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dude-its-riley · 4 years ago

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Huge post - quotes I underlined whilst reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara.

They were wonderful, truly wonderful, and he knew it. And what's more, he did deserve them.

"You're a coward," he said to his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Tonight, I am a camera,

as if someone had patted away the top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.

Not just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories;

whenever he had smiled or laughed, he had reflexively covered his mouth with his hand,

the drip of all their lives.

It was a love letter, it was a documentation, it was a saga, it was his.

Spinster librarians and cardigan fags.

"Smile, but don't tell people your name."

Recede into the evening, a melting into history as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath.

Motivated by a fear that if he didn't move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left and about which he would tell none of them.

"Ambition is my only religion."

"You're not stupid," he said, quietly. "I'm just not explaining it well enough."

They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.

This is enough. This is more than I hoped.

He had the ability to imagine anything.

The phrase beating its rhythm like a heartbeat, thudding through his body like a second pulse: Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.

A what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again.

"Fuck!" he shouted. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

For hurting himself, for not letting himself be helped, for frightening and unnerving him, for making him feel so useless: for everything.

Only his rage was keeping him warm.

And he was sick with guilt.

"Fuck 'em," he said, "I'll stay here with you."

There was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted.

"Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past."

"The post-man. Jude the Postman."

You're just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self control.

Great ugly unmissable pleas for attention.

He could feel the smoke filling his eyes, pressing upon his eyelids like a shaggy warm beast.

It was as if the daily effort to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else.

His days were now hours: hours without pain and hours with it,

it's going to fester inside you, and you're always going to think you're to blame.

Why had she never told him exactly how poor, how ugly, what a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth, his life really was?

It lived on him like a thin scum of mold.

"Don't let this silence become a habit."

"Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?"

Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.

He could feel the creature inside of him sit up, aware of danger but unable to escape it.

A blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.

He stopped to take a breath, aware, suddenly, that he had been talking and talking, and that the others were silent, watching him. He could feel himself flushing, could feel the old hatred fill him like dirtied water once more. "I'm sorry," he apologised. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble on."

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

What is going to happen to me? he asked the sea. What is happening to me?

And yet he was always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of that month: Next month. He won't talk to me next month.

"There's something incredibly arrogant about your stubbornness, Jude," he continued. "Your utter refusal to listen to anything that concerns your health or well-being is either a pathological case of self-destructiveness or it's a huge fuck-you to the rest of us."

He will be reminded of how trapped he is, trapped in a body he hates, with a past he hates, and how he will never be able to change either.

My life, he will think, my life.

-part chant, part curse, part reassurance-

My life.

I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high:

The impossibility of finding someone to do such a thing for another person, so unthinkingly, so gracefully!

Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading,

Ah, you tell yourself, its arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

And while I didn't drive him off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.

He wished, suddenly and sharply, that he was alone.

He missed Willem intensely -

life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.

"And Jude-" But he didn't, or couldn't, say anything else.

"I know," he said. "I know, Willem, I feel the same way."

"I love you," said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it.

Who, really, would ever want this?

"Don't fuck this up, St. Francis," he said. "This is your chance, do you hear me?"

"I'm honored to be your weird friend."

Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.

He wants to hear Willem say such things over and over,

the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are - not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving -

"Don't make me go alone."

"You won't be alone. You'll be with JB and Malcolm."

"You know what I mean."

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better?

It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

"For someone who claims to be such a great friend, you sure as fuck haven't been around to prove it,"

He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he had never intended to play.

I don't think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn't want to eat. But it's for you, Willem.

He opens his eyes and experiences that strange, lovely sensation that his life is cloudless.

"You'll always be ugly, but that doesn't mean you can't be neat,"

It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick.

To think of him as someone reliable and hardy, someone they can come to with their problems, instead of him always having to turn to them.

He wanted to devastate them; he wanted them to feel as inhuman as he did.

Forgive me, Jude. Forgive me.

Forgive me.

His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive,

"You don't need to worry about me, Willem. I'll always be fine. I'll always be able to take care of myself."

"I'm lonely," he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling.

Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult.

Could he destroy everything he's built and protected so diligently for intimacy? How much humiliation is he ready to endure?

x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.

I felt bad for us, then, for being so stupid.

