I cut my thumb,
I licked the blade,
I sucked it up like lemonade.
Who’s kidding who?
My blood’s Mountain Dew.
I’m moving on,
The Philosophy of ‘Non-Fiction:’ Truth Claims in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
‘What were we doing out here? What was the meaning of this trip? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?’
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1979)
In 1981, American business journalist and author Joseph Nocera wrote a scathing diatribe for The Washington Post against the work of Hunter S. Thompson. ‘Thompson has given New Journalism a bad name,’ Nocera declares, ‘instead of being exhilarated by (New Journalism’s) freedom, he was corrupted by it. Instead of using it in the search for truth, he used it for trivial self-promotion.’[1] This demonstrates a larger debate around the distinction between Fiction and Non-Fiction, and a larger animosity from certain critics towards the Non-Fiction techniques pioneered by Thompson and his New Journalist ilk.[2] But what is a ‘search for truth?’ And why is Thompson so far away from this imagined standard? In this essay, I look to tackle these questions with regards to Thompson’s masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ‘truth claims’ and the concept of a ‘Creative Non-Fiction.’
The New Journalism, pioneered in the 1960s by the likes of Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe, offered, in Wolfe’s terms, ‘the full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective or emotional life of the characters.’[3] This was achieved through immediate, ‘gripping’ techniques previously associated with the realistic novel; techniques including scene-by-scene construction and realistic dialogue, approaching, in Wolfe’s estimation, some sense of people’s status life.[4] In other words, characterizing them with a place in society, hopes, desires and behaviours; making them three-dimensional. The ‘journalists’ became immersed anthropologists, interested, like their forebears in the realistic novel, in a sense of the lives of people, beyond the facts of people. Thompson takes this a step further by making himself a part of the story via a highly subjective first-person narrative (‘pure gonzo’[5]). A step that proved, for some, a step too far.
Fear and Loathing chronicles Thompson and his attorney barrelling through Vegas in a drug-fuelled frenzy, looking, as he continually reiterates, ‘for the American Dream.’[6] Nocera’s problem begins with the main drive of Thompson’s scattered, stream-of-consciousness narrative, which he sees as purely giving Thompson a writing ‘persona’[7] onto which he can project a compelling, but flawed, vision of the world; a lazy shorthand that ‘college students are particularly susceptible to.’[8] For Nocera, Thompson’s characterisation of self detracts from the journalistic ‘search for truth.’
Ken Hogarty argues that the New Journalism arose from the failure of traditional, ‘official’ journalism’s elimination of the personal voice to achieve an ‘objectivity’[9] which is plainly impossible. As he notes, ‘if nothing else, journalists’ world views, language, and personal histories coloured what they determined was important.’[10] Indeed John Hersey, an early practitioner of New Journalism, drew his own line as to where ‘objectivity’ lies, famously taking against fellow New Journalists Wolfe, Capote and Norman Mailer on the grounds that they were inventing as opposed to reporting.[11] However in his most popular work, Hiroshima, Hersey borrows the structure from the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey to link together the stories of six people who survived the atomic bomb. Though he remains relatively affectless in narration, the decision to focus on just six out of the dozens of people he interviewed creates its own kind of bias.[12] To Hersey’s chagrin, Wolfe wrote from the immersed perspectives of those he interviewed, perspectives he could never have known or successfully verified. For Hersey, Thompson’s subjective first-person narrative, awash with author’s statements one couldn’t possibly verify, like ‘Vegas is the meanest town on Earth,’[13] would probably not even qualify as a non-fiction style.
