Confused by Charles Bukowski · 2:30am Oct 28th, 2013
I went to the bookstore today and grabbed a book of short stories by Charles Bukowski. I found them hard to reconcile with my notions of story.
Bukowski wrote short, gripping, realistic first-person stories about his life. People say the most important thing to having a story is conflict, and his stories have conflict. But not the kind of conflict that has a sympathetic protagonist and an antagonist. More like life presented as a constant irritation, arguments and fights that are part of the garbage Bukowski has to wade through each day to get fucked and fed, like shitting. Just ignoble, repetitive conflicts that people create between themselves: Men jockeying for the alpha-male position, women trying to squeeze more money out of their men, onlookers enjoying the suffering of strangers. It's hard to say why these things feel like stories.
What puzzles me more is that Bukowski was an animal, and when I say that, I'm being unfair to animals. All he thinks about is fucking, fighting, eating, drinking, crapping, sleeping, and scraping together whatever money he needs to keep doing these things. A dog can love, but no character in a Bukowski story loves anyone else. There is no love or friendship. Everyone uses everyone. Men bring their women money, and in return the women screw them and cook for them, and that's all there is.
Something was deeply wrong with Charles Bukowski. Perhaps he was a sociopath. But a sociopath comprehends that other people have feelings and attachments, and learns how to manipulate them. Bukowski seems to have been an idiot savant, an autistic author who wrote powerful stories about people without believing that they had feelings beyond pride, hunger, fear, and anger, like Hemingway on steroids. Sometimes other characters in the stories show signs of caring or having morals, and Bukowski's character spews profanity at them and dismisses it as bullshit. He exhibits no curiosity, never wondering about anything that doesn't directly bear on getting sex, beer, or a bit of cash. A chimpanzee seems more human.
He was badly abused as a boy and was an alcoholic for most of his life, and he said his suffering helped him write. I would like to imagine that suffering makes a person more sensitive to the suffering of others, but I don't think it works that way. Bukowski, as he presents himself, was well aware of the suffering of everyone around him, but didn't care.
Was it all a show? Was Bukowski really a sensitive soul playing with a sociopath's persona? Was he a cynic who cared deeply but refused to admit it? Or does artistic mastery have nothing to do with intelligence or understanding? How could someone like Bukowski, who denied so much of human nature, be such a great author?
ADDED: I think I'm not getting my point across. Most theories of literature say that great literature gives insight into human nature. I think Bukowski had a very warped view of human nature. Yet his stories are powerful, and really get you into his head. My confusion is how someone can write great literature while having such a warped view of human nature. One answer could be that Bukowski was a cynic pretending to be a bastard. Another could be that Bukowski had insight into his own nature, and his ability to get us inside his head makes his stories great. A third, more pessimistic answer, could be that we can't tell the difference between literature that gives us insights into human nature, and literature that misleads us convincingly about it.
There's a scene in one story where he's hemorrhaging internally, coughing up blood, while riding in an ambulance with a lot of other people. He's on the top row, and he tries to swallow the blood to avoid coughing it on to the people below him. That was considerate, & touching. There's an entire story, "The most beautiful woman in town", where he shows compassion, although admittedly only for the most beautiful woman in town. I'm leaning toward the cynic theory. A cynic is a bitter idealist.
Well, it could be because he makes the world more believable in a different sort of light. Some people may tire of all that too feelsy, friendship and love conquers all concepts we see all too often in writing. Mostly in kids shows. So they prefer writing where this is no hope, no love, no happiness other than what can be provided through physical means. This might seem grim, but in the end, it might seem more believable to some people than love conquering ll concept from before.
If you go to college and never study and flunk out after two semesters you can say you've gone to college, but you can't say you've learned or otherwise accomplished any thing.
If you are a bastard and you suffer, all you necessarily become is a suffering bastard. The School of Hard Knocks still requires you to do your homework, same as Yale.
Your definition of "Great" may need a little work. For people who like stories about... the things he writes about, yes, he sounds great. For others (like me) who prefer their stories to be escapes from reality where imaginative vistas open up to new and beautiful worlds... no.
If I want to read something that will make me depressed and think of the entire world as a pile of poo, I'll go read our division's budget forecasts for the next three years.
Otherwise, I'm reading happy ponies 
Bukowski was a troubled soul that wrote troubled tales about troubled souls. He is "great" only in that he followed the advice: 'write what you know.' to an extreme. That's depressing, to be certain, but one can take that lesson from him and see how even if what he wrote was awful, it still moved readers of all walks of life.
