"With something wriggling underneath it": Gary Indiana between Conspiracy and Obscenity

on reading "Resentment: A Comedy"

I found out that Gary Indiana died while crossing 3rd Street in Philadelphia, mid-bite in a pork roll, egg, and cheese. A splatter of ketchup and yolk ensued, and I spent the rest of the day scratching at the crusted stain on my shirt while scrolling through a Twitter feed full of remembrances, tributes, favorite passages. I had known him mostly as a chronicler of AIDS-era gay life, a vicious critic, and as a fixture of the Village scene—one of the last of the old guard to actually hold onto his apartment. Even Lou Reed died on Long Island, but Gary went out within spitting distance of Stonewall.

I didn’t know his fiction beyond Horse Crazy, and I certainly didn’t know him personally, though it now seems like everybody else did. I saw dozens of people share their favorite “email from Gary,” almost all of them delightfully derisive, in his classic style. The club of Gary’s correspondents was apparently not limited to the Ryan Ruby’s and Christian Lorentzen’s of the world; almost up to the day he died, the man seems to have actually taken the time to write back to schmucky nobodies like me.

I also didn’t know that he wrote true crime, but of course he did. He spent the late-1990s working on a loose trilogy—Resentment: A Comedy (1997), a roman-a-clef satire of the Menendez brothers’ trial, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999), a more traditional work of serial killer reportage, and Depraved Indifference (2001), about the mother-son con artist team of Sante and Kenneth Kimes. I ran over to Lot 49 Books on Girard immediately after work and found an empty space between Ibsen and and John Irving. Somebody had bought up everything but a dog-eared copy of Resentment.

I stayed up with Resentment until around midnight, buoyed along through the thick prose by his spot-on impressions of courtroom legalese, newspeak, and junky slang. It’s more of a novel than I expected. The book focuses mostly on Seth, a cut-rate magazine reporter splitting his time between covering the “Martinez” trial and profiling Teddy Wade, a straight actor playing a gay AIDS patient in his latest film. In the meantime, he crosses paths with dozens of recognizable LA characters, almost none of whom come off well. Indiana insists in an author’s note that “these people exist solely in the pages of this book, even if they evoke a superficial resemblance to people glimpsed on a city bus or a television screen.”

Though we can read the above as a bid for legal cover or a fit of postmodernist perversity, I prefer to take the author’s word for it. He’s not writing a novel with a “key,” but presenting “a narrative in which stray threads of reality reinforce an imaginary tapestry of the era’s psychic life.” He wants to tell the story of the trial and the media circus as it might be remembered and recounted “in a hundred years,” when “time has boiled reality down to a ball of ambiguous myth.” In this, Gary Indiana sets himself in an American tradition of documentary realism stretching from Dreiser and Dos Passos up to James Ellroy and Tom Wolfe.

The rough splitting invoked here between referent and text, history and myth, reality and image persists throughout the book. In the hands of a lesser writer, this kind of thing would quickly devolve into a kind of navel-gazing dorm-room solipsism: “Bro, even if we are in the cave, does that make the shadows less real?” Indeed, this is precisely what happens during the "Martinez” trial itself, as lawyers turn each dispute over facts into an amateur debate about epistemology. In the novel as in the courtroom, Indiana insists that what matters in such cases is not what actually happened, but what we do with the stories that survive and get told, the meta-stories that we tell ourselves about the facts themselves.

There’s a scene early in the novel where Indiana works this out by contrasting two perspectives on the Menendez case—that of Jack the former-student-radical-turned-conspiracist-cab-driver and Seth the writer.

“Everyone agrees there is something monstrous and awesome about the Martinez case, but some people have different reasons for thinking this than others. Jack hasn’t given it much thought at all. In Jack’s mind, the Martinez case figures among a dozen current events buzzing in the zeitgeist, things you hear about without really wanting to, Jack believes that events can be tricks to keep your mind off some unchanging structural flaw in human organization, circus acts designed to numb critical scouting. Something hidden, a conspiracy, or some sinister condition of things. Jack’s forever trying to figure such things out, attach a diagnosis, settle a meaning. Jack things that everything that happens hides something else. Since losing faith in dialectical materialism, Jack’s inclined to analyze things in occult terms, flirting with the belief that thirteen men control the world, that planetary configurations determine random-looking events, that each person has an astral double whose actions are unseen, metaphorical, the true text of his life. In his dreams he is a butterfly that dreams of being Jack.

