Skin (Kathe Koja)
Mar. 4th, 2005 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksThis was a rereading sparked by something ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffee_and_ink said in her recent Kathe Koja posts, an association of Koja as a writer with Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan-- which caused me to flash back to adolescent paperback-scroungings in interest and astonishment, because, although obvious, it was an association I had never made. I read a lot of modern horror during high school, a lot of Gothic and/or Goth stuff and a fair quantity of splatterpunk, driven by inner reasoning that didn't make much sense at the time and doesn't really now. Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse remains the only book without illustrations that has ever made me throw up, and I think I was trying to figure out why the extremities of horror writing could affect me so powerfully, and what, if anything, could be done about that, but the effects on me occurred less as rational analysis and more as a tangled dark web of peculiar associations, meanings that piled onto each other, the production of concatenations of symbols that could make me shiver. I am not complaining about this. The story I recently sold comes from this. I also suspect that it has something to do with my bimonthly screaming nightmares. Brite and Kiernan and Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell and Shirley Jackson and Alan Moore: I read their work, newly published or far older than I was, as horror, internalized it as horror, worked towards a personal aesthetics of horror in shortform and novel.
Koja got mentally filed somewhere near Kathy Acker and Avital Ronell and Greil Marcus: punk.
A rereading of Skin convinces me that this was a misfiling on the part of my brain based on this particular book and its obsessions with industrial culture and body art, subjects I was researching separately at that time and that I did not associate with horror despite the very clear indications that Koja is trying to use them that way. These indications, on rereading, solve several problems with the novel that I had on the first go-round-- I didn't feel there was enough thought about the purposes and philosophy of serious body modification in the book, and there isn't, because the need to self-modify is here intended as the basis of the horror and hence cannot be fully discussed if the shadowy mythicalness of it all is to remain intact-- but, on the other hand, reading Skin as a horror novel creates more problems than it solves (ask me what I think of said shadowy mythicalness).
It's a fairly well-conceived book, with decent plotting and strong characters. Tess, the protagonist, is an avant-garde artist working with metal, trying to stretch the limits of her medium in various mobile and stationary sculptures; the plot concerns her tangled relationship with Bibi, a dancer she meets who is trying to move beyond motion of the body as a location for art to the body itself as the only focus. They collaborate, and fight, and break up, and make up, and eventually have sex (a hundred pages after I felt it thematically necessary), and finally drastically fail to communicate. As a romance, it's quite good. If it had been trying to be an underground-culture romance novel, I think it could have been great. Tess is believable, quiet and resolute and driven, repressed and devoted to her art in a way that she cannot realize reads as pretentious from the outside: it doesn't to the reader because we don't see the outside, and I think this is the book's finest trick, since Tess could very easily have become insufferable very, very quickly. Bibi is the mercurial one, outgoing, performance-oriented, and manages to remain interesting for at least half of the book by means of her genuine unpredictability.
However, because it is a horror novel, they have to not only be doomed, but Doomed Epically And Tragically, and I have serious issues with both that and the way said Doom works itself out. Essentially, Bibi's obsession with control of her body leads her further and further into the more extreme forms of body modification, and this, seemingly by itself, sends her into a kind of performance-art psychosis, ending eventually in murder and dehumanization. Bibi talks some about the spiritual resonance of what she's doing, about the control and power she feels she can bring herself through pain, but Tess is incapable of hearing any of her arguments as anything other than manifestations of sickness, and the reader is not given any serious cause to disagree with Tess-- there's a woman who appears briefly who works as a professional decorative cutter who is treated with some sympathy and grace, but she doesn't get dialogue, and we don't get a chance to find out why she does what she does. Bibi is sick-- she treats other people as objects, without compassion-- but this is shown as inexorably linked with her art, as part of the cause for it. This is what makes Skin into a horror novel: the view of Bibi's obsession as a deep essential wrongness, as something that cannot be spiritually right, which must be defeated if possible.
Now, serious modification is not my thing. I have no doubt that it can go wrong, and that it may, even, go wrong sometimes in the way it does for Bibi, towards an objectification of others and the self. However, when it first became apparent to me that I was going to someday acquire a tattoo and a nose ring at the very least, I studied the history and practices of body art and body modification as thoroughly as I could, so that I would have an awareness of what I was doing and why I was doing it and what other people had done in the past. I used many of the same sources that Koja acknowledges in her dedication, and others that I'm sure she must have come across. And I found that, at least in interview, many of the people who do things that most people would find thoroughly outrageous and/or sickening-- people who do things like recreating the Native American Sun Dance or hanging themselves from the ceiling by their piercings-- come across as literate, calm, intelligent, gentle, and full of a peace and confidence with themselves and the world around them generally only seen in monks. They seem driven more towards empathy than toward treating others as objects, and they never deny the reality and value of pain. Granted, there were also some really scary people out there, some things that I still have trouble understanding and some things I cannot condone, but I decided after my research that it would be all right for me to get my own modifications, as long as they were thought out thoroughly; it was not necessarily a sign of embedded self-destructiveness.
I wish that Koja's book had had signs of this viewpoint about body art. I think it would have been richer as a story and deeper as a work of art if it had made clear where the boundaries of Bibi's sickness were, and that help for her could have been accomplished within her own framework of reference; if the horror of the book had come from the inner darkness of one woman's soul and not from a way of life that many choose to think is dark; if Bibi had been shown to be exploiting and profaning the things that others find holy rather than reveling in things that were essentially profane.