I suspect at least some of Bukowski's reputation was bestowed upon him by the sort of critic who dreams he might like to have a life of drinking, screwing, public outrage, and drinking -- or, alternatively, by the sort of critic who believes that this kind of activity has a salutary effect on society because it's Real and Gritty, as opposed to that ivory-tower stuff that snotty little TA is always talking about, and she thinks she's too damn good for me, doesn't she?
Okay, I got off track for a moment. But in a society that thinks it's doing itself a favor by venerating street goons, it's impossible that someone like Bukowski could go unnoticed forever.
I think Modest Mouse summed up my feelings:
I find it important to not view talent and skill as an indicator of the presence of any other positive traits.
Brilliant artists are often horrible people. Look at Roman Polanski, Charles Dickens, Alfred Hitchcock, Ludwig van Beethoven, Orson Scott Card, Stanley Kubrick, Ernest Hemingway, David O. Russell, and that's before we get into the musicians (*shudder*).
Of course, there are stable, sociable creative geniuses, like P.G. Wodehouse, Hayao Miyazaki, Shigeru Miyamoto, &c., but they don't make the front page of Reddit or get chapters devoted to them in hyped-up "Tell-all" memoirs, so we don't hear about them.
1460086
More or less. And of course people make stuff up about stable people. "He read a lot of books and became a good writer" isn't very mystical or interesting.
1460049
You. I like you.
1460110
Of course, one of the main reasons we venerate gossip and tabloid-esque behavior is because we like cathartic reminders that celebrities are secretly just as horrible as the rest of us.
The trouble with assigning the value of 'greatness' to achievements of 'oh my gosh, he convincingly made it seem like he thinks that way in a literary work and made it seem all too real' is that it's not as great an achievement if it's simply documentary.
You don't win prizes for special effects makeup by having leprosy.
I've not looked at much Bukowski, but I think he is considered great mostly by people who can't really comprehend him (and are wounded by his ability to make it all too real) or people who'd like that to be great because THEY feel most people can't understand such feelings and should be made to understand.
I'm not sure nihilism is particularly original in 2013. If anything, I think we're testament to a sort of reverse Bukowski: creative work (for hire) persuading a wide range of wounded people that allowing their hope and caring to engage, is okay and even desirable
1460308
A hit, a palpable hit.
All views of human nature are warped, by virtue of the fact that no human can completely grasp it. Have you ever met someone absolutely convinced that people Are Always Good? I have, and it's a delusion just as damaging -- perhaps moreso -- than pure nihilism.
Perhaps the insight here is that some people really do, in the end, want to see the world burn. They've been conducting unpleasant social transactions their whole life and it doesn't seem there's anything else.
Honestly, I always felt a resonance with cynical, unpleasant characters who have no way to assume good intentions on the part of others. To some degree, I'm that way. It is undeniably unpleasant.
But it is undeniably part of human nature. Some of us actually are that way, to one degree or another.
For some, life is really that awful daisy chain of dog turds, awful thing after awful thing after hedonistic need after serving one's biology a thing resembling a meal. My life's improved considerably since those days, but I'm not exactly a ray of fucking sunshine as it is, and I think my stories reflect this, especially on my worst days.
I think I'm rambling. Sorry.
1460484 Seconded. I confess my immediate feeling was I wished to shake their hand, and steal it. (Both the line and the hand
)
> we can't tell the difference between literature that gives us insights into human nature, and literature that misleads us convincingly about it.
Well, what's "human nature"? Isn't Bukowski a human, running the same brain routines on the same wetware that the rest of us are? Aren't his experiences, as wholly devoid of higher consciousness as they are, human experiences? I'd agree with you that we should and must aspire to higher, but there are people out there who choose that path and thus there's nothing inauthentic about it.
I think there's a fascination to these stories of voyeurism; for us, of this is how the other side lives. One of the things I love in stories (and I'm speaking abstractly, not about Bukowski) is how they peel back the skin of our day-to-day world to give us a glimpse into someplace where the rules are different. This is why I usually stick to speculative fiction. But in this case, the experience sounds so divorced from my own experience of the world that there would be something interesting to get out of it anyhow.
There is one possibility that I am surprised that you are not considering.
Charles Bukowski could be honestly stating the truth of his personal experience exactly as he lived it.
It is far to easy, when we come across uncomfortable or alien viewpoints to our own to dismiss or excuse them. One common technique is to make the accusation of what amounts to lying - that the person is telling tall tales, or has an agenda, or has some defect, or is not being somehow 'fair'.
