The Room
by Hubert Selby Jr.
In pre-modern times before prisons became institutionalized, criminals were punished by shunning or exile; they were either ignored by other members of society or they were sent out of their villages to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Since prisons were invented, criminals have been contained and segregated from the general population and sometimes even segregated from the prison population when put into solitary confinement. Humans are mammals, specifically primates, and so social bonds and community are necessary for survival. Isolated primates become mentally sick. A notorious scientific experiment was once conducted on rhesus monkeys where one monkey was separated from his peer group by a glass wall. He could see them but could not associate with them. He became depressed and angry and when the lab technicians released him back into the rhesus monkey population, he became hostile, aggressive, and violent towards the other monkeys. Solitude had made him insane and so he had to be permanently removed. The main character of Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room is a lot like that rhesus monkey.
That main character, who I will call the Prisoner because he is unnamed in the narrative, remains isolated in his jail cell, waiting for his trial, throughout most of the novel. Unable to leave, save for meal times, his only escape is inwards into his own mind where he indulges in either memories of his childhood or fantasies involving either his pursuit of justice or indulgences in the torture of the policemen who arrested him.
The first thing to notice in The Room is Selby’s writing style, a continuation of how he wrote his previous novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The punctuation is minimal and follows Selby’s own invented rules. This makes his prose rush along at a rapid pace. It also demands a lot from the reader in a way that benefits his style; it is difficult to be a passive recipient of information when reading Selby since the writing demands you pay careful attention to what is happening, when people are speaking since there are no quotation marks. The narrative also shifts between first and third person which is something else to watch out for. This benefits the narrative because it shows you who the Prisoner is from an inner and outer perspective. The shifts from third to first person also draws you into his inner world in a way that might not be possible using a different writing technique.
Needless to say, the Prisoner’s childhood memories are not pleasant. Two persistent themes are his relations with the police and a snowballing sense of shame. From a young age, he plays solitary games where he pretends to be having shootouts with the police. Otherwise, his real life interactions with them are not so bad. In one scene, a policeman helps him when he gets bit by a dog. Another policeman helps him when he gets injured. But then there is a suspicious incident where the Prisoner is in a park and a cop hiding behind a bush jumps out and smashes his hand with a billy club then runs away. It’s an improbable story and one that marks the Prisoner out as an unreliable narrator. This is the story he tells his mother when he returns home with an injury. It sounds like the kind of a story a twelve year old would make up if he were doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and was too ashamed to say what really happened.
The theme of shame and dishonesty persist throughout the Prisoner’s childhood memories. Most of these revolve around sex as his thoughts keep coming back to stains on his pants from either urine or semen. Some of the incidents that lead to these stainings are narrated more than once with differences in details each time therefore reinforcing the status of the unreliable narrator. For example, one story he tells his mother is that the urine stain on his pants was the result of an incident with a girl. He says he urinated on her and she got him back by urinating on him; somehow she had good enough aim so that her urine stream landed precisely right on his crotch. Again it sounds like a story a child would make up out of shame for what really happened like losing control and pissing in his pants.
Another stain he gets on his pants is the result of the Prisoner and a girl fondling each other in a movie theater. He has to walk home and performs an excessive cleansing of himself in the bathroom so no one can see the stain left by the semen. And so the theme of shame and the attending cover ups through actions and lies persist. You might also notice the way the Prisoner lies to himself in his jail cell inner monologues to justify his mistakes as if his self-deceptions are the only thread of hope he has to cling on to. His thoughts are just as much of a prison as his cell is.
As he lies in bed, the Prisoner’s mind becomes a stage for the acting out of his fantasies. One involves himself writing an imaginary letter to the press which sparks a government investigation into injustice and police brutality. You might notice that the letter is neither detailed nor persuasive, but in his fantasies it is. This launches into a grandiose story of the Prisoner being lauded as a hero for standing up for justice and speaking out to the media and in the courts. He also daydreams about representing himself as a defendant in court. His cross-examinations of the cops who arrested him are deranged, unrealistic, and absurd. They serve the purpose of confusing the witnesses more than cross-examining them though that really doesn’t matter because the Prisoner’s objective is to humiliate them more than anything. These grandiosities are silly and pathetic, but they reveal a lot about the Prisoner. He is a man with a mediocre mind fantasizing about being a genius, but since he lacks intelligence, his idea of “genius” just looks stupid. It also tells you something else about who he is. People fantasize about what they don’t have. So what kind of man would have grandiose fantasies about being a hero and an intellectual giant? A nobody, that’s who. Also notice that the Prisoner never writes, let alone sends, the aforementioned letter. He only dreams about it because he is a coward and could never bring himself to do such a thing. Indulging in self-pity suits his self-destructive purposes more than being assertive ever would.