But, actually, Thompson’s statement is interesting, and illustrates a point (‘Vegas is the meanest town on Earth’). Mainly because it is followed by: ‘Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying: DON’T GAMBLE WITH MARIJUANA! IN NEVADA: POSSESSION – 20 YEARS SALE – LIFE.’[14] These two statements illustrate the two polarities in a classic dual concept of language. In Logical Positivism, language can be divided into either emotive or symbolic. Symbolic language is the statement or recording of thoughts, the rational, whereas emotive language is the expression of feelings, the poetic (or aesthetic). In this dichotomy, language is symbolic if it is verifiable; the emotive is for contemplation, whereas the symbolic conveys information. Morris Weitz criticized Positivist aesthetics, arguing that it’s not that authors don’t make truth claims, though much of their language is emotive, but that they make a different kind of truth claim.[15] Weitz suggests an understanding of ‘depth meanings:’ those meanings which, psychologically, are suggested by the aesthetic surface meanings of a work. For Weitz, ‘it is here that the emotive meanings of art become symbolic and where one is to look for the truth claims of literature.’[16] What Weitz takes umbrage against in Positivism is the notion that ‘meaning’ is reserved only for tautologous statements of pure fact, where, to him, ‘depth meanings,’ or ‘second-order meanings,’ have certain potencies too.
For example, in the excerpt from Fear and Loathing, the ‘depth meaning’ of these two statements about Vegas can be interpreted as a reflection of Thompson’s position; Thompson is ‘another ugly refugee from the Love Generation’[17] in a world gradually becoming more conservative (or ‘mean’). This evocation of a world where ‘Joe Fraiser, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like (Thompson himself) refused to understand – at least not out loud,’[18] is a ‘second-order’ truth suggested by the surface, emotive language, which may be false,[19] but presents itself for contemplation. As a side note, I would also argue that, in many ways, the ‘truth’ of this statement could be verified, by testimonies of the time[20] or by the facts that comprise it. On the semantics of verification, I echo Weitz’s sentiment: ‘To refute the thesis that truth is successful verification would necessitate a discussion as long as the whole of this paper. Anyway, it’s not particularly relevant to our thesis since, even if truth were successful verification, the second-order meanings of art can be, in many cases, successfully verified.’[21] Through discussing Positivism, we can argue that ‘second-order’ meanings in a narrative may possess truth, but does using them in Non-Fiction not undercut a factual narrative? Does Thompson’s invocation of a ‘truth’ centring on himself and his perception not intrude on (or perhaps infect) his reporting of the outside world? Hersey may have argued that a second-order meaning not reflected by and of itself would amount to an invention. But this is the central problem of objectivity; a world conceived in and of itself is an incongruity.
Nocera’s key problem with Thompson is that he accuses him of ‘catering’ to the prejudices of the counterculture, still an identifiable audience then, by propounding ‘intellectually fashionable’[22] stereotypes. Nocera notes a moment in the second part of Fear and Loathing where Thompson characterizes an argumentative cop as a ‘noisy little asshole,’[23] rambling: ‘I had been there with these fuzzy little shitheads… mean-tempered rule-crazy cops.’[24] To this, Nocera writes: ‘Thompson always liked to claim that what he was really after was the “truth.” These, then, are his truths. You have to be a member of the Weather Underground to believe they contain any lasting insight.’[25] And Thompson’s statement is definitely subjective, and prejudiced against the authorities of the time, but I think Nocera misses a key insight that proves to be fatal. To demonstrate this, I will look at Brett Lott’s discussion of Non-Fiction, and Ynhui Park’s concept of a ‘linguistic convention’ in Fiction.
Now, we must clarify, before going forward, our epistemology. Park summarises my position well: ‘There is no world tout court, no knowledge tout court. The world is made by the act of knowing it, and knowledge is constructed by a conceptual system. Since there are various ways of devising a conceptual system, and since knowledge is relevant to a conceptual system there are many forms of knowledge.’[26] Whichever way we explain/ think about (or narrate) the ‘unwashed mass of facts’[27] that constitutes our lives, it is only one of many. This is how Hersey’s style, minimal though it may be, still amounts to bias. From this, we can extrapolate that ‘art’ (or ‘fiction’) is just one of many symbol-systems, but one largely based in emotion and contemplation over cognition. For Park, the surface meanings of fiction are governed by a ‘linguistic convention’ which says: ‘the words and sentences in a linguistic product should not be taken as referring to any real things.’[28] Although novels, particularly realistic ones, may refer to things that are real (Park uses the example of Madame Bovary’s provincial northern France), ‘the convention says that the language in a fiction means what it means without its real referent.’[29] In other words: the ‘second-order meanings’ are its function and its cognitive surface meanings are either incidental, or serve the second-order meaning. Non-Fiction, on the other hand, is governed by the convention that its language is related to its real referent. So Thompson’s real referent then, in Nocera’s example, would presumably be the cop, and thus could we not say that his description is both indolent and partisan? Well, not quite. I believe that the real referent is not the cop, but Thompson himself.