Stories of truly noble, compassionate humans stick out. The are told and re-told, and fictional characters with these traits are common in tales of heroic fantasy. Have you noticed that whatever is rare and special is so interesting that it is talked about a great deal, told and re-told, and made fiction of... while the common and average is generally ignored or deliberately overlooked?
Even those real world 'heroes' of nobility - few as they are - are made even more fantastically perfect in the retelling - Gandhi being a prime example. His strong, overt racism against Africans, his homophobia, his many bitter hatreds and petty acts of vengeance are all swept under the rug, so that history may record... for the general masses... a 'perfect' hero. He was far from it in real life.
Truly good people are exceptionally rare. This is why being compassionate and unselfish is even considered to be 'heroic' at all, instead of just 'normal'.
The most reasonable understanding is that Charles Bukowski was simply telling the truth of the ordinary. That is generally considered a subversive, egregious act, because it shatters the illusions that most humans like to believe about themselves. I don't think Bukowski was a psychopath, or strange in the least. I think he was just normal, writing about normal life as seen by what is almost certainly the majority of human beings. People really are as he describes them, for the most part.
Because if that were not true, there would be no grand canonizations of 'saintly' men such as Gandhi and King and others - such a thing as 'heroic, compassionate men' would be absurd.
Because they would be ordinary, normal, and unexceptional, and thus not worth fussing over.
What you have encountered, Bad Horse, is a man who is not bothering to write good-looking falsehoods about his own life, but rather who simply wrote about his own experience truthfully. He is committing the crime of agreeing to the shared lie that pretends that most people are better than they truly are.
1462096 That is one of the possibilities I considered: "One answer could be that Bukowski had insight into his own nature, and his ability to get us inside his head makes his stories great." My surprise in that case is that someone with such a constricted range of experience can write good literature. I could name a lot of other authors who wrote from a narrow view of human nature, and their work doesn't interest me the way his does.
1461207 I wrote, "One answer could be that Bukowski had insight into his own nature, and his ability to get us inside his head makes his stories great." It wouldn't be surprising for Bukowski's work to be authentic. But it would wreck my theories about literature if someone with a pathologically narrow view of human nature could write better literature than someone with a wider view. Frank Miller has a pathologically-narrow view of human nature, but that's why what he writes is bad literature.
I think Hemingway poses the same problem, but not to as great an extent.
I don't see why you would take that at face value.
You don't need to have insight into human nature to be able to reliably provide your readers with insight into human nature. It could just be that the stark contrast between your ideas and Bukowski's characters make your ideas clearer to you.
1462399
Skill at writing evocative prose about humanity does not equal skill at being human.
I see people I wish I was as good as all the time.
Still, theories are things to be challenged, just as my theory that humans are tiny scraps of good buried under a mountain of shit got challenged and rearranged. Cognitive dissonance usually happens upon exposure to nonsense or truly challenging things. If it's not nonsense, well, that leaves the latter, IMO.
What did it get rearranged into?
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That humans are a somewhat larger pile of good under a pile of shit in a lot of cases, and less often they're a mixture, and then more rarely they're a pile of shit covered over in a pile of good.
On more charitable days, that translates into "Humans are complex, and while they are frequently good on some level, trusting that is not always wise."
Why do you ask, out of curiosity?
1463070 I want to know what humans are like, and I want to know what you are like.
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Fair enough, I suppose, although I cannot personally recommend getting to know me.
1462399
Well, as others have said, that turns this from a human-nature discussion into a literature discussion, so let me ask you this. How would you compare, say, Bukowski to Steinbeck? Actually … no, better yet: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, because arguably (from what you've described of B.) what he's writing is basically about the same misbehavior and the same power games and the same surrenders to primal impulse, but without the veneer that we like to think separates us from the animals. (On multiple levels, if I remember correctly. It's been a long while, but I remember Gatsby's narrator as being one of the only sympathetic characters in the novel, and for the most part it sounds like B. is peeling even that away, throwing us right in the deep end with the sharks.)
Also, I agree laterally with 1462962: sometimes what makes a story profound is what it challenges. Your own recent Pony Play asks the question of whether something shocking is bad if it's what makes the characters happy. I wonder if Bukowski, in his own way (intentionally or unintentionally), doesn't get readers to ask the same.
Thank you, by the way. Thought-provoking discussion as always.
Best,
H