The sort of rage that comes with the realisation of one's gross inadequacy,

Believe me, because you believed me before; you are beautiful and perfect, and I never meant what I said.

He always answered the exact same way: fine, fine, fine; no, no, no.

To collapse against him the way he never had and start crying, to confess everything to Willem and ask him to make him feel better, to tell him that he still loved him in spite of who he was.

And the two of them stood there, wrapped around each other, holding each other for a very long time.

They would see how much time he had stolen from them; they would understand what a thief he had been, how he had suckled away all their energy and attention, how he had exsangstuinated them.

The way everyone looked the same when they cried, their noses hoggy, rarely used muscles pulling their mouths in unnatural directions, into unnatural shapes.

In the same, undefinable way that he had decided to kill himself in the first place - he had decided he would work on getting better.

This is crazy, he told himself. This is not a good idea. Both were true. It would be so much easier if he didn't have these feelings at all. And so what if he did?

"There are worse life sentences."

He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him - he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?

This, he realises, is what he wanted from a relationship all along. This is what he meant when he hoped he might someday be touched.

A strange queasy giddiness, that he is the one seeing it, that it being bestowed upon him.

-a warped curiosity? madness? pity? idiocy?-

It is as if they are bringing all the air from the room, from the apartment, from the world, into their lungs and releasing it, just the two of them, all by themselves.

"I mean, I'm actually really pissed. But. I. Am. Happy."

And this too he loved: he loved knowing that in those moments, he was making Jude happy, loved knowing that Jude wanted affection and that he was the person who was allowed to provide it.

"Oh well," he'd said, even though he could hardly speak because the pain was so intense.

Someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

As they enter the fire, they aren't burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.

Good, he'd praise himself after they'd hung up, after every time he'd kept his mouth closed against his own fears. Good job.

He was worried because to be alive was to worry.

They all - Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors - sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of it's minutes, it's hours, it's days.

The fact that I know this is sick means I'm not.

"No. I do this to myself so I won't hurt him. I'm doing this to spare him."

His face and body and voice and scent and touch,

the way his smile moves so slowly across his face that it reminde you of moonrise,

there will be the shirt with its dangling buttons, but the buttons will be sewn back in place.

This other person is always making a home for you,

laughing so much that you began to equate happiness with pain,

being extravagantly silly the way you never were as children.

So: happy. Yes, he was happy.

He feels massive beside Jude, something puffed and expansive.

You're mad because you can't figure out how to make him better and so you're taking it out on me. Oh god, he thinks. Oh god. Why am I doing this?

This is my little world, and I don't know what to do in it. He feels trapped, and yet how can he feel trapped when he can't even negotiate the small place he occupies?

Gobbled up this affection as a rat would a piece of molding bread.

"I am fifteen," he announced to the quiet room, and hearing himself say those words - the hopes, the fantasies, the impossibilities that only he knew lay behind them - he was sick.

The person he loved was sick, and would always be sick, and his responsibility was not to make him better but make him less sick.

"Jude St. Francis, my best friend and the love of my life, for everything."

If Willem could make him better, didn't that also mean that he could make Willem sick?

If Willem could make him into someone less difficult to regard, couldn't he also make Willem into something ugly?

He glimpsed at himself in the bathroom mirror, his stupid, pleased expression, as absurd and grotesque as a monkey dressed in expensive clothes, and would want to punch the glass with his fist.

"And for many years to come."

At one point he leans against Willem's side, from exhaustion and affection, but isn't even aware he's done so until he feels Willem move his arm and put it around him.

"I love you," he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice.

"You're Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend.

You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you."

"And who are you?" he asks, looking at the man who is holding him, who is describing someone he doesn't recognise, someone who seems to have so much, someone who seems like such an enviable, beloved person. "Who are you?"

The man has an answer to this question as well. "I'm Willem Ragnarsson," he says. "And I will never let you go."

The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.

"I can do other things in life besides cry, you know," although he was no longer sure that was even true.

Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

He ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straightjacket, but which he can pretend - if he concentrates - are Willem's arms in an embrace around him.

Dear comrade,

Dear comrade; Dear Jude Haroldovich; Dear Willem Ragnaravovich -

"You're safe, Judy, you're safe. It's over; it's over; it's over."