Then there are the torture and rape fantasies. In two scenes, the Prisoner imagines himself kidnapping the two policemen who arrested him, taking them to a dungeon, which he calls the kennel, and training them to be dogs in ways that are sadistic and homo-erotic. They read like gay BDSM sessions that have gone horribly wrong. In another scene, he fantasizes about the two cops kidnapping and raping a woman in the woods. If this passage isn’t disturbing enough, then you have to understand that there is a whole other dimension to it. This fantasy is about not just the rape but how the two cops get away with with their it so the Prisoner can use it against them as evidence during the cross-examination during the imaginary trial. Tom Waits once sang “you’re innocent when you dream.” The Prisoner really puts this idea to its ultimate test.
These fantasies make the Prisoner look absolutely repulsive. And yet they are only fantasies and they come from the mind of a chronically lonely man, suffering from inadequacy and shame to the point of despair. He wallows in an inescapable pit of depression and his sadism is an attempt to make himself feel superior to someone else. At some level, these fantasies are also a means of torturing himself. In one part, he imagines cutting off the cops’ eyelids and shining bright lights at them while using eye drops to moisten their eyes. He controls when they are allowed to get the drops in a combination of the psychology of water torture and physical sadism. This transitions into the Prisoner lying on his bed and holding his eyes open for as long as he can while staring at the lights and then closing them to form tears. Those tears are just as emotional as they are for physical relief. He also uses similar language to describe the way the police restrained the woman during her rape and how they restrained him during his arrest while pushing him into the back of the police car. By associating himself with his imaginary victims, we get a sense that his own thoughts are a means of hurting himself.
When the Prisoner emerges from his memories and daydreams, he is alone with his thoughts in his cell and nothing else. He gets obsessed with a pimple on his cheek. Every time he prods at it, the painful thoughts of the police start up again. To him, the pimple is disproportionately painful to what it actually is. To most people, such a blemish would be a minor discomfort but for him it is an excruciating reminder, like the semen and urine stains on his pants, of how worthless he feels. While suffering in his shame and isolation, such a trivial thing becomes magnified to a point of incomprehensible pain.Then while in his bed, his pants get stained again and he has to go to the mess hall trying to hide it from the other prisoners. He begins feeling nauseous and finally admits that nausea has been the only friend he has ever had. You can’t get anymore sick with loneliness than that. There is no way out of his cell, there is no way out of his isolation, and there is no way out of his mind. All three are his inescapable prison.
The subject of this book is a loser. He is a whiner, a complainer, a coward, a weakling, and a failure. His isolation is a double-bind since it causes him to be miserable while his misery drives other people away. Can you blame those other people for ignoring him? You have to admit that you probably wouldn’t want to be around him yourself. He’s just one of those problematic people you’d be better off avoiding. It is a discomforting thought that we might be complicit in this man’s loneliness and despair. On the other hand, by reading this book we get up close and personal with him. At some level, we relate to him. Is anyone happy all the time? Hasn’t everyone felt alone in the world at some point? We may not be as miserable as he is, but we have all been miserable at least once and the Prisoner reminds us of that. It is another discomforting thought that we might have something in common with such an unappealing person.
As unique and provocative as this novel is, there is one major flaw in the prose. There are at least three passages where Selby just goes on for too long. The most memorable one is the scene where the main character and a girl fondle each other in the movie theater. It goes on for a good fifteen pages and, honestly, that isn’t necessary. Once you know what they are doing, it doesn’t need to be excessively explained over and over again. We all know what a hand job feels like and don’t need it to be explained. There are a couple other passages where Selby just plain overshoots his mark. It is also a little too obvious at times that this novel was inspired by Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of the Flowers which, I have to say, is actually a much better work of art.