I also think it would have been a less shadowy and obfuscatory mess of a book, because it would not have had anything to hide from scrutiny at its core. Maybe it would even have become a real romance.
coffee_and_ink said in her recent Kathe Koja posts, an association of Koja as a writer with Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan-- which caused me to flash back to adolescent paperback-scroungings in interest and astonishment, because, although obvious, it was an association I had never made. I read a lot of modern horror during high school, a lot of Gothic and/or Goth stuff and a fair quantity of splatterpunk, driven by inner reasoning that didn't make much sense at the time and doesn't really now. Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse remains the only book without illustrations that has ever made me throw up, and I think I was trying to figure out why the extremities of horror writing could affect me so powerfully, and what, if anything, could be done about that, but the effects on me occurred less as rational analysis and more as a tangled dark web of peculiar associations, meanings that piled onto each other, the production of concatenations of symbols that could make me shiver. I am not complaining about this. The story I recently sold comes from this. I also suspect that it has something to do with my bimonthly screaming nightmares. Brite and Kiernan and Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell and Shirley Jackson and Alan Moore: I read their work, newly published or far older than I was, as horror, internalized it as horror, worked towards a personal aesthetics of horror in shortform and novel. Koja got mentally filed somewhere near Kathy Acker and Avital Ronell and Greil Marcus: punk.
A rereading of Skin convinces me that this was a misfiling on the part of my brain based on this particular book and its obsessions with industrial culture and body art, subjects I was researching separately at that time and that I did not associate with horror despite the very clear indications that Koja is trying to use them that way. These indications, on rereading, solve several problems with the novel that I had on the first go-round-- I didn't feel there was enough thought about the purposes and philosophy of serious body modification in the book, and there isn't, because the need to self-modify is here intended as the basis of the horror and hence cannot be fully discussed if the shadowy mythicalness of it all is to remain intact-- but, on the other hand, reading Skin as a horror novel creates more problems than it solves (ask me what I think of said shadowy mythicalness).
It's a fairly well-conceived book, with decent plotting and strong characters. Tess, the protagonist, is an avant-garde artist working with metal, trying to stretch the limits of her medium in various mobile and stationary sculptures; the plot concerns her tangled relationship with Bibi, a dancer she meets who is trying to move beyond motion of the body as a location for art to the body itself as the only focus. They collaborate, and fight, and break up, and make up, and eventually have sex (a hundred pages after I felt it thematically necessary), and finally drastically fail to communicate. As a romance, it's quite good. If it had been trying to be an underground-culture romance novel, I think it could have been great. Tess is believable, quiet and resolute and driven, repressed and devoted to her art in a way that she cannot realize reads as pretentious from the outside: it doesn't to the reader because we don't see the outside, and I think this is the book's finest trick, since Tess could very easily have become insufferable very, very quickly. Bibi is the mercurial one, outgoing, performance-oriented, and manages to remain interesting for at least half of the book by means of her genuine unpredictability.
However, because it is a horror novel, they have to not only be doomed, but Doomed Epically And Tragically, and I have serious issues with both that and the way said Doom works itself out. Essentially, Bibi's obsession with control of her body leads her further and further into the more extreme forms of body modification, and this, seemingly by itself, sends her into a kind of performance-art psychosis, ending eventually in murder and dehumanization. Bibi talks some about the spiritual resonance of what she's doing, about the control and power she feels she can bring herself through pain, but Tess is incapable of hearing any of her arguments as anything other than manifestations of sickness, and the reader is not given any serious cause to disagree with Tess-- there's a woman who appears briefly who works as a professional decorative cutter who is treated with some sympathy and grace, but she doesn't get dialogue, and we don't get a chance to find out why she does what she does. Bibi is sick-- she treats other people as objects, without compassion-- but this is shown as inexorably linked with her art, as part of the cause for it. This is what makes Skin into a horror novel: the view of Bibi's obsession as a deep essential wrongness, as something that cannot be spiritually right, which must be defeated if possible.
Now, serious modification is not my thing. I have no doubt that it can go wrong, and that it may, even, go wrong sometimes in the way it does for Bibi, towards an objectification of others and the self. However, when it first became apparent to me that I was going to someday acquire a tattoo and a nose ring at the very least, I studied the history and practices of body art and body modification as thoroughly as I could, so that I would have an awareness of what I was doing and why I was doing it and what other people had done in the past. I used many of the same sources that Koja acknowledges in her dedication, and others that I'm sure she must have come across. And I found that, at least in interview, many of the people who do things that most people would find thoroughly outrageous and/or sickening-- people who do things like recreating the Native American Sun Dance or hanging themselves from the ceiling by their piercings-- come across as literate, calm, intelligent, gentle, and full of a peace and confidence with themselves and the world around them generally only seen in monks. They seem driven more towards empathy than toward treating others as objects, and they never deny the reality and value of pain. Granted, there were also some really scary people out there, some things that I still have trouble understanding and some things I cannot condone, but I decided after my research that it would be all right for me to get my own modifications, as long as they were thought out thoroughly; it was not necessarily a sign of embedded self-destructiveness.
I wish that Koja's book had had signs of this viewpoint about body art. I think it would have been richer as a story and deeper as a work of art if it had made clear where the boundaries of Bibi's sickness were, and that help for her could have been accomplished within her own framework of reference; if the horror of the book had come from the inner darkness of one woman's soul and not from a way of life that many choose to think is dark; if Bibi had been shown to be exploiting and profaning the things that others find holy rather than reveling in things that were essentially profane.
I also think it would have been a less shadowy and obfuscatory mess of a book, because it would not have had anything to hide from scrutiny at its core. Maybe it would even have become a real romance.