Now he stumbles through his days and wonders why he isn't, in fact, killing himself.

Let me get better, he asks. Let me get better or let me end it.

The cement box shrinking back around him until he is left with a space so cramped that he must fold himself into a crouch, because if he lies down, the ceiling will lower itself upon him and he will be smothered.

"Dear Jude," he makes out, "please" -

He has the sense that if he says Willem's name, then the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem's hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

It feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.

There is Willem, imprisoned forever in a one-sided conversation. Here he is, imprisoned as well.

In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow's sole prosthetic, and it is from this single branch that he hangs. Above him a rain is always misting, which makes the branch slippery. But he clings to it, tired as he is, because beneath him is a hole bored into the earth so deep that he cannot see where it ends. He is petrified to let go because he will fall into the hole, but eventually he knows he will, he knows he must: he is so tired. His grasp weakens a bit, just a little bit, with every week.

I knew I would survive, but I knew as well that survival would be a chore; I knew that forever after I would be hunting for explanations, sifting through the past to examine my mistakes.

To let him do what he wants is abhorrent to the laws of nature, to the laws of love.

See? This is why it's worth living. This is why I've been making him try.

So I tried, of course. I tried and tried.

That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse;

"Willem," I ask you, "do you feel like I do? Do you think he was happy with me?" Because he deserved happiness. We aren't guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it.

It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it's what he died believing.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

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dude-its-riley · 4 years ago

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Brutality and Violation in A Little Life

Okay, so, I just want to talk about this a little bit. I’m going to go into some pretty heavy spoilers for this book here, so if you haven’t read it yet, you should skip this post.

I’ve seen some people accuse and refer to the violence and abuse we see in A Little Life as “torture porn”, saying it��s excessive and unnecessary, using their own shocked reactions and otherwise dry-eyed responses during such scenes in the book to back up their claims. I want to address this, because I think it’s an entirely wrong take, and I’ll just explain why.

The entire point of A Little Life is to confront the reader with the reality of certain sorts of lives. And as Hanya Yanaghihara has said, some lives, the lives we don’t see, the lives we are often so afraid to look at, are violent lives, brutal lives, torturous lives. And this book specifically forces the reader to come to terms with those violent sorts of lives, and to come to terms with the consequences, with the results of people, specifically children, living through real violence and abuse.

The abuse Jude goes through in the book is extreme, yes, but not anywhere near impossible, or even improbable. These sorts of things DO happen to people, every day. Once again, just because we don’t see it, or hear about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It is. And what this book does, what makes it so important, is that it forces us, the reader, to look at something, and acknowledge something as existing, that we otherwise would likely turn away from and pretend wasn’t there. The book doesn’t allow you to do that. It MAKES you look, and so, it makes you see the people that have gone through the kinds of horrors Jude goes through. It makes you aware, whether you want to be or not, of their existence.

Now, in terms of practical story telling, the abuse and violence we see in the book is also necessary, and here’s why.

In order for the reader to fully comprehend why Jude is as damaged as he is, we need to see what caused that damage. Jude’s struggle in the present, his mental health issues, his self-loathing, his inability, no matter how many people tell him he is deserving of kindness and love, no matter how many people tell him he’s good, or extraordinary, his inability to believe it, the impossibility for him to believe it, needs to be explained. Because Jude’s life IS a good one, on the surface. He’s professionally and personally successful. He has a high paying, important job, he has numerous friends who love and adore him, he has enough money to live a comfortable life of privilege and luxury, he’s respected, etc… So why is he so messed up? Making vague, half-hidden allusions to a dark and abuse filled past wouldn’t be satisfying enough, narratively, to explain away WHY Jude hates himself as much as he does, why he feels the need to self-harm to such an extreme and devastating degree, why his memories haunt and torture him so persistently, why he’s so unable to make them stop. A Little Life deals largely in psychology, and patterns of behavior. Jude thinks very specific things about himself, all of which are rooted in the abuse he suffered as a child. His belief that he’s unclean, that he’s spoiled and guilty, his belief that he’s a bad person, his inability to say no, or to defend himself, or understand that he even is ALLOWED to defend himself, his cutting, etc… All of this is tied up, inextricably, with what happened to him in childhood. We, as readers, NEEDED to witness Jude’s past in order to understand his present. Without it, without witnessing specifically what it is that happened to him in his childhood, we wouldn’t have nearly the psychological understanding of Jude that we end up having. His struggles and difficulties and sufferings in the present wouldn’t make any sense to us. We would wonder, by the end, why it was he felt he needed to end his life, rather then the perfect understanding we’re actually left with, rather then the empathy we have for his choice, and so one of the driving and most important themes of the book (the question of justified suicide, of what makes life unendurable) would be lost, and that would be a massive failure, and make the book far lesser as a work of art. With the inclusion of Jude’s past, the detailed and unflinching view we get into his past, we aren’t left to wonder why he’s as broken and damaged as he is, we don’t question his pain and suffering, we don’t ever think he’s being overdramatic or self-indulgent. Instead we understand perfectly why he is the way he is. As Andy tells Willem at one point, make him tell you what happened to him, and you’ll understand why he is the way he is. Like Willem needed to hear the truth, as brutal and horrible as it was, we too, as readers, needed to hear it as well.

