with discomfort."

The result is at once self-enclosure and self-alienation. Gaitskill's characters are young women and men set adrift between adolescence and adulthood, members-in-training of the so-called creative class, like so many of us are or once were. They hole up in cruddy apartments, work demeaning jobs and nurse vague creative aspirations while making the desultory round of bars, clubs and parties in the demimonde of urban hipsterdom. But Gaitskill gives her characters a larger than ordinary allotment of psychic distress. It doesn't matter if childhood trauma figures explicitly in their stories; with their stunted or fragile or provisional selves, their baffled craving for comfort, they are all still damaged children. Their predicament creates a suffocating compound of psychological pressure and emotional desiccation, along with a lurking sense of threat that originates not in the outside world but in the hidden places of the psyche, in the violence that unacknowledged desires are capable of calling down. Gaitskill's characters have a blind spot where their personalities are supposed to be, and it's staring at the back of their heads. They can't feel what they feel or want what they want. They aren't struggling, like their peers, to decide what to be; they're trying to figure out who they are.

Needless to say, they have even more trouble making contact with other people. Gaitskill's characters spend most of the time in their own heads: imagining, picturing, fantasizing, dreaming--rearranging reality, like a child playing with dolls, into manageable scenarios. "He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy." "She imagined Leisha as an actress in a sci-fi movie.... As a mother in a blue-and-white checked blouse.... As an aging hipster in a bar.... As a bag lady." When contact comes between such heavily defended souls, it takes the form of penetration, physical or psychological. One of Gaitskill's characters falls in love with a dentist and fantasizes about having her labia pierced with needles. Another violates her playmate with a toothbrush. Abjection and humiliation become the nearest tolerable approaches to intimacy. "I feel too vulnerable" for sex, one woman says. "I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me." Role-play--fantasy projected outward, a kind of psychological bondage--defuses the disruptive potential of sex and love. "You're so sweet," the same character tells a lover. "I just want to tie you up and torture you." The palliation is inevitably transient. Gaitskill's stories typically end with the breaking off of contact, the protagonist returning alone to her empty, safe apartment.

Given the obsessive quality of Gaitskill's thematic focus, it is hard not to read her work as psychic self-portraiture. Like a number of her characters, Gaitskill left home at 16, went to the University of Michigan, worked as a stripper and prostitute, experienced sexual violation, spent time in a mental institution, lived in New York and San Francisco. Bad Behavior didn't appear until she was 33, many years into her own apprenticeship in anomie. An autobiographical story in the new collection describes the period of the book's composition as "five dreary years...in a tiny apartment with a sink and a stove against one wall and a mattress against the other.... I neglected my family. I forgot how to talk to people."

The shock value of Gaitskill's early work comes from the fact that she dared to write about her psychological situation; its artistic value comes from the fact that she figured out how to express it in a style. The substructure of her prose consists of a minute attention to physical and social detail that bespeaks an outsider's hooded, vengeful observation: "His eyes and nose were arrogant and ignorant, his mouth was sensual and nervous, wanting to please. But his forehead was powerful, discerning, and strange." The acuity is remarkable, but the description also functions as an act of imaginative dismemberment and dehumanization. As the title of Two Girls, Fat and Thin suggests, Gaitskill's gimlet eye exposes and persecutes ugliness and imperfection like the worst locker-room tyrant: "He turned the edge of one nostril over with his thumb and nervously stroked his nose hairs with one finger." (A culture that worships beauty will spawn a countervailing literature of ugliness, as the author of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men also understood.) The relentless attention to bodily squalor is humiliating, punitive, sadistic. The tone is cold, detached--almost all of Gaitskill's early stories are written in the third person--the syntax probes and penetrates like a dental drill. Defenses are stripped, secrets revealed, hidden places touched. Her titles are sarcastic: "A Romantic Weekend," "Something Nice," "Comfort." Gaitskill, like her characters, is a deviser of scenarios, and no more merciful than they to her Barbies and Kens.

The effect is of a writer simultaneously occupying both sides of the sadomasochistic dynamic, inflicting pain, white-lipped, on her own alter egos. She is the whip, and she is also the cringing flesh. Again, the psychological condition, infused with urgency, carries over into the fiction, this time at the level of structure. Gaitskill's stories typically involve some kind of psychic division. The title of Two Girls is again representative. Gaitskill is the fat outcast, and she is also the neurotic young writer who pursues her. Other narratives dramatize acts of compartmentalization or disassociation. In one, an arty young woman moonlights as a prostitute, stepping out of the world of galleries and name-dropping and into a different persona. Still other stories juxtapose a pair of young women, usually embittered ex-friends, as if to suggest that each represents a version of the other. And many of Gaitskill's narratives, including Two Girls, revolve around a temporal split, the past unfolding in memory as the protagonist thinks back to an earlier, different self.

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