Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reason we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is a book that had sounded interesting to me, and when I got a copy of it through interlibrary loan I looked forward to cracking it. Then when I first started reading it I was pretty sure I didn't like it. The language was too showy, the characters too pleased with their own perversity. But I stuck with it out of lack of anything better to do.
I'm glad I did. The story of a group of circus freaks, most of them deliberately bred to be such, it offers insight that might not come out in another setting. Plus it turns out to be a lot of fun.
2 comments:
I guess you wouldn't be surprised to learn that I was immediately reminded of Tod Browning's movie when I read this. The power of that film was its verisimiltude - the characters were tragic yet also beautiful in their own bizarre fashion. All of them had been abandoned by horrified or deeply ashamed parents and had been forced to adapt to what the world offered. I'm thinking here about the real people who portrayed characters in the movie rather than the story itself.
The idea that parents would deliberately mutilate children in order to use them in a freak show feels distasteful to me even as I know such things have been known to happen. Then again, perhaps Katherine Dunn's point was that parents always bungle aspects of the child rearing process.
But perhaps I'm reading too much into a book I haven't read.
Your mention of Freaks brought me back. It was definitely an exploitation film in that it delivered the audience a sharp, simplified experience, but it didn't feel exploitative on a personal level. It turns out that Leila Hyams, who played the kind and pretty Venus, was also in Ruggles of Red Gap with Charles Laughton. The sideshow performers, not surprisingly, didn't have extensive onscreen careers. Although 20 years later there was a movie starring the Hilton sisters, the Siamese twins in the movie. And Johnny Eck, the "half boy" played birds in a few Tarzan movies. He inspired a Tom Waits song as well, "Table Top Joe." And of course I don't have to tell you the influence the movie had on the Ramones.
Your view on the book and its theme is actually not that far off. The parents aren't flagrantly abusive, beyond of course the initial disfiguring. But for them, and especially the father, the kind of children they have is an expression of their vanity. The kids do not come out well at all, and while the narrator is loyal (to a fault), it's not healthy on her part. The story is ultimately a tragedy.
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