On Bruce Benderson’s Urban Gothic
(2022)
The publication of Bruce Benderson’s complete stories has been a long-awaited event not only for myself but for many others, I suspect. It turned out to be an event worth waiting for. Within the span of 670 (!) pages, we (re-) encounter not only the full contents of his first collection, Pretending to Say No, 1990 (its titular story, a reference to the “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign helmed by Nancy Reagan, finds the former first lady stumbling into a crackhouse with transsexual prostitutes and eventually partaking of the pipe… or does she?), but also twenty-one stories that have never before been published, excerpts from longer works, and journalistic exposés that fit quite sensibly alongside the fiction; as Benderson explains in his preface, in the French literary tradition with which his work has historically been more closely aligned, “French prose neglects to define a text as either fiction or nonfiction, aware as most French writers are of the high degree of imagination needed to tell any story that touches on the truth, whether fact-based or wholly fantastic.”
This preface allows Benderson to set out his aesthetic M.O. with remarkable concision. For it is not merely the ambiguity of the texte that attracts him to French literary culture – and vice versa, as his work has been more lauded and awarded in France than his native US – but also its implicit rejection of the narrative of redemption, one of the centerpieces of America’s Puritanism, and which has seen a surge in recent years with the policing strategies and censorship machinery of so-called “woke” ideology and cancel culture, with their mission to actively propagate narratives that negate all nuance in favor of black-and-white universes in which every individual is either a faultless victim or else a cold-blooded tyrant.
To the redemption narrative, the literary milieu in which Benderson has encamped might counter with a position enumerated by Georges Bataille: that if literature avoids engaging with evil, then it rapidly becomes boring. Bataille posited transgression as being inextricably linked with literature’s essential ontological function. (Writing from a twenty-first century perspective, I feel compelled to qualify that this must not be confused with the promotion of an anti-humanist ethos or hate speech, but an implementation of authorial perspective into a universe that runs counter, in varying degrees, to one’s own in order to excavate certain deeply moral truths.) Benderson employs the example of Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal was one of the inspirations for Bataille’s argument, and whose Paris Spleen Benderson presents as an example of the French texte that resists that assignation of genre that American literary culture so desperately clings to.
Just as Baudelaire plummeted the depths of 19th century Paris – its whorehouses, opium and hashish dens, drunkards and dropouts and laggards – Benderson similarly immersed himself and his work in the seamy underside of New York in the 1980s and 1990s; it wouldn’t be a mistake to call him the Baudelaire of New York of that period.
Throughout much of the 1980s up to its “cleanup” under Giuliani in the 1990s, Benderson’s stomping grounds was Times Square, with its plethora of porn theaters, sex shops, street whores, pay-by-the-hour motels, and drug dealers. In particular, it was the hustler bars that became Benderson’s New York Spleen, that site where he tested – often at great personal risk – the dividing line between life and art. “The worst place in New York,” he writes in a story bearing that title, “is the surface of my bed.” What we get in these early stories is a confluence of outside perspectives: the middle-class suburban Jewish homo writer who moves to the city and immerses himself in encounters with young men of color who truly have nothing but their bodies to sell (and, often enough, addictions to support.) Of course, in the gay scene it is well known that many yearn for rough trade, in seeming desire for the quick fulfillment of some masochistic urge, but Benderson’s stories unveil a deeper yearning for connection, fueled by the semi-naïve neo-Marxian ideal of the dissolution of class borders that truly made the Times Square of the 1980s, a period of increasingly rigid stratification between the haves and the have-nots, an anomaly. This is the “urban gothic” to which the title of the collection alludes, a polis of potentialities in every encounter, where love might actually come to cross those borders that the capitalist order has established in order to keep us separated.
If he’s no longer considered the cross-Atlantic counterpart to Baudelaire’s flâneur, it is because New York itself has changed. Benderson’s original approach, that of urban anthropologist, is at odds with the world today in general, and in particular, with the New York that still entraps him – a New York that has been sterilized and suburbanized into an island-length outdoor shopping mall catering to the wealthy and their bland progeny (i.e. those who aspire to be them.) Today, the city has become frankly too boring and obvious to dissect; even its supposed depravities have become largely Disneyfied. Benderson, the writer, had no choice but to move on.
In doing so, he attained new heights. Thankfully, a collection of this heft allows us to see the writer’s astonishing breadth of mastery. In “An Anarchiste de droite,” which might be translated into English as “A Right-Wing Anarchist,” Benderson gives another key to his aesthetics in an assessment of the French Decadent author J.-K. Huysmans. “He’s part of an entire group of artists of that period who also contributed to the high-jacking of naturalist description as a transporting experience, a vehicle for fantasy,” Benderson writes. Unlike Dickens and Zola, who deployed naturalist techniques as a means of advocating for social reform, only to have those techniques eventually subsumed into the machinery of the culture industry and spat out as mass entertainment, Huysmans used those same techniques as a means of rendering in vivid color the abject, a depiction intended as an uncommodifiable end in itself – a portrait of the soul in agony – and hence, a higher art.
Chris Kraus has argued that there exists a close connection between the art of acting and the writing of fiction. It is an assessment with which I agree, and, very often in Urban Gothic, we encounter instances of Benderson “playing” Benderson; that is, where the narrator or main character is an exaggerated or exacerbated version of the man who wrote them. At the same time, it would be a mistake to define Benderson’s work as “autofiction,” which has become trendy of late. Although these stories no doubt have their roots in events directly experienced by the author, there is always an othering device at play here: Benderson brings far too much imagination to the craft than the regurgitative reportage that so much autofiction winds up being. I would go so far as to argue that this imaginative approach is located at the very center of the machinery; if anything, what Benderson gives us is the realization of an anti-autofiction, at the same time more real and true and imaginative (its truth being ensconced within its imaginativeness) than “pure” autofiction could ever aspire to be.
“The Grandstander,” a story from 2014, is narrated by a writer who is invited to Kyoto to give a reading. The result is a cross-cultural comedy of errors. Like Benderson, he is a semi-famous downtown New York gay writer of a certain age whose outsize personality – he gets drunk at the reading and embarks upon a rant on his sex-and-drugs exploits, rigged with hilarious politically incorrect barbs – clearly clashes with the embarrassed restraint of his hosts. But as the story progresses, what might have looked in the beginning like a lampoon or crude racist generalization of Japanese identity ends as a poignant and probing exploration of the gradations of what is, after all, one of the most complex national cultures.
A similar strategy is used in “Mouth of the River,” an excerpt from 2006’s Pacific Agony, my favorite of Benderson’s novels. In that book, the author is portrayed as a booze-addled sex offender whose wealthy benefactor from the Pacific Northwest offers him the chance to write a travel exposé on that region. Again, we get an uproarious clash of cultures described, scene by scene, in painstaking detail: the loud-mouthed cosmopolitan New Yorker encountering the repression of the nearly all-white, all-Protestant denizens of that rainy coast, who appear at first to also be all-innocent. But are they really?
In fact, Benderson’s grandest accomplishment may be as an ironist. He would likely be in agreement with Kierkegaard’s argument that the dark seriousness of modern life must be portrayed through irony. (It is perhaps ironic – irony of ironies! – that this theorist of irony was a devout Christian, as irony in practice has traditionally fallen within the domain of Jewish artistic genius and the humanist ethos that reside within it.) Irony, both a stylistic and a moral force, has the breadth and width to encompass the comic as well as the tragic, which are found in equal measure in Urban Gothic. These intricately carved pieces, the products of a life work, transcend the period and milieu in which they are set, offering the reader a master class in the sophistications and flourishes of narrative art.