I can’t say The Room is for everybody. Then again, Hubert Selby Jr. generally isn’t for everybody either. It takes a certain amount of courage and dedication to finish a novel like this. The kind of courage it takes is motivated by the desire to understand someone who is not like we are, someone we would rather not know about, the kind of person most people would ignore. Then it also takes a certain kind of honesty to admit that we might have some common ground with such a person. It gives you a different perspective on life, but maybe one that is tragically important for understanding the human condition.
That main character, who I will call the Prisoner because he is unnamed in the narrative, remains isolated in his jail cell, waiting for his trial, throughout most of the novel. Unable to leave, save for meal times, his only escape is inwards into his own mind where he indulges in either memories of his childhood or fantasies involving either his pursuit of justice or indulgences in the torture of the policemen who arrested him.
The first thing to notice in The Room is Selby’s writing style, a continuation of how he wrote his previous novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The punctuation is minimal and follows Selby’s own invented rules. This makes his prose rush along at a rapid pace. It also demands a lot from the reader in a way that benefits his style; it is difficult to be a passive recipient of information when reading Selby since the writing demands you pay careful attention to what is happening, when people are speaking since there are no quotation marks. The narrative also shifts between first and third person which is something else to watch out for. This benefits the narrative because it shows you who the Prisoner is from an inner and outer perspective. The shifts from third to first person also draws you into his inner world in a way that might not be possible using a different writing technique.
Needless to say, the Prisoner’s childhood memories are not pleasant. Two persistent themes are his relations with the police and a snowballing sense of shame. From a young age, he plays solitary games where he pretends to be having shootouts with the police. Otherwise, his real life interactions with them are not so bad. In one scene, a policeman helps him when he gets bit by a dog. Another policeman helps him when he gets injured. But then there is a suspicious incident where the Prisoner is in a park and a cop hiding behind a bush jumps out and smashes his hand with a billy club then runs away. It’s an improbable story and one that marks the Prisoner out as an unreliable narrator. This is the story he tells his mother when he returns home with an injury. It sounds like the kind of a story a twelve year old would make up if he were doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and was too ashamed to say what really happened.
The theme of shame and dishonesty persist throughout the Prisoner’s childhood memories. Most of these revolve around sex as his thoughts keep coming back to stains on his pants from either urine or semen. Some of the incidents that lead to these stainings are narrated more than once with differences in details each time therefore reinforcing the status of the unreliable narrator. For example, one story he tells his mother is that the urine stain on his pants was the result of an incident with a girl. He says he urinated on her and she got him back by urinating on him; somehow she had good enough aim so that her urine stream landed precisely right on his crotch. Again it sounds like a story a child would make up out of shame for what really happened like losing control and pissing in his pants.
Another stain he gets on his pants is the result of the Prisoner and a girl fondling each other in a movie theater. He has to walk home and performs an excessive cleansing of himself in the bathroom so no one can see the stain left by the semen. And so the theme of shame and the attending cover ups through actions and lies persist. You might also notice the way the Prisoner lies to himself in his jail cell inner monologues to justify his mistakes as if his self-deceptions are the only thread of hope he has to cling on to. His thoughts are just as much of a prison as his cell is.
As he lies in bed, the Prisoner’s mind becomes a stage for the acting out of his fantasies. One involves himself writing an imaginary letter to the press which sparks a government investigation into injustice and police brutality. You might notice that the letter is neither detailed nor persuasive, but in his fantasies it is. This launches into a grandiose story of the Prisoner being lauded as a hero for standing up for justice and speaking out to the media and in the courts. He also daydreams about representing himself as a defendant in court. His cross-examinations of the cops who arrested him are deranged, unrealistic, and absurd. They serve the purpose of confusing the witnesses more than cross-examining them though that really doesn’t matter because the Prisoner’s objective is to humiliate them more than anything. These grandiosities are silly and pathetic, but they reveal a lot about the Prisoner. He is a man with a mediocre mind fantasizing about being a genius, but since he lacks intelligence, his idea of “genius” just looks stupid. It also tells you something else about who he is. People fantasize about what they don’t have. So what kind of man would have grandiose fantasies about being a hero and an intellectual giant? A nobody, that’s who. Also notice that the Prisoner never writes, let alone sends, the aforementioned letter. He only dreams about it because he is a coward and could never bring himself to do such a thing. Indulging in self-pity suits his self-destructive purposes more than being assertive ever would.
