For the rest of the day, you can get any available issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern for $5. Yep. Just $5. This deal is only good through Friday (today), so stock up before the long holiday weekend. - - - - |
- - - - Copyright 2001 Turtleneck
- - - - The Royal Family
Review by Karl Erickson In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes of the difference between an act being done as a gift, with all of its connotations of connection, responsibility and community, and as a service, which is done in exchange, usually for money. A gift, most commonly seen in native cultures and small social organizations (such as families) stresses the binding continuance. The service on the other hand can be seen perhaps most easily in today's' world of doctors, social workers and psychiatrists, who help others out, but have a buffer between provider and receiver. With a gift one is, in a sense, obligated to return the favor, creating a continuous cycle-an ongoing relationship that is not easily broken. A service is usually a one shot deal, with no ongoing connection. The cash transfer takes care of all obligations. With a service there is neither need nor desire for continued intimacy. William T. Vollman's The Royal Family examines what happens when the outward service economy of prostitutes becomes enmeshed with the inward gift economy of family. Vollman has explored the world of prostitutes numerous times in his writings, extolling the view that what they provide is love, if only for a moment. This of course seems to be true only through the eyes of the receiver. Throughout his novels and stories are painfully misguided men who take the one-time transaction of cash for sex (or companionship) as something deeper, more intimate. These men are almost inevitably desolate of the outcome of their repeated encounters with these women of the streets, unable to comprehend why, even through their repeated patronage, the prostitutes don't treat them as lovers or significant parts of their life. In fact, the prostitutes often treat the men with greater and greater derision, using and abusing the loyal "johns" as well as taking their money. The Royal Family is the story of low-rent private detective Henry Tyler who barely functions in life as it is. Things go from bad to worse when his brother John's wife, Irene, disconsolate and pregnant, commits suicide. Henry was in love with Irene, who hesitantly returned his affections. Henry would also sniff Irene's dirty underwear when he could get the chance, and was possibly the father of her unborn baby. The Royal Family is also the story of Henry's quest for, and eventual relationship with, The Queen of the Whores. Originally hired by a Mr. Brady, who also employs John's law-firm, to find her so that he may employ her in his new Las Vegas casino-cum-whorehouse, Henry quickly abandons his employer and continues the quest on his own. Having found her, Henry becomes her (perhaps only) loyal follower. He completely gives himself to her and to the transient life of the prostitutes' world. It is this world that Vollman explores and explodes. While there are many points of entry in The Royal Family, it is the role of the prostitute and by extension, a life out side of the mainstream world, occupied by Henry, the child molester and police informant Dan Smooth (who here makes the slimiest Virgil to Henry's Dante ever), the prostitutes Domino, Strawberry and others, and the assorted pimps, bail bonders and hobos that exist in the fringe. This world is not presented as an alternative to the mainstream world, but rather as a separate reality with semi-fluid borders between it and the mainstream. Whereas Henry crosses over completely, his brother John dabbles, sticking his toe in by hiring prostitutes, only to have his world corrupted when one of his prostitutes encounters him in his mainstream world. What I wish to examine is this underground world's relationship to the mainstream, and how specifically Vollman presents the prostitute's role. In The Royal Family the queen, known to her subjects as "Maj," is the benevolent ruler of a gang of prostitutes, protecting them, offering them crash pads, drugs and her addictive, heroin-like spittle, like a very nice pimp. Some of her subjects adore her, some resent her. They all maintain a respect for her. The rest of the world knows of her as myth, if at all. Applying Lewis Hyde's framework of the gift to The Royal Family is a somewhat inelegant but enlightening treatment. Vollman maintains that the prostitute offers a gift to society, offering intimacy where there is none. According to Hyde though, what the prostitute does is provide a service rather than a gift, the cash exchange acting as a barrier. Crashing into this schema is the role of the Queen, who never explicitly sells herself in the book, though there are several scenes of her having sex with Henry and several of the other prostitutes. She provides a structure for the whores, a protective umbrella. In return they are expected to contribute to the society she rules, but not in a cash-for-services manner. It is, to echo the title, much more of a family affair, a communal group. This is distinctly at odds with the more capitalistic natures of several of the prostitutes, who are constantly cheating and scheming against one another and the queen. What Vollman presents then is the intersection between a gift economy and capitalistic one. The Queen's charity intersecting with the commerce of the prostitutes and the 'above ground" world of Brady and the legalized whorehouse he is trying to establish. What the Queen's methodology logically leads to is a communal, intimate network of allegiances, while Brady's ultimate goal is a guilt- and intimacy-free sexual encounter. It is from Brady's world and into the Queen's that Henry Tyler travels. From the beginning of the novel he is increasingly dissatisfied, to put it lightly, with the nature of his detective work: exposing cheating spouses, finding those that don't want to be found, and the like. He more often that not refuses to complete an assignment, warning his employer that they don't want to hate their spouse any more than they already do. He crosses a line, becoming intimately empathic with his clients, and tries to save them from themselves. When he can no longer tolerate this world he is cast, somewhat by choice, mostly be fate, in to the realm of the Queen. Henry must no longer maintain the cash for services barrier essential to the functioning of commodity culture. The stories of the individual prostitutes are slowly revealed throughout the sprawling novel. Each tells of the woman being cast out of "normal" society and into the fringe world of prostitution. After the inevitable fall of the Queen's realm and the dispersal of the main characters, Henry travels for awhile between a variety of "alternative" underground communities: the homeless in Florida, hobos in across the nation and desert-dwelling displaced persons. Depressingly, The Royal Family is like an indictment of the futility of communities outside of the capitalistic mode, which is untenable for all of his characters except for the barely human corporate slug Brady. Wracked with poverty at best, disease and death at worst, the fringe people that Vollman presents are lost souls, struggling to survive in a brutal world. Without the shield of the capitalist culture, the characters are exposed to the worst that humanity has to offer. By operating outside of the sanctioning umbrella of mainstream life, the hookers, pimps, homeless and others like Henry are not merely lost, but severely punished by the dominant culture, represented by Brady and his armed hooligans "Brady's Boys". It is a paradoxical message that Vollman sends, if it can be called a message at all; for in his world living in the mainstream culture is no life at all, as exemplified by John, Irene and their ilk, while to risk something different, a world free of the constraints, is doomed from it's inception. If there is any beauty and hope in this awesome, awful novel, it is Vollman's continued treatment of this other side of life. The way he handles his characters, despite their worst flaws, is moving and his evocation to live outside of society's prescriptions, if doomed, is redeemed by the effort, the belief in a possible freedom tomorrow, whether realized by sex, drugs, nomadism, or love. Even if that freedom is always receding into the future. - - - -
|
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.