There’s one other point I want to address too, which I’ve heard some people posit as proof that the violence and abuse we see in the book was included only for the sake of shock value. They say during these scenes of past abuse, they felt more shocked than anything, but didn’t find themselves tearing up or particularly emotional, and this is somehow supposed to be proof that the scenes are excessive and unnecessary and only included to shock the reader.

To me, this claim only shows poor reading comprehension. It shows a failure to understand the view point presented in these flashbacks.

All of the abuse scenes are told from Jude’s perspective. We are witnessing them through Jude’s eyes. One point Hanya Yanagihara has made again and again in interviews about child abuse, about what makes it such a particularly awful thing, is that children don’t possess the intellectual or emotional capacity to understand what it is that’s happening to them, and so they aren’t able to process it at all. They aren’t able to comprehend it.

While these things are happening to Jude, then, while he’s being beaten, or emotionally, mentally, or sexually abused, he doesn’t have the mental or emotional maturity yet to comprehend why these things are happening to him, or what these things even are. And again, remember, these scenes are told to us through Jude’s perspective on them, his thoughts, his feelings. Jude can’t understand what’s happening to him. While we as readers can understand it, and know intellectually that what is occurring is a tragedy, and heartbreaking, Jude can only respond to it with fear and confusion. He doesn’t have the mental or emotional capacity yet to be heartbroken, or sad, over what’s happening. He only has the capacity to be confused and afraid. And those are the emotions we’re presented with during these scenes. Confusion and fear.

Early on in the abuse, Jude also responds in the way children do when something is happening to them that they don’t understand. He throws temper tantrums. He becomes violent, screaming and throwing himself against walls and onto the floor, rebelling in a confused state of pain and terror to something that he can sense is bad, but doesn’t yet understand WHY it’s so. Eventually, in response to these tantrums, his abusers beat him badly enough, enough times, that Jude learns responding at all to what’s happening to him only makes it worse, and so he learns to repress what he’s feeling. He stops throwing tantrums, he stops screaming, he stops crying, and he shuts down. Again, remember, these flashbacks are being shown to us entirely from Jude’s perspective. So he shuts down and goes entirely within himself, learning, even , to disassociate during instances of abuse, to pretend it isn’t happening to him. That he’s only somehow witnessing the event, not experiencing it. The scenes of abuse then take on a dreary, resigned, defeated quality. They’re MEANT TO. Because, again, we’re experiencing them through Jude’s perspective. The abuse becomes an almost mundane, agonizing and oppressive part of his every day life. An inescapable reality for him. A common and inevitable part of his existence. Jude falls into a state of despair. He isn’t consciously aware of feeling anything but that resignation, then, and we feel that resignation with him. Extremity of emotion is missing from these scenes on purpose, because we’re meant to feel what Jude is feeling, which is nothing at a certain point. He disassociates, detaches, and represses his anger and pain and fear. It’s the only way he has of coping with the brutality of his life.