Brett Lott introduces the idea of ‘the self as continent, and you its first explorer.’[30] For Lott, the ‘creative’ part of ‘creative non-fiction’ starts with you (or the ‘self’ that both Hersey and Nocera seem vaguely dismayed by, and that ‘official’ journalism has continually tried to eliminate). He explains: ‘without you and who you are, a piece of writing is simply nonfiction: a police report.’[31] As we have covered, subjectivity is inevitable when we choose to narrativize something, instead of this ‘police report,’ fact-sheet style of writing. For Lott: ‘when I begin to incorporate the sad and glorious fact that the way I see (the world) shapes and forms what it is to be seen, I end up with creative nonfiction;’[32] without this realization, Non-Fiction is merely notation. I would argue that Hersey’s ‘objectivity’ amounts to a narrative decisionto remain affectless (or ‘quietly recitative’[33]), and that it is only due to the subject of Hiroshima that this happens to be appropriate. It does, however, remain a decision nonetheless. What Nocera appears to miss in Fear and Loathing is that Thompson’s characterisation of the cop is not without its context. Thompson’s subject is himself: an ‘over-thirty drug dilettante’[34] in 1971, three years after Nixon’s election, and a year before his re-election.[35] Fear and Loathing remains ‘non-fiction’ because, though it holds the second-order meaning of a lamentation (‘’Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ… and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon’[36]), conveyed through the aesthetics of Thompson’s drug-fuelled trip to Vegas, the ‘real referent’ is always Thompson himself and his experience of said trip. Thompson discovers the ‘continent’ of himself to be a creature of melancholy, caught in the morose tundra of ‘a proper end to the sixties.’[37]
My contention is that, as soon as Non-Fiction becomes Creative (or narrativized), it is no longer related explicitly to the cognitive. It is related, like the novel, to the emotive or poetic, but this doesn’t abolish its status as Non-Fiction. To the question of falsity (‘in my attempt to put order to my days, am I deluding myself, inflicting an order that was and is nowhere to be seen?’[38]), we can only respond with further introspection. Our inability to find a true narrative means that we can only approach the self (and the world) with ‘a rigorous and ruthless questioning.’[39] We must find order in chaos without creating it, and the decision of where to draw this line ultimately falls on our own introspection. In this way, the task of writing non-fiction is tantamount to our very being. As in Creative Non-Fiction, we are all fallibly, but necessarily, working towards ‘an understanding of what it is that has happened… (an attempt) to see order, however chaotic it may be,’[40] and I think that Nocera’s criticism, and the broader criticisms held to New Journalism, are at best reactionary, and at worst degenerative. In the end, the only sense of truth we can ever hope to find is, and will always be, our own.
Bibliography:
Heyne E (1987), “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 479-490.
Hogarty K (1991), “Audit Them: Biographies, Autobiographies, and Other Nonfiction,” The English Journal, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 57-60.
Lemann N (2019), “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” The New Yorker, Conde Nast, April 22nd, 2019.
Lott B (2000), “Roundtable: What is Creative Nonfiction? Two Views,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 191-192.
McDowell E (1984), “Nonfiction Techniques Debated Anew,” The New York Times, 20th June, 1984.
Nocera J (1981), “How Hunter Thompson Killed New Journalism,” The Washington Monthly, April 1981, pp. 44-50.
Park Y (1982), “The Function of Fiction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 416-424.
Thompson H S (1979), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, St Albans: Paladin Books, an imprint of Granada Publishing Ltd.
Weingarten M (2005), The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, New York: Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.