“Seth believes the Martinez case resembles a large underwater rock, magnified by immersion, with something wriggling underneath it: blind albino fish, possible, or eyeless eels that have grown to unbelievable length, or prehistoric flint heads encrusted in mossy crud. He thinks the Martinez drama probably illustrates something but doesn’t mean anything, that you couldn’t use it, for instance, to figure out the kinship system of the primitive Bororo or extract from it the chemical steps to enrich uranium. But you could turn it into a Mardi Gras float or a tableau vivant in a wax museum, serialize it into Stations of the Cross, fashion it into topiary or embroider it on exotic underpants. Seth believes it is always better for something to happen than for nothing to happen, he likes it when life speeds up and propels him through a lot of stuff he can’t make heads of tails of at the time, arranging it later into complicated stories, yarns, fables, fairy tales, poems, jokes, verbal sculptures of any sort that bend in his mouth like putty.”

Two perspectives—Jack’s and Seth’s—on two relations: (1) the relation between the event of the trial and the total world in which it occurs, and (2) the relation between the representations of the trial that circulate and their “meaning” with regards to the fundamental truths of that world. Neither cares much about the facts themselves that are debated in the courtroom: Were the brothers really molested by their father? Did they really “lay in wait” to commit the crime in such a way that would constitute a charge of “first degree murder with special circumstances” and add years to the sentence? These questions are written off from the jump as more or less unknowable, more or less irrelevant to the real stuff of the trial.

Both are set apart from Indiana’s derogatory “everybody” for whom the trial is “monstrous,” exceptional. There’s nothing exceptional about it at all, for Jack, just one more example among many that points directly back to that “unchanging structural flaw in human organization,” a flaw he would have once identified with the class-struggle but now articulates through more mystical concepts—actions of an occult conspiracy or manifestations of a primordial principle. Either way, the trial appears as a little expression of some deeper truth underneath the quotidian world, or as concrete variations on an unalterable, abstract theme written in some Beyond that would constitute the “true text” of the Everyday. Jack sees something Evil at the heart of the world, but he carries on within that world without unduly agonizing about it. In this he is like so many conspiracy theorists who are too sensible to allow their supposed beliefs to impact their daily lives. One imagines the Puritans at the Salem Witch Trials, returning home to milk cows and argue over housework after 8 hours hearing about their neighbors signing Satan’s book in blood. The real wonder isn’t that so many people believe in QAnon, but that more of them don’t commit horrible acts. Disavowal is a hell of a drug.

Seth, for his part, asserts a cynical-secular view on the trial. Until proven otherwise, he does not accept it as one of the facts that “mean” something. Mathematics and chemistry mean something, Lévi-Straussian symbolic systems “mean” something—because they have real effects, and through these effects they organize human experience in a basic way. The Martinez trial is not of this order of primitive, structural fact, but on the order of illustration—not a monstrous exception, nor one example among others offering a direct line to the Truth of Things, but one more spectacle in the triumphal carnival of the 1990s. Not even a real event but already the representation of an event, not even tailor-made for this purpose, but off-the-rack. It presents itself immediately as amoral raw material, pure evental happening and gelatinous putty that can be shaped into narrative. As the novel progresses, the aloof journalist will find himself drawn into the scene, libidinally invested and thereby determined by it in ways he cannot easily recognize—as the protagonist of noir always is—though HE will continue striving towards the above as an ideal orientation. Disavowal by other means, in other words.

The author ultimately sides with Seth over Jack—better that there be a world and things happening in it, better that we live to tell the tale and that others live to listen, better that we see it all for what it is with the clearest eyes we can bring to it, and try to find the most adequate forms for its expression.

The form to which Gary Indiana returns most often when pursuing this goal is a kind of naturalistic simile. “The Martinez case resembles a large underwater rock, magnified by immersion, with something wriggling underneath it: blind albino fish, possible, or eyeless eels,” he writes here. Elsewhere he tell us that “up close, Bill Clinton looks like he’s covered in fresh fetal tissue.” These sorts of comparisons are not just his most memorable lines, but the sentences that give us the deepest sense of his outlook and his work as a whole, the nuclei of the corpus.

Gary’s writing is an art of the flesh, like Cronenberg’s films and Bacon’s paintings. But in his hands sex and murder alike are stripped of the essential obscenity and therefore of the transcendence they still maintain in for the latter artists. He refuses the romantic gesture at all costs, emphasizing the clumsiness and banality of both violence and orgasm. “Deflationary realism,” Christopher Glazek called it. The goal of the writer, for Gary, is not to uncover the disgusting creatures under the rocks of everyday life and show the world its obscene truth, but to get familiar with one’s own disgust, intimate with it—and thereby to know the difference between the merely disgusting and the truly despicable. To know that we are alone in this world, and to know that therefore we can make alterations, even if only at the margins. We cannot live just as we choose, of course, but we almost always have more freedom to dissent to the external order of things than we want to believe.