(Or, Fun with Overt Prosthetics)

[This is a fetal essay embedded in a letter, now proferred for your voyueristic amusement & delectation]

Another letter in the register of what Mary Daly calls "academentia." There's probably a way to integrate these thoughts into some wonderfully flowing account of my personal experiences, but some days I don't have the energy. It's a turtle brain day, which means that I can slog through logical argument, but the emotional motivations behind my thinking aren't easy to locate. Any high notes will be in a Mandarin key.

I've been thinking about our discussion of the regalia of carnivals and the way that it's spread to MTV and hit a point of popularity where, like much marginalia, it threatens to lose its own integrity and become just another pop condiment, a little spice for bland suburbia. Today's hell clown is tomorrow's video vixen in greasepaint. I hope that carnival geeks don't become the next hot thing, but even if they do I've found thinking about carnivals and freak shows helpful in understanding myself.

What interests me about clowns and others who make themselves up to enter the world of the carnival or circus is the element of choice in their actions. As opposed to the "natural monstrosities" of the freak show who, even if their monstrosities are faked, reputedly belong to a world of biological deviation, clowns and other performers choose to enter the world of the carnivalesque by making themselves up, literally "composing themselves." In a way this overt self-composition is a voluntary damnation. The carnival and the Commedia dell'arte that partially followed it grew out of medieval religious plays, especially entertaining depictions of Satan and Hell. Hell, then as now, was the locus of proliferating meanings and interpretations, a site of semiotic fecundity that theology proper desperately tried to constrain. Today, the closest equivalent space would be Halloween, the festival of signifiers joyously liberated from their contexts and subject to unexpected collisions, a night where Marie Antoinette might sit down at a bar table along with the cast of Giligan's Island and a six foot Hersey bar.

If making oneself up, composing oneself in greasepaint, contains an element of volunteerism, I'm curious whether there is a hierarchical relation with the greasepaint performers of the circus taking a back bleacher to the biological monstrosities of the freak show. You mentioned this vis-à-vis the individuals in Geek Love, where the boy with flippers occupies the top of the pyramid amongst his differently formed peers. Was this true of the greasepaint performers as well? Did they feel like paler imitations? I can't help but think of the moment in Batman Returns when the Penguin, a "natural monstrosity" and former circus performer himself, accuses Batman of being jealous because he has to dress up in a suit to be a freak while he, the Penguin, is the genuine article. Batman's response is to admit that "you may be right."

Batman dons a rubber suit and deploys an array of fetishized supplements that are, in principle, endless (Batmobile, batamarang, bat + anything ). In the right critical light, this overt fetishism reveals other fetishes that are more familiar and natural. Is the dildoesque Batmobile really that different in kind than other penis cars? Only in that the Batmobile so clearly revels in its prosthetic nature. The world of Batman is one in which dildos are preferable, a world where others' claim that their large cars mean that they have the phallus can be identified as tedious, deluded, and uninteresting.

This is not to argue that Batman, or for that matter carnivals, are "subversive"--an overused and perhaps not very helpful paradigm. Subversion, I would argue, inheres not solely in the aesthetic object or marginal social practice itself, but in the interpretation that makes it meaningful. Some things, of course, are more readily available to these sorts of interpretations than others, and to that extent "subversive" may be a useful label. But the discourse of subversion carries with it implicit claims to authenticity that I believe usually do more harm than good. All too often any discussion of something's "subversive" qualities gets derailed into a dismissive exercise about how the thing in question is plugged into the big machine or secretly replicates some of the values it purports to challenge. My response is usually to point out that of course it's plugged into the big machine and is in a dialectic with existing values--what else can we expect in this sublunary world? I'm more interested in how we can use such artifacts and practices in spite of their prerequisite ties to the reprehensible.

The carnival performer--and this would take much more research to begin fleshing out in all of its historical specificity and internal variation--enters a world of overtly constructed subjects. At least since Rocky Horror I've noticed people who, like Bruce Wayne, feel like freaks but have no biological marker for it, draw upon the indicia of the carnival as a visible supplement to the self. To name a few examples: Goth rock, The Crow, Garbage's video to "I'm Only Happy When It Rains," the "HumBug" episode of The X-Files, Jim Rose, and the Residents' CD ROM, Freak Show. Places where the carnivalesque and the Gothic overlap have some unique twists (although, given the carnival's roots in performances of Hell, these overlaps are not surprising). Like the carnival, the gothic is a place of proliferating meanings and uncanny parodies of dominant institutions and personalities. It is the world of the doppelgänger, the unsettling double, the black mass that bears uncomfortable resemblances to the real institution.

