tory-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/looking-wrong-way-review-red-tory-huw-lemmey/"></div>What hits you 300 pages into Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell is how skilfully Huw Lemmey has depicted the occurrence of an irreversible shift in his protagonist&#8217;s political convictions. Having previously been a champagne socialist, as one might expect of a junior functionary in the UK Labour Party circa 2015, Tom Buckle finds he has ditched the champagne and become simply a socialist: “The more sex he had, the more distant he felt from the Party, from the centrist daddies who had been leading his hand — the closer he felt to the boys, to the binmen, to the shifting lights at night, the halos… He knew his old world had broken down; he could not go back and his Saturn was returning under a red flag.”
This is the moment Tom realizes that something novel has emerged to replace the “old world” we have witnessed crumbling for much of the narrative thus far. For months he has been attending “chemsex chillouts” — weekend-long sessions of drug-assisted group sex — which have increasingly been overflowing their putative Friday-to-Sunday confines and invading the mundane reality of the working week. The chillouts offer him an alternative social arena in which to immerse himself — a commons of fucking with strangers in place of office intrigues alongside power-hungry colleagues — but they also make him wonder if he is losing his sanity. Tom has become a regular user of a drug called MMT; the visions he has while he&#8217;s on this make it difficult to distinguish between the actual and the imagined.
His visions are of several types. Some seem to bleed from his unconscious into current affairs (one day he hallucinates a sexual partner turning into a giant hog, and the next the newspapers are full of the then Prime Minister David Cameron fucking a pig), while in others the direction of flow is reversed. The latter type of vision almost seems to be giving him ambiguous and disturbing lessons on the genealogy of our present political settlement. For example, a chapter-length set piece sketches the chain of human connections behind cross-European drug trafficking, inscribing all of this in the margins of Empire, both the ancient Roman version and the postmodern iteration, associated with theorists such as Tiqqun and Hardt/Negri.
Yet another category of visions, generally articulated in a tone of broad humor, involves real or fantasized sexual situations being gate-crashed by Jeremy Corbyn and other figures from the Labour left. These sequences act as doubles for the waking nightmares of Tom&#8217;s Labour colleagues, who have been blindsided by the experience of a real socialist  assuming leadership of a party (as Corbyn did in late 2015) that has been trying to slough off that part of its heritage for decades. The Corbyn visions don&#8217;t feel like repressed political impulses welling up from the depths, but, instead, like a mild form of psychic bullying imposed from without. (As we discover late in the book, this is not too far off the mark.) They certainly don&#8217;t seem to be the primary agent behind Tom&#8217;s political epiphany — that would be his relationship with Otto, a German anarchist.
Red Tory has a plot, which even becomes thriller-like in the closing pages, but it more often seems to resolve into concentric rings of thematic material which sometimes drift and cross. The Tom-Otto story is the innermost of these and for the most part is told in a tender, litfic-realist voice. Otto is warm and understanding, and Tom seems to become more three-dimensional the more time he spends around his lover. The two men&#8217;s encounters and estrangements create a context for Tom to act out his insecurities, project his fantasies, swing from admiration to hatred and back, take risks, retreat, change. In short, their relationship is for Tom also a type of apprenticeship premised on “[developing the] unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved,” as Gilles Deleuze has written. This education ends up feeling as political in nature as it is amorous.
That Lemmey chooses to show us the whole trajectory of Tom and Otto&#8217;s love story only throws some of his other choices into relief. A number of enormously consequential historical events (not least the referendum which led eventually to Brexit) crowd into Red Tory&#8216;s timeline, but since the book ends shortly before Trump&#8217;s election to the presidency in late 2016, Lemmey only gets to depict them in a state of what we can now see as severe incompleteness. We don&#8217;t get to see where they lead, nor what they have come to mean in 2020. Also, the book is so filled with references to real people, some of whom have all but exited the British parliamentary scene — all the way from bit-part players like Liz Kendall and Tom Watson to major ones such as former Prime Minister David Cameron and now-former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — that you wonder how a sufficiently comprehensive reading of the book can be pieced together several more years from now, or from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with British politics.
