Neuro-Horror-Novel: Kathe Koja's Bad Brains

Predating the emergence of the neuronovel by about 5 years Kathe Koja's Bad Brains (1992) could be regarded as a prefigurative critique of that particular micro-genre. Replacing the spectacular and rare disorders so beloved of literary fiction Koja settles for a fall off a curb and resulting brain damage and repeating seizures for her central character - failed artist Austen Bandy. The banality of the initial incident coupled to the lengthy exploration of largely ineffective treatment, combined with rapidly dwindling health insurance, puts paid to some of the irritating troping of neurological 'insight' and 'difference' in the neuronovel.

Of course, we might say that the rise of the neuronovel is not so much a sign of the turn to the brain and bodies, although it is that, but a particularly literalised version of the postmodern condition as the fragmentation of the psyche (Jameson). Where once we were content with figurative mental illness now the only Real deal is the trauma in the Real, which (as Zizek has often noted) neglects the Real of appearance for an ideological version of the 'concrete' qua hardwired brain (hard being the operative signifier).

Koja's novel certainly does return to the troping of creation - what makes this a horror novel is Austen's deepening vision of 'a dustdevil of fluid, liquid, mucus; silver, almost scalelike, delicate as fish skin and stretching out, elongating'. If we can rely on this most unreliable of narrators then it's reported that this 'silver mucus' is spreading into Austen's own work, hence its appearance in the 'Real'. It is also coordinated with his previous divorce and his desire for his ex-wife Emily.

As the novel unfolds (slowly), we are in the territory of the activity of artistic creation. This is made explicit in the closing section of the novel with 'Dr Quiet', a Cronenbergian psychiatrist, who links this 'vision' to limbic excess and the act of creation, with the 'silver' as daemon of creation. The 'era of blood' is coded as absolute sacrifice, or the malign greediness and egocentrism of 'the heedless bodiless passion of creation itself where nothing matters, nothing exists but the work.'

Something, however, remains of the banality of this stepping over. Austen, headed out on an ill-advised road trip to visit his mother, encounters a punk band in the usual shock style. He wryly remarks: 'they were young and earnest and so unaware of edges, the real edges on which we teeter, every day'.

The real edges, or for a flip Lacanian reversal, the edges of the real are as much divorce, falling off curbs, running out of health insurance, and failed mothers as they are edged silver smears that may, or may not, be the sign of 'creativity' - or perhaps, both at once.

'The Hectoring of Limits': Kathe Koja's Skin

For Steven Shaviro

Kathe Koja's 1993 novel Skin is a novel of transgression and its usual destination: death. It concerns two symmetrical artists: Tess Bajac (the narrative voice), who works with metal to make it live, and Bibi Bloss, a dancer who makes to transform the flesh through integration with metal. These symmetries, as Tess and Bibi, pass from comrades to friends to lovers to enemies to final collapse, trace a narrative of 'transgressive/alternative' culture. Tess's work in the novel is obviously modelled on Survival Research Laboratories (referenced in the text), and in her later departure from public art her 'boxes' are obviously Joseph Cornell's (a favourite model, it seems, for fictional artists). Bibi, on the other hand, is the 'modern primitive' of Re/Search fame, with her extreme body modification and, implied in the novel, quasi-Facist tendencies.

While the account of the art created is, typically in a novel, not every convincing in terms of the effects it is supposed to be producing, the account of the 'hectoring of limits' engaged in by the transgressive artist, especially Bibi is - as critique. What's also interesting is he emergent narrative in the book of the function of the manipulative character Michael Hispard who, in a sense, runs the whole show by playing off Tess and Bibi against each other to produce or force the 'spiral' of transgression.

In particular Tess's account of Bibi, and her scepticism, offer a questioning (quite literally) of this 'dynamic':

Do you modify to improve, or empower, or simply to feed the greedy black scorn of the human boundaries that succor flesh to blood to the pulse and contraction of the emperor mind within?

In a key formulation Tess remarks of Bibi 'her body was the vanguard'. This captures, I'd argue, a contention we can derive from Badiou that the collective 'passion for the real' of the avant-gardes has become saturated. This does not mean it is simply exhausted, but rather dispersed into the body itself - hence Badiou's scepticism concerning 'postmodern' art as the art of bodies/languages in their implosive and inert 'presence'.

The novel, however, seems to terminate all options - public performance, collectivity, individual involution - in a final pairing of death, inert madness, and inertial passivity. The novel explicitly formulates the problem of change as its core - transformation, transfiguration, becoming, all seemed to twist finally into forms of failure. While this can be seen as a 'local' pathology, either of this 'scene' or the characters in the narrative, the book also points to the winding down of the 'dynamic' of transgression. Of course, the novel itself is the 'creative' allegory of these 'failures', and it is fitting that it is not entirely successful - or perhaps successful in its own strangely drawn-out inertia. We might say it is the prefigurative novel of 'democratic materialism' and its pathologies, the indicator of the impasse of Bergsonian 'mechanical' vitalism as 'creative'; in this way, it is the dead-end of transgression.