Weitz M (1943), “Does Art Tell the Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 338-348.
Wolfe T (1975), The New Journalism (ed. Wolfe and E. W. Johnson), London: Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.
[1] Nocera J (1981), “How Hunter Thompson Killed New Journalism,” The Washington Monthly, April 1981, pp. 44-50, p. 50.
[2] McDowell E (1984), “Nonfiction Techniques Debated Anew,” The New York Times, 20th June, 1984.
[3] Wolfe T (1975), The New Journalism (ed. Wolfe and E. W. Johnson), London: Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, p. 35.
[4] Ibid., p. 46.
[5] Weingarten M (2005), quoting Bill Cardoso, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, New York: Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, p. 235.
[6] Thompson H S, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, St Albans: Paladin Books, an imprint of Granada Publishing Ltd., first mention: p. 14.
[7] Nocera (1981), p. 46.
[8] Ibid., p. 46.
[9] Hogarty K (1991), “Audit Them: Biographies, Autobiographies, and Other Nonfiction,” The English Journal, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 57-60, p. 57.
[10] Ibid., p. 58.
[11] ‘The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.’ Lemann N (2019), quoting Hersey, “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” The New Yorker, Conde Nast, April 22nd, 2019, p. 9.
[12] Ibid., p. 5.
[13] Thompson (1979), p. 44.
[14] Ibid., p. 44.
[15] Weitz M (1943), “Does Art Tell the Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 338-348, p. 342.
[16] Ibid., p. 344.
[17] Thompson (1979), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 62.
[18] Ibid., p. 27.
[19] Weitz (1943), p. 346.
[20] “I think he (Thompson) saw the generation as falling apart long before most of us who were still trying to be practicing members. It was pure inspiration,” Weingarten (2005), quoting David Felton, p. 250-251.
[21] Weitz (1943), p. 348.
[22] Nocera (1981), p. 49.
[23] Thompson (1979), p. 103.
[24] Ibid., p. 103.
[25] Nocera (1981), p. 48.
[26] Park Y (1982), “The Function of Fiction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 416-424, p. 418.
[27] Heyne E (1987), “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 479-490, p. 489.
[28] Park Y (1982), p. 418.
[29] Ibid., p. 418.
[30] Lott B (2000), “Roundtable: What is Creative Nonfiction? Two Views,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 191-192, p. 195.
[31] Ibid., p. 195.
[32] Ibid., p. 195.
[33] Lemann (2019), p. 5.
[34] Thompson (1979), p. 185.
[35] ‘But what is sane? Especially here… in this doomstruck era of Nixon,’ Ibid., p. 165.
[36] Ibid., p. 186.
[37] Ibid., p. 27.
[38] Lott (2000), p. 198.
[39] Ibid., p. 198.
[40] Ibid., p. 193.
Writing ‘Realism:’ Lucia Berlin and Raymond Carver
The works of Lucia Berlin and Raymond Carver represent two different types of Realism in short fiction. As a writer of autobiographical short fiction, it’s difficult not to catch myself tackling the dueling legacies of these two great writers.
Lucia Berlin’s style; conversational, free-floating, ‘you feel as though you’re gossiping with her at the table;’ seems to be less of a construction than Carver’s tightly minimal, savagely edited prose, but both aim to reach, albeit with different methods, a type of ‘Realism.’ I will look at Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ and Berlin’s ‘Angel’s Laundromat’ to explore these two distinct styles.
‘Carver’s fabled ‘Dirty Realism,’ often focusing on the everyday problems of blue-collar workers (including drug abuse, alcohol abuse and divorce), reflected his own life experiences through a form of minimalism which reduced prose and focused on surface descriptions. Oliveira describes a ‘voiceless desperation’ in Carver’s characters who, representative of a lower, desperate social class, are ‘not happy or satisfied with their social position.’