Maybe these things scarcely matter. Responding to events in the here and now, without excessive concern for whether subsequent developments will reveal one to have hit the target, is after all the remit of satire. But I don&#8217;t think Lemmey wants us to let him off the hook for this reason. There is something strategic about his commitment to including ephemera on the one hand and partially traced historical arcs on the other. Perhaps he means to remind us, with Gertrude Stein, that “No one is ahead of his time,” no matter how good a read we think we have on the times. Recent political history on both sides of the Atlantic has shown repeatedly that most of us do not. We are like the generals who — Stein again — “talked about the [First World] war… as a 19th century war although to be fought with 20th century weapons,” because they could not imagine what a 20th century war would look like.
Do we civilians know what 21st century war looks like, on whatever battlefield, or are we too lost in the fog of it to see? Red Tory is full of the tropes of insurrection — the “Red Falafel Thugs” with their croissant grenades, for example. These initially ask to be read as a satirical stylization of the conflict that is the focus of the book&#8217;s first half — i.e. that between the Corbynite Labour left and the Blairite Labour right — but take on a different resonance when, in the second half, it is revealed that a new front in the broader culture war perpetrated by the alt-right is underway.
The development of MMT has to do with the battle for the “psychotropic edge.” As Dr Laing, a rightwing scientist-activist explains: “the ‘psychotropic edge’ is&#8230; an attempt to recalibrate the values, experiences, outlook and ambitions of the young generation by means of new drugs. To turn drugs into a social movement that is chemically oriented towards Cultural Marxism. To literally brainwash the British, to flood out their courage, their love of their race and culture, to wash out their sense of racial pride and replace it with some sort of meaningless and relativist idea of ‘connection’ and ‘love.’” Dr Laing&#8217;s project is to develop an anti-MMT:
<blockquote>We have designed a plan. I have called it ‘The Albion Plan’: to infiltrate and capture the secret chemical formula the reds are using to manufacture this drug, and, with our own scientists, develop a drug of similar power and intensity. Where the Cultural Marxists use this drug to stimulate an uncontrollable political consciousness — a state of heightened awareness whereby the nature of capitalist bourgeois ideology is revealed in plain view — we will retro-engineer the drug to a new state, one in which a healthy fear and paranoia of difference is cultivated, drawing the user back to their own kind, nurturing within them a natural sense of family, defence, prosperity, kinship. Just as addictive, but the high will be so much more potent&#8230; Instead of brainless, open-armed refugee lovers, we will chemically restore the natural family balance, and in turn create great hallucinogenic visions of the pure ethno-state!</blockquote>
This reveal makes clear that the first half of Red Tory is a smokescreen; the message is that what really matters for a 21st century British socialist is not staking it all on a written-in-water conflict between opposing wings of the same social-democratic party, but (to paraphrase Otto) believing in those people who are trying to kill you.
It is probably true that, with Tom, we are only able to glimpse the broader picture by increments, otherwise the contrast with our comforting illusions would be too jarring. But in the UK the left didn&#8217;t make the adjustment in time. The Labour party continued to be mired in internal feuds until its catastrophic defeat in the December 2019 general election, and entirely failed to grasp how comprehensively it had been outflanked by Boris Johnson&#8217;s Tories with their simple offer to “Get Brexit Done.” If anti-MMT were made into pills, those three words would probably be stamped on them.
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Looking the Wrong Way: A Review of Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell by Spitzenprodukte

