Zac Descending: the Attractions of Dennis Cooper

The novel is morbid by design: its word-people held in place so that a reader may return upon their every triumph and misfortune. Even so, Zac’s Freight Elevator, the latest visual novel from Dennis Cooper, is a special occasion to sequester oneself and to read aversively, in pained auto-oblivion, to the awful finish. Like the 2015 prequel, Zac’s Haunted House, the novel is assembled from hundreds of collected gifs, arranged suggestively in descending columns and chapters. Reading here is more falling than turning, like a Choose Your Own Adventure without options. In spite of its unremitting intensity, perhaps Cooper has never been so playful.

Few writers elicit as much squeamishness as Dennis Cooper, whose name seldom appears without distancing epithets like “infamous” or “controversial”; a gesture duplicated here only to note that such judgments are second-hand and contentless, a common response to a presumed-common response, making a citation of another’s offense. In Cooper’s pornographic novels, gayness is de facto and unnamed, and never treated as a social difficulty in itself. Furthermore, he makes no apologies for the sadistic killers and fatedly vacant youth who people the pages, nor does he pathologize them. In this sense, Cooper’s works are hopeless, but utopian. This relative autonomy is more likely to upset would-be censors than any explicit content per se. Then another self-protective reaction to Cooper’s writing is the critical appeal to a canon of literary transgressors who have been gradually assimilated to contemporary taste; and Cooper’s writing may be collated across time with that of Genet, Bataille, Burroughs, Acker, and of course, preconfiguring and in many ways exceeding all of the above in extremity, D.A.F. Sade. Cooper himself identifies a youthful phase of his own process with the Marquis in a bracingly plainspoken poem:

When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
ready to communicate
with Satan …

Sade’s licentiousness may have been impetus for a young Cooper to receive Satan into his prose, but it is ad hominem non-criticism to call any work sadistic, which denotes a disposition or worse, a disorder. Rather, properly Sadean literatures would encompass fantasies of mechanical insistence and quantitative obsession, unrestricted by any standard of propriety whatsoever. As Leora Lev notes, “Cooper’s writing styles and novelistic architectonics are more polychromatic and inventive than the aristocratic libertine’s clear but notoriously wooden style and monotonous structures of orgy-disquisition-orgy.” An angst suffuses Cooper’s work that is absent of Sade’s repetitious world.

Both Sade and Cooper revel in the sovereignty of writing, which allows for infinite torturous and permutatory designs upon the captors of the novel. But Cooper...