I think it’s also important to acknowledge the sinister, creeping nature of the abuse, and how it’s portrayed, especially in regards to Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor. More than intending to make the reader feel sad, or heartbroken, the scenes with these two, main abusers are meant to invoke in the reader a real sense of unease and unsettlement and fear. We’re aware, in a way Jude is not, that these men are manipulating him, and that their apparent kindness is nothing more than a ruse. Our awareness of this reality, while simultaneously witnessing Jude’s ignorance and naivety, while witnessing his trust, is incredibly disturbing, because we know these men are going to molest him at some point. This isn’t meant to make us cry, so much as it’s meant to make us deeply uncomfortable and frightened for Jude. We know what’s coming, even as Jude doesn’t, and it’s awful to see. And then, once again, we experience the abuse through Jude’s perspective, and once again, because of his lack of emotional or mental maturity, because of his inability to fully understand what’s happening to him, the emotions we find conjured in us are ones of confusion and fear and despair, rather than extreme heartbreak. These scenes aren’t meant to make us cry, they’re meant to make us understand what Jude is experiencing and feeling during this period of his life, which is, after a certain point, just simply resignation, and an oppressive sense of inescapability. More than anything, it is an endless drudge of misery with no end in sight, and that’s the feeling we as readers are left with, because it’s what Jude himself is feeling. He rarely cries, he never shows anger, he never rebels. He never shows any extremity of emotion. He is, more and more, introverted and emotionally suppressed, and once again, that oppressive inevitability which marks his existence is the primary feeling we’re left with.

It isn’t until Jude is older, and able to mentally comprehend what actually happened to him, that the heartbreaking tragedy behind it all comes more to the surface, and the emotions Jude, and thus, the reader, go through are more extreme in their intensity. When Jude starts to realize, as an adult, the nature of what was actually done to him, that’s when we’re met with more emotionally charged reactions from him, and in turn, we find ourselves responding with more emotion. It’s why Jude’s struggles in the present are so heartbreaking, because he’s no longer able to separate himself from the act like he had as a child, he is no longer able to pretend it happened to someone else, to escape inside himself, to shut down emotionally. He’s hit with the full brunt of his reality, and it’s devastating, both to him, and to us.

Hanya Yanaghihara has said that children are far more accepting of terrible living conditions and abuse and ill treatment than an adult would be, because they simply don’t know any better, because they simply don’t know anything else. Whatever their lives are, that’s all they can imagine as reality. They can’t imagine anything past it. And that’s what we see with Jude. As a child, while all of these terrible things are happening to him, he grows to simply accept it as his reality, and can’t imagine a life beyond it, and so he reacts to it with a deadened resignation. There’s an oppressive, suffocating sense to what he’s experiencing, more than extreme sadness, and once again, we as readers are meant to experience that oppressive suffocation with him. When he grows up, and his life improves, and he learns that life can be not just better, but infinitely so, that’s when he starts to understand what happened to him, when he begins to understand the injustice and cruelty of it, and the heartbreaking aspect of it becomes more clear, to both him and to us.

So, in conclusion, the arguments or criticisms people level at this book, particularly in regard to the scenes of abuse, don’t, in my view, hold much, if any weight, because they seem to fail entirely to grasp the purpose behind any of it. It makes them uncomfortable, which it’s meant to, and because it makes them uncomfortable, they’ve decided, as a means of relieving that discomfort, to dismiss it as unnecessary and excessive and included only for shock value, as a cheap trick to ring emotion out of the reader. Again, these sorts of takes fail to understand the purpose or importance of Jude’s past being revealed the way it is. This book is uncompromising, and understands the necessity of facing the ugly reality of child abuse head on. It understands that it achieves nothing by skirting around the issue, or by coddling the reader and making the grim and horrific reality of its subject matter more palatable for them. It would do both a disservice to Jude as a character, and our understanding of why he ends up where he does, and a disservice to real life victims of child abuse, who aren’t afforded the luxury of getting to pretend that what happened to them wasn’t so bad, who aren’t afforded the luxury of looking at it askance and at a remove. The point of this book is to show the lifelong and devastating consequences of child abuse. Jude is unable to escape the pain and vividness of his memories. He can’t get away from them. He’s made to live with them every moment of every day of his life, made to relive the horror of his past again and again, and the reader too is meant to be unable to escape it, is made to relive those moments with him, precisely so that they can then better understand Jude’s suffering, and why life is so difficult for him.

That’s the entire point.

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