Looking the Wrong Way: A Review of Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell by Spitzenprodukte

11-27-mcelwain-hilbig

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/nothing-ever-ends-wolfgang-hilbigs-females/"></div>Thanks to the publication over the last three years of Isabel Fargo Cole’s translations of several of his shorter works and one longer novel, Wolfgang Hilbig’s writing is becoming better known to an English-speaking readership, as are the basic details of his life: he wrote his work, which also includes poetry, essays, and other fiction, during breaktimes while doing tough manual jobs, and defected to the West several years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His narratives may often focus on what it is like to be on the receiving end of the machinations of the East German state during its middle and later years, but Hilbig is not interested in bearing witness to these experiences as narrowly characteristic of that place and time. His work seems to take a much longer view — something that László Krasznahorkai articulates in his introduction to Sleep of the Righteous:
Whoever reads Hilbig quickly understands that nothing ever ends, and that there is specifically no end for the Germans, because those ordinary days contain within themselves a force: base, frighteningly motionless, dark, lurking in the depths, a monster that has not collapsed, that did not disappear.
Krasznahorkai seems to suggest that whatever monster was birthed by the DDR is still with the Germans today, and perhaps not only with the Germans. What monster, engendered by some political formation before the DDR, lurked in its depths, having likewise “not collapsed,” not disappeared? The Females, centering as it does on what is in one respect a febrile investigation into the immediate prehistory of the DDR, asks this question.
It does this by means of a bold conceit: its nameless narrator, having begun his story by spending a number of pages describing fruitless attempts to ogle the women who work at his factory through a grate in the cellar where he spends his days, tells us that just after he is let go from the factory, he finds that “all the females [have] vanished from town.” At first it is not clear quite how literally to receive this statement. Females (and women; in The Females this is an important distinction) disappear entirely from the narrator’s day-to-day encounters, but then so, it would seem, do virtually all human beings. The narrator instead spends his time in solitude, trying to recall the narrative of a pornographic tale he wrote years previously, imagining how he would justify its content to a court presided over by a woman, and looking for traces of the vanished females in the rubbish tips and trash cans of his town, the latter sometimes seeming to him to contain disembodied parts of the female anatomy:
I dug my arm into one of the trash cans. And I thought I felt hair, a fleshy hairy mound in the midst of the can whose contents massed around my wrist. Just as though I’ve managed to swallow my own fist, a labial circle closes, firm and sucking, around my lower arm, bent arm wrapped around the neck of my shadow, pressing the head of my shadow to my face, gingerly I’ve closed the fingers of the hand on that arm to form a fist, and for days to come, on the palm of my hand and between my fingers, I’ll find the smell of the heat that my fist clutched.
The Females is a queasy read, and passages such as the above can seem to contain overtones of the “apocalyptic masculine hysteria” the literary critic Amanda Demarco has discerned in some of Hilbig’s work. This kind of passage represents only one of the many textures to be discovered in The Females, however. The predominant one — impossible to give a sense of with only brief quotations — involves an extremely intricate soldering of one trope to another such that they form long chains which intertwine and must be unpicked from each other. Another way to put it might be that they form waves which in their interactions create complex patterns of interference.
For example, the novella opens with a sequence that ensures that we learn to associate women with eyes, visibility, and occlusion, as well as with the authority wielded by the state (which in East Germany was above all the authority to watch). Crucially, it is the German word Frauen which belongs in this chain in the original text, and not Weiber, the term used to designate “females.” Weiber is the anchor of a chain of tropes having to do with animality, rubbish, history — and hair. In other sequences, things are less clear cut, and it can seem sometimes to be Hilbig’s intention to overtax the interpretive impulse, to make it hard to work out if the trope we are considering is supposed to be associated with women, females, or with yet some other figure. Indeed, so much interpretive labor is required at certain moments that the chains of tropes snake off into obscurity, and the signifiers readiest to hand float free of whatever might be said to be their original referents, instead coming to designate new, as yet unthought concepts (in which respect The Females is an extremely distant cousin of Urs Allemann’s Babyfucker, a book that achieves a similar end by very different means, and an even more distant relative of Genet’s Funeral Rites).