Then there are the torture and rape fantasies. In two scenes, the Prisoner imagines himself kidnapping the two policemen who arrested him, taking them to a dungeon, which he calls the kennel, and training them to be dogs in ways that are sadistic and homo-erotic. They read like gay BDSM sessions that have gone horribly wrong. In another scene, he fantasizes about the two cops kidnapping and raping a woman in the woods. If this passage isn’t disturbing enough, then you have to understand that there is a whole other dimension to it. This fantasy is about not just the rape but how the two cops get away with with their it so the Prisoner can use it against them as evidence during the cross-examination during the imaginary trial. Tom Waits once sang “you’re innocent when you dream.” The Prisoner really puts this idea to its ultimate test.
These fantasies make the Prisoner look absolutely repulsive. And yet they are only fantasies and they come from the mind of a chronically lonely man, suffering from inadequacy and shame to the point of despair. He wallows in an inescapable pit of depression and his sadism is an attempt to make himself feel superior to someone else. At some level, these fantasies are also a means of torturing himself. In one part, he imagines cutting off the cops’ eyelids and shining bright lights at them while using eye drops to moisten their eyes. He controls when they are allowed to get the drops in a combination of the psychology of water torture and physical sadism. This transitions into the Prisoner lying on his bed and holding his eyes open for as long as he can while staring at the lights and then closing them to form tears. Those tears are just as emotional as they are for physical relief. He also uses similar language to describe the way the police restrained the woman during her rape and how they restrained him during his arrest while pushing him into the back of the police car. By associating himself with his imaginary victims, we get a sense that his own thoughts are a means of hurting himself.
When the Prisoner emerges from his memories and daydreams, he is alone with his thoughts in his cell and nothing else. He gets obsessed with a pimple on his cheek. Every time he prods at it, the painful thoughts of the police start up again. To him, the pimple is disproportionately painful to what it actually is. To most people, such a blemish would be a minor discomfort but for him it is an excruciating reminder, like the semen and urine stains on his pants, of how worthless he feels. While suffering in his shame and isolation, such a trivial thing becomes magnified to a point of incomprehensible pain.Then while in his bed, his pants get stained again and he has to go to the mess hall trying to hide it from the other prisoners. He begins feeling nauseous and finally admits that nausea has been the only friend he has ever had. You can’t get anymore sick with loneliness than that. There is no way out of his cell, there is no way out of his isolation, and there is no way out of his mind. All three are his inescapable prison.
The subject of this book is a loser. He is a whiner, a complainer, a coward, a weakling, and a failure. His isolation is a double-bind since it causes him to be miserable while his misery drives other people away. Can you blame those other people for ignoring him? You have to admit that you probably wouldn’t want to be around him yourself. He’s just one of those problematic people you’d be better off avoiding. It is a discomforting thought that we might be complicit in this man’s loneliness and despair. On the other hand, by reading this book we get up close and personal with him. At some level, we relate to him. Is anyone happy all the time? Hasn’t everyone felt alone in the world at some point? We may not be as miserable as he is, but we have all been miserable at least once and the Prisoner reminds us of that. It is another discomforting thought that we might have something in common with such an unappealing person.
As unique and provocative as this novel is, there is one major flaw in the prose. There are at least three passages where Selby just goes on for too long. The most memorable one is the scene where the main character and a girl fondle each other in the movie theater. It goes on for a good fifteen pages and, honestly, that isn’t necessary. Once you know what they are doing, it doesn’t need to be excessively explained over and over again. We all know what a hand job feels like and don’t need it to be explained. There are a couple other passages where Selby just plain overshoots his mark. It is also a little too obvious at times that this novel was inspired by Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of the Flowers which, I have to say, is actually a much better work of art.
I can’t say The Room is for everybody. Then again, Hubert Selby Jr. generally isn’t for everybody either. It takes a certain amount of courage and dedication to finish a novel like this. The kind of courage it takes is motivated by the desire to understand someone who is not like we are, someone we would rather not know about, the kind of person most people would ignore. Then it also takes a certain kind of honesty to admit that we might have some common ground with such a person. It gives you a different perspective on life, but maybe one that is tragically important for understanding the human condition.
No comments:
Post a Comment