While this can be seen all over Carver’s work, a quick example from the story in question would be: ‘the man sat on the sofa, leaned back, and stared at the boy and the girl.’ In this line, we see Carver’s restraint, his absence of adverbs, almost reflecting a sort of journalistic objectivity which Kita has called, a process of ‘giving all his attention to the concrete and avoiding all possible abstractions.’ Later on in the story, Carver describes the man dancing with the girl on his porch: ‘the girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man’s shoulder. She pulled the man closer,’ the spare descriptions leaving us to read the subtext, or text, from our own perspectives. One feels compelled to talk about aging, or the generational passage of time in relation to this story, but Carver remains ruthless in pushing a certain ambivalence on his readers.
As Kita summarizes ‘Carver leaves the reader to decide, who, if anyone, is truly a victim or villain,’ and this method of ‘three-dimensional’ character sketching confirms Carver’s commitment to the realistic with a striving for a faithful depiction and exploration of the complexities and battling narratives in ‘real-life.’ In this sense, returning to Oliveira, Carver’s focus on the nuances of the everyday creates a space where ‘blank spaces are as important as the spaces filled with words.’
This Realist ‘ambiguity of interpretation’ is near-perfectly exemplified by Carver himself in the closing paragraph of ‘Why Don’t You Dance?:’ ‘She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.’ Just like the characters in the story, we are unsure of its exact ‘meaning,’ but, with Carver, what Oliveria described as that sense of ‘voiceless desperation,’ and the insecurity inherent to it, may, pointedly, be the defining consistent motif. We could almost interpret what Kita referred to as Carver’s successful employment of omissions, using ‘the spaces between the words to give a sense of evanescent and elusive feelings,’ lending his work the air of an anti-surrealist, blue-collar version of what David Lynch’s films tell us about the Suburban middle-class; there is always more to it. That beneath the veil of certainty and security, there is, in fact, ambiguity and insecurity.
Contrasted with Carver’s ‘dirty,’ spare Realism, Lucia Berlin’s claim to the 'Realistic' is conversational, confessional and free-floating, tending to lurch from recalled images and memories, emerging as a kind of cohesive whole by the end. In ‘Angel’s Laundromat,’ this can be seen in the first paragraph: ‘A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His hair white and long, knotted with raspberry yearn at his neck,’ the image springing from nowhere and providing a ‘root’ for the rest of her recollections. Like most of her stories, ‘Angel’s Laundromat’ follows an addict of some kind, an alcoholic Indian in this case.
Geoghegan writes that Berlin’s stories echo memoir writing; often being based on her own life, and her style of recollection resembling a particularly idiosyncratic, free-wheeling autobiography. As Geohegan notes ‘like most great storytellers, Lucia was a first-rate gossip. But her gossip was never banal. The best of it always connected to her life.’
This free-wheeling, recalled quality is characterized well by Power: ‘the waves of memory crash again and again in Berlin’s work,’ creating a string of associations and compacted narratives. Such an effect can be seen when, between describing the Indian who forms the subject of the story, Berlin returns to an earlier recollection of her elderly neighbour: ‘The only time I had spoken to Mrs. Armitage outside of the laundry… She gripped my arm with her cold dying hand,’ making us think of aging and fragility, pertaining to the following story of the Indian as though we can see the connections being made in her mind, roughly as if the reader truly were ‘gossiping with her at the table;’ albeit a somber, and profound, gossip.
Power notes that Berlin is a close relative of Carver’s ‘Dirty Realism;’ and indeed we can see that, similarly to Carver, there is always a certain ambivalence to Berlin’s work. The Indian depicted in the story is described as ‘very drunk, mean drunk’ but Berlin qualifies this with a very humanistic sense of sympathy when the ‘Angel’ of the title says: ‘I know just how you feel,’ causing Berlin’s narration to retort ‘anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.’ This faithfulness to complex human characters, to a world where, like Carver’s, ‘no one is wholly bad,’ approaching what Power calls a ‘universal empathy,’ shows a commitment to the Realism that both Berlin and Carver are indebted to.