Much of Hilbig’s effort here appears to be directed towards delivering us to the border between the thinkable and the unthinkable — which is also the frontier of the monstrous, since the unthinkable and the monstrous are overlapping concepts, as Richard Kearney and others have shown. The Frauen come to function as the mask of a thinkable monstrosity: the “coldest of all cold monsters” that is the state. The state is presented here in an ambivalent fashion. On the one hand, a state functionary — an administrator at the Workforce Steering Office who, of course, is a woman — is portrayed as visiting psychic violence upon the narrator when she tasks him with collecting trash instead of writing (he tells us that “if I ever managed to feel that I possessed an identity, if I was able to develop any nebulous ideal of my I, it was only through experiencing myself [&#8230;] in writing”). But on the other, the suffering generated by being the subject of such an oppressive regime does not seem to silence the narrator; instead, it seems to inspire bouts of eloquence, as is evident in passages such as the following:
to the state it seemed obvious that I owed it boundless, eternal gratitude. For ultimately it had created me…oh, there’d been a progenitive act of incredible intensity: outstretched in sincerest devotion my mother had let Father State bestride her in all the vigor of his beauty; the grandiose symbol of rebuilding rose precipitously before her and plunged into her body and to celebrate how she’d been favored, a sea of flags unfurled, the Party’s young guards waved them over the rite of this clean coitus; I was immaculately conceived and stood spotless amid the life that was being rebuilt, my brow was steeled, I appeared in the shape of hope …
It is hard to ignore the ecstasy of complaint here, which is only intensified by the fact that, as throughout The Females, the narrator&#8217;s language finds itself more than equal to the task of thinking through the destructive effects that the state has on the lives of its subjects. Something that can dwell so comfortably in the light of reason cannot really be a monster.
Real monsters live in a region beyond language and thought. Although they are by no means monsters, it becomes steadily clearer that this is also the region inhabited by the Weiber. They seem to flee in the face of language and figuration: late in the novella, the narrator is forced to conclude that the tropes which seemed to be clues to their presence (the hair, the trash, and so on) are nothing more than signs of their absence. The narrator searches for them tirelessly, but finds no trace of them beyond vague intimations of their departure.
In the end, the book feels like it turns on a riddle: how can the females have vanished if they were never visible in the first place? The antinomies of their disappearance can be reconciled if they are thought of as being like darkness: darkness can’t be seen, and vanishes when a light is turned on. The females come, in their way, to designate a kind of historical darkness that was present in the DDR, but perhaps not only there — a darkness that still exists, in the most troubling way, even when the light is turned on.
Near the conclusion of the novella, the narrator at last recalls an historical moment at which the females were actually present — which, indeed, is the moment when they came into being in the first place. Although it has been clear since near the beginning of the book that an abandoned concentration camp in which the narrator played as a child enjoys a privileged but enigmatic status in relation to the females, it is only at this late stage that we are allowed to understand that the existence of the females — and, indeed, of the women — stems from a specific moment of abjection which took place there:
Yes, I felt I must describe the females who had lived in the torment and simple solidarity of these barracks, where they were called females, because women staffed the guard details. That was where that honorific was invented: the females.
Knowing that the females were present once, if only in the camp, and feeling emboldened by this knowledge to believe that they remain objects potentially accessible by thought, he nevertheless finds himself entirely unable to substantiate their continuing existence, even if only to himself. He finally seems to understand that he has become like someone trying to solve another type of riddle: attempting to picture, say, the redheaded man in Daniil Kharms’s fragment “Blue notebook #10” who has no hair and, lacking mouth, nose, arms, legs, stomach, and spine, is not a man either; or, more compactly, like Alice when she tries to “fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out.”
Is the camp where — and when — the monster lurking in the depths of the DDR was born? Yes, in a sense. But things aren’t as simple as that. Hilbig’s point is not that the horrors of the DDR have their origin in the unthinkable violence of National Socialism, partly because in fact this is all too thinkable: we know it happened; we know where and when, for the most part, and who exactly did what. Hilbig is directing our attention to something really unthinkable, of which the separation into women and females is a particularly shocking local instance: that no moment of history can be weighed for its consequences by those living in its stead. The narrator seems to understand something of this when he says “If the females don’t exist, then I need not either.” If our understanding of history is so circumscribed, then so too is any claim we might make to be living in the present.
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Nothing Ever Ends: Wolfgang Hilbig&#8217;s The Females

Nothing Ever Ends: Wolfgang Hilbig&#8217;s The Females

Mycelium

Ross McElwain is a writer based in London, UK.

Ross McElwain

Echo Chamber: On Annette Weisser’s “Mycelium”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Writing “Alongside” — Not “About” — Art: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa

Art &amp; Architecture

Ross McElwain is a writer based in London, UK.