More especially for recent British--and to a lesser extent, US--culture, it seems to me that the gothic is a register for important meanings about being white and young. Is it any coincidence that many young white Brits during the eighties, screwed by Thatcher, and expecting to be bombed by Reagan, enacted a kind of ritualized mourning? Or that their sense of disinheritance was related to the exaggeration of white racial features that the gothic typically encourages? It's as if they were self-consciously entering the world of the marginal and dispossessed, but simultaneously disavowing any intention to appropriate the experiences of ethnic others. Their whiteface seemed to say "this is a white form of dispossession, an acknowledgment that our racial privileges don't pertain any more, that the exuberant possibilities of glam rock's glittering makeup and self-stylization have contracted into a pale corpse that subsists on sullen irony."

This racial element may be especially significant because of the role that non-white music such as Reggae played at this moment in Britain. In the right light, a Goth boy in his white facepaint and his high Victorian black could pass for Baron Samedi, the Vodoun deity who wears a top hat because it was the dress of the slavers. Even in dispossession, ties to history and (partially lost) racial privileges are present. If you're white and speak English, you can't evade the markers of racial privilege without overthrowing history. And most of us who came of age during the eighties, skeptical of the pretensions and compromises of the Baby Boomers, don't think such an overthrow is possible. So instead of a rhetoric of purity and revolution, you get irony and a parodic exaggeration of whiteness. The message isn't "we escape the status quo and will therefore overthrow it," but "being unable to escape history, we will parody dominant institutions and insignia to the point where they are no longer credible." A sulky form of camp.

The whiteface element in Goth rock brings me back to our video vixen. I think her made-up face looks in two directions. On the one hand, she carries the commercialized performances of the carnival far beyond their original audience and staple performers to a point where they threaten to become meaningless. For example, the clowns in k.d. lang's "Constant Craving" video have a pathos for me because of queers' marginalized status in a way that, say, Tori Amos in a clown suit and trying to appeal to sentimentality might not. On the other hand, Tori in facepaint or the lead singer of Garbage in punky makeup and surrounded by ugly clowns can point out how unnatural and constructed all makeup is--reminding us that any vixen is, in fact, made up. Given the right frame of reference either woman becomes the occasion for a discussion of how other, more naturalized things in her appearance--the carefully regulated body weight, her cosmetics and prosthetics (or cosmetics as prosthetics), the racial categories and confusions she occasions --are similarly made up. This discussion would not be a prelude to a call for some return to the "natural" (as if that were possible). Instead, if nothing is viewed as indisputably natural, then the political and historical factors that shape and limit our choices become paramount. Perhaps more importantly, identities and practices that derive their status from being identified as "natural" (heterosexuality, black people as athletes and entertainers instead of thinkers, men's "affinity" for guns--and, according to Gingrich, for shooting giraffes) can be seen as arbitrary and weird.

What attracts me about the regalia of the circus and the freak show is that it refuses to equate itself with the idea of the natural. The make up is resolutely artificial and overtly prosthetic. As with tattoos, the body is viewed not as nature, but canvas. For me, these things can be associated with a realm of proliferating meanings and alternate identities that I find comfortable and comforting (Hell, the Celtic otherworld, the carnivalesque, whatever you want to call it). Additionally, the circus seems to have a more complex and self-aware relation to the "norms" than some other marginal institutions because the circus and the freak show depend economically on the dominant culture. There is no question of overthrowing that culture or instituting a utopian alternative, goals which seem grandiose anyway, and bound to lead to an unproductive emphasis on purity or jockeying as to who is the most "subversive" or authentically oppositional. As we move into post-identity politics, hunkering after purity, even and especially pure identity based on pure resistance to pure oppression, is a historical cul-d-sac.

 Warren Hedges, English Dept., Southern Oregon University, 5/97