Berlin’s personal narrative adds a more subjective and, thus, more honest dimension to Realism than Carver’s precise, snooker-cue pauses and spaces. Berlin doesn’t limit surface descriptions like Carver, describing Fourth Street as a landscape of ‘shabby shops and junkyards.' Though she does limit herself, her limits appear to extend only to the nature of recalled narratives. Berlin does not over-saturate us with information, she does however try to accurately follow the rhythms of human recollection and interactions, which gives the impression that no included detail is irrelevant. As Geoghegan summarises: ‘The moves she makes in her fiction shadow the peripatetic nature of intimate conversations.’
In choosing my style, I gravitated more to Berlin’s peripatetic, loose prose than Carver’s delicate constructions. Being that my story was married to a highly subjective first-person narration, I found Berlin to be a perfect influence, encouraging me to draw connections between memories and images, accurately portraying the ‘scattered’ quality of a stream-of-consciousness, and the complex nature of human interactions/perceptions. I do however think that it is always conducive to bear in mind Carver’s ‘loaded’ pauses for tension and ‘secret longings,’ particularly when dealing with the unique status insecurities of blue-collar characters.
The Ghost Town of Famagusta Bay
Our boat rocked in the wind as we sat in the middle of Famagusta Bay. Remarkably clear, the pastel sky trailed off, bright and gleaming.
There were seven of us on-board: five tourists, the tour guide and the Captain. On my left there was an older couple, a man and a woman around sixty. The old man was unassuming, but with a scrunched-up sort of face, like he was sucking some perpetual lemon. His wife wore an over-sized floral hat, slightly too large for her head. They sat near the edge; he rested one arm on the handrail and she gazed out at the sea. A younger couple sat further along the port side. The woman was beautiful with sun-kissed skin and long, silky brown hair billowing in the wind. She kept brushing hair off of her face, tucking strands behind her ears; the man kept an arm around her and peered through black wayfarer sunglasses. The Captain sat at the helm, wearing summer shorts and a shirt buttoned up to his chest. He didn’t talk much, but just held the wheel loosely, occasionally checking the map on the dashboard. Our guide was hairy and tanned with a wet, clinging yellow t-shirt. He stared out into the horizon, shielding his eyes from the sun.
We stopped moving. The beating sun and turquoise sea dissolved, fading away. There it was, a melancholy mirror: a pale reflection of the vibrant body of Cyprus. Like Alcatraz, it sat as a lonely and remote sinister blemish on the island, hidden away in its furthest corner. I was struck by a monolithic cornucopia of dilapidated hotels and greying horseshoe beach around the water’s edge. Like a resort, but uncanny, ghostly and ineffable. Fences and barbed wire dotted the beach, blocking entry on every side, trailing across the beach and disappearing into the sea. This picture in the distance seemed altogether too still. Dead: it seemed somehow new, and untouched, but wracked with decay all the same. As I stared into this bleak horizon, the guide began: ‘This was once the most popular resort in Cyprus.’
In the sixties, Famagusta accounted for fifty percent of the total hotel accommodation of Cyprus. One of the best-known tourist spots in the world, it accommodated Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot; the biggest stars of their day. Following the post-war ‘package holiday’ boom, thousands of Brits holidayed in Famagusta through the sixties and early seventies. It was Cyprus’s tourist capital. Famagusta had nine nursery schools, seventeen primary schools, and eleven secondary schools. It was a cultural centre too, with a library, an art gallery, a rich archaeological museum and a municipal marketplace. In the sixties, it saw industrial growth fifty percent higher than the rest of the country. Famagusta had a vibrant nightlife, cinemas, restaurants and bars; it flourished in an unforeseen advanced market of international tourism.
We looked out at this strange, unnerving spectre of a resort. Everything looked strangely rotted, even at that distance, a moulding, decayed yellow hanging over the buildings, as if the city’s very existence was choking the life out of it. The old woman with the hat glibly remarked: ‘stunning, isn’t it Richard?’
The tour guide glanced over to a dark, stony guard tower perched alongside the barbed wire. It was far away; he squinted in the sun. Seemingly satisfied, he went on, keeping one eye in the distance.
