Meet [ ]. An unnamed victim of the unnamed narrator in Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby.
[ ] doesn’t live in a rational world. He lives, with many, in a world of black and red.
“He looks too young for his age, but it’s not because he’s had an easy life; it’s because his soul is underdeveloped.”
“His own thoughts couldn’t fill a page…He continues to spew, but what’s coming out of him in such great volumes couldn’t be called consciousness, what remains isn’t anything at all. If anything, it’s the unconscious attempting to contaminate the rest of us with its amplitude. A song that has volume but no melody.”
Don’t be [ ].
[ ] cut the budget for the philosophy department at the university where he works.
What does a philosopher do without her philosophy department?
She must experiment privately, on her own budget.
The American Psychological Association defines “experiment” as that which “involves the manipulation of an independent variable, the measurement of a dependent variable, and the exposure of various participants to one or more of the conditions being studied.”
Nowhere in the definition do you read the word “torture.”
“What happens when you burn one thing of which there are many? Not much.”
[ ] is one of the later experiments.
But the first experiment is with Emily, to determine “how much space a human inhabits” or rather “how much space does a human occupy.”
When I first read that sentence, I thought, well, that’s an interesting premise. We of course occupy the amount of space that is held together by our skin, but we also occupy the floor of an apartment, in neighborhoods we did or didn’t grow up in, buying items from around the country and around the world to fill up this space, leaving little bits of skin cells, fingernail clippings, strands of hair, other bodily waste, all around in our absence. Or we purchase an item online, maybe from [that giant retailer], and begin the Rube Goldberg chain of human suffering, the cheap package of paper towels that we clicked “Buy Now” on occupying space on a shelf in an anonymous facility, then a logo-ed truck (probably non-electric), driving down anonymous highways, and then parking throughout a city (probably in a bike lane), deliver the towels that take up space, occupy a space that could be said to be myself occupying that same space as the paper towels, I the one to put that event in motion.
What an interesting experiment it would be to learn how much space we really take up in the world.
That is an experiment for a different book. Not a book by Charlene Elsby. I’m learning that Elsby is a synonym for “content warning.”
Back to the first experiment with Emily, who we learn is an ex-lover of the professor. The professor brings Emily to a location, to one room. The professor began to remove furniture in the room to see how Emily would react, and how she would occupy the space. “The spaces in which the old furniture had ceased to exist died, became spaces that could no longer be occupied, spaces that once were but now are not.”
The professor then alternatingly force-feeds then starves Emily. The professor penetrates every orifice Emily has (the ears being the most resistant). By filling up Emily with various tools, impediments, instruments, she became less of herself: she took up less space.
It’s a horrific experiment, and while it does read as torture, it has its roots in the works of Lucretius, Plato, the paradoxes of Zeno, John Locke, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
The professor goes on to perform experiments such as removing a woman’s teeth, lips, and tongue to see how speech and rational thought are connected; to see if fatal wounds can be healed by artificial insemination; if a human’s soul can be transferred into a dog if it eats enough of the human being.
Does it not count as torture if you’re able to quote and reference old dead white philosophers while doing it?
There’s a reason why people experiment on the nice animals rather than the vicious ones.
This book was unsettling. I found myself reading it faster to get it over with. Or maybe the book scratched the perverse part of my mind that wants to see how dark it can go. I’ve read interviews and excerpts of Elsby’s online, but this was the first full book I’ve read of hers. My interest was piqued from the Millions preview: “A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel.”
I was prepared and not prepared. I am a fan of horror movies, but haven’t really read a lot of horror - as gruesome as the movie Hellraiser might be, fiction allows for even more dehumanizing descriptions of what a tormentor can do to another human being. The cold, mechanical, rational mind of the narrator allows the reader to keep a distance. But there is also an otherworldlyness of Elsby’s book that feels right in line with the works of Clive Barker (on both page and screen). And maybe anyone who’s read/seen American Psycho won’t be that distraught reading this either.
With Elsby there is a philosophy behind the violence and horror. “I think I came around to violence the same way a lot of people do,” she said in a 2022 interview. “You grow up with the ambient threat of violence, and then there it is.”
“With a philosophical experiment, we must not only define our terms from the outset, but also recognize that those terms might and should be redefined as the experiment proceeds. This is how knowledge progresses.”
Horror itself feels like an experiment.
Why read horror? Could it perhaps prepare us in some ways for the horrors of life? Like the continuous news of hospitals and food aid organizations being deliberately bombed in Palestine?
Does it remind us of our humanity? That we are more than just a future corpse and would do anything to try to survive, to find that part of humanity within ourselves, and extend that empathy towards our fellow humans?
Most of the time, for those of us privileged enough to do so, we don’t have to think about our bodies. They just keep doing their thing. Oxygen finds its way into the lungs. Blood pumps throughout veins. Our senses sense.
And sometimes, we become all too aware of what is happening with our bodies. Cancer. Prosthetics. Heart attacks. Loss of vision or hearing. Colostomies. Loss of shelter. War. Hunger. Racism. Sexism.
And then there it is.
Horror can expose other imbalances in the world. The body, and how it can be mutilated, becomes a metaphor for grief, greed, desperation, addiction, or power.
“For we know how much space a corpse takes, but the human is so much more than that!”
This book, ultimately, is about a professor who’s had enough. It’s about men in power, and their fear, and how their fear of those with even more power, affects those without power. It’s a revenge fantasy for everyone who’s had to prove their worth to a world that is indifferent to them (and those in academia will probably get more out of this than the rest of us).
And how quickly the tables can turn, how quickly a book or a body can burn.
[ ]’s worst mistake? Just being one of many.