Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge [Hardcover]

 

 

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When I heard that there was another monograph devoted to my favorite writer, I ordered one immediately. Leora Lev's ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK (2006) set the bar pretty high; how would this new challenger stand up to the gold standard of Ms. Lev? When the book came I was not disappointed. There's a lot of substance here and anyone interested in Mr. Cooper's work will find hours of enlightenment, amusement, provocation and just plain brilliant work.

Well, there's one caveat perhaps, that the book suffers from using only men to write about Dennis Cooper's world. (Leora Lev is the one exception.) Perhaps diversity isn't an issue at Sussex Academic Press the way it would be in the USA? Otherwise editors Hegarty and Kennedy are chiefly interested in Mr. Cooper's novels, and the rest of his oeuvre is given decidedly short shrift. Does this reflect the emphasis of the recent Cork conference on Cooper, from which this volume is largely drawn? Wayne Koestenbaum does address the novels through their poetic qualities, making what seems in the larger context of this book the heretical observation that "His tempo has more in common with Robert Creeley's, Lorine Niedecker's. and George Oppen's, than with de Sade's, Bataille's, Genet's." I see I wrote, "How true!" in the margin opposite this note. Elsewhere Leora Lev herself calls attention to Cooper's work as a delimited energy field of cross-genre experiment that includes poetry, art, the essay, his well-known weblog, indeed his life itself as a continual adventure in writing, and editor Kennedy conducts an interview with Mr. Cooper that ranges freely, like chicken in a Sonoma organic farm, over a wide variety of Cooperania from Battleship Galactica to sculptor Charles Ray's interest in astrophysics--hmm, maybe not as wide-ranging as it seems at first sight.

The essays themselves are sharply focused and largely convincing. Damon Young pulls the yarn of My Loose Thread through the needles of Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Martin Dines, theorist of the suburbs, proves conclusively that little Ziggy from TRY rejects recent histories of suburbia to return to a previous, Forsterian "greenwood" impulse, "one that actually bears close resemblance to the ideal that inspired much of post-war American suburbia." Timothy Baker's remix of The Sluts with various limbs torn off screaming from the bodies of Blanchot, Hegel, and Adorno bears the weighty signs of gender reassignment surgery, but since, as he argues, "The Whole is Untrue," it is rather like trying to stuff an oyster in a parking meter. We find that Polish genius Witold Gombrowicz exerted a similar planetary influence over his own field of readers as does Mr. Cooper in the present day, from editor Kennedy's article on Cooper's soi-disant "Ferdydurkism." And so on. You can see there's some interesting touchstones at work in this volume. Only once in a while will the layperson find some of the theory, mmm, uh, pretentious? I nearly couldn't get into Diarmuid Hester's exploration of Cooper's celebrated "blankness" in terms of Derrida's writings on mourning (though I'm glad I persevered), because I kept wincing through Hester's opening salvo, in which "I will not speak of `mourning through Derrida' for, as I hope to show in what follows, mourning is always already Derridean and Derrida is always already mourning in advance." I never did work out if this wound up making any sense. To me, what would prevent such an essayist from writing an article which refused to speak of "eating rich French food and not gaining an ounce through Derrida" for similar reasons, that "eating rich food and not gaining an ounce" is already Derridean and Derrida is always already eating rich food and not gaining an ounce?

The homogeneity of the book, its emphasis on the novels, is broken by an opening selection of 7 or 8 brief prose poems by Cooper, and then even more radically by a center section, like a foldout of Playgirl, of poems (and lyrics?) by others, and a scattering of art inspired by Cooper. It's a charming idea, but in practice a little disastrous, chiefly because the poetry just isn't all that great. Sorry poets! But here you have allowed editors Kennedy and Hegarty to hoist you up against one of the greatest poets of our day, you were always going to come off as second rankers surely. In another context I'm sure your work is splendid. In short, anyone interested in Dennis Cooper's novels, not to mention his thinking in general, should buy this book and prepare to get it dirty.

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