The Cypriot National Guard received support from the Greek government for a coup against the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios. Looking for a greater presence in Cypriot affairs, the Greek Cypriots planned a union with Greece. The Turkish Cypriots (who shared power with the Greek Cypriots since the UK granted the island independence in the sixties) responded by launching a military invasion. The Turkish invading force was code-named ‘Operation Atilla,’ but Turkish Cypriots called it ‘Kıbrıs Barış Harekâtı,’ or ‘Cyprus Peace Operation.’ The Turkish occupied the northern third, Famagusta took a hard shelling during the second phase and, within two days, the Turkish military fully occupied the city.
At this point, the young woman with the brown hair was leaning on the handrail next to me. She’d let her hair flop over her face in the wind, but between the strands sat a hazel iris. I stared through sunglasses at the depth of this colour, for a moment, as she contemplated Varosha.
By August 1974, the Turkish army occupied thirty seven percent of the whole island. The 39,000 or so people who lived in Famagusta (who didn’t perish in the bombing) fled into surrounding fields, believing that, after the initial violence, they could return. The Turkish Army, however, had already cordoned off Varosha for the UN buffer zone. The buffer zone, or ‘the Green Line,’ is gash slicing Cyprus in half: Nicosia and Larnaca on one side, and Kyrenia and Famagusta on the other. Permanently under guard by UN peacekeepers, the buffer zone now comprises three percent of the whole island. Anyone caught in Varosha today risks being shot on sight. In the decades since that day in August, people who made their homes in Varosha could only see the city through barbed wire. Once the modern quarter of Famagusta, Varosha remains abandoned over forty years later.
The guide suddenly stopped what he was saying, raising a hand to his brow. He stared at the guide tower and, after a nod, dismounted the bow. He explained: ‘that’s the UN telling us to go back.’ It appeared that, in agreement of making these trips possible, organisers pre-arranged some signal with the UN to indicate when we’d come close enough.
The fact that Varosha had remained exactly the same, completely frozen in time, struck a chilling note of the spectral in me. According to rumour, there’s a car dealership on Leonidas, Varosha’s leisure street, with a brand new set of 70’s Toyotas put out just before the invasion, still parked exactly where they were on that day. One wonders exactly what level of deterioration they’ve endured in all that time.
I stared for a further moment, as we headed back towards Larnaka Bay. In forty years, nothing had changed for Varosha. It remained an anomalous, dusty painting; a capsule floating through the winds of time. I looked back at the city, fading further and further from view, and spied a tower crane hanging over the skyscrapers, seemingly mid-swing, stuck in the seventies and beyond escape. I wondered how long it would take for all the old iron and steel to rot away, for the foundations to collapse, and for all these old, dying buildings to fall like dominoes. Perhaps then, in the crumbling and decomposed ruins, nature will fully reclaim the quarter, and it will stand as a monument to lost civilization, to the immovable immutability of man’s self-destruction and the ever-present cyclical return of the natural order. All that remained for now was an empty vessel.
this side of the mattress is not the sleeping surface
This began as a poem, and I’ve since re-purposed it as song lyrics:
–
I can’t feel the very bones holding me together,
the wobbling skeletal gel
of congealed soul-juice.
Or
The cantankerous, sickly curvature of a face with
eyes that see too much, like a shibboleth
of the 21st Century dream.
The yellowed white sheets are made up
of burns and wounds, decomposing remains, disregarded
in the rising smoke.
Its plumes of retreat and remand.
–
M.V.
There’s a monolithic tick of bass, anarchically simple; throbbing. There’s a sudden contorted, crackling death rattle permeating the room, hanging in the air like smell. It’s the sound of choking, murderous fumes blown through a nose. It’s the picture of a smoking bull squaring up to the matador with a dead-eye.
Without warning, in an instant, that plodding bass tap is transmogrified. Atop the naked ear: a new beast astride. By the alchemy of overdrive, from a cocoon of spitting, spluttering, immutable distortion emerges a primal, guttural lashing of power-chord violence. In the indecipherable hiss, from the depths: from the smoky din of the mundane… There rises a scratchy-throated warrior, one who rasps indignant to whomever will listen.
And listen they will.
word virus 