Barry Hannah's Ray: A country doctor's self-examination slides into chaos and reverie

Does anybody here remember Barry Hannah? I’m sad to say I was not even aware of this celebrated Mississippi author until I’d heard of his death at age 67 this past March. They ran an archival interview with him on Fresh Air, and I was enchanted by Hannah’s voice, his vaguely ornery pauses, and his conversation with Terry Gross about guns and religion and the habits of bad men. Wikipedia offers this quote from the author, which seems to tell us a lot about Barry Hannah: “Sometimes you don’t want to arrange your memory. I love the pure chaos of it and just the reverie of it for its own sake.” I’ve just read Hannah’s slim but utterly arresting and often appalling 1980 novel Ray (Grove, $15.50). The chaos and reverie breathes on the page.

As with Daniel Clowes' Wilson (see the preceding post), Ray’s eponymous protagonist slides back and forth between ecstasy and despair and seems to have trouble adapting to the modern world, to avoid becoming another “casualty of the American confusion.” He sees his country as fundamentally ambivalent, representing “rage and gentleness together.” Perhaps this is part of the reason why Ray sometimes fantasizes that he’s a veteran of the windswept battlefields of the Civil War, where he delivered many men unto death, as well as of Vietnam, where he, for real it seems, flew a Phantom. Ray is a resident of Tuscaloosa. Ray is both a doctor and a sick man, conducting on these pages a precarious and wildly deluded self-assessment that bleeds into self-re-invention via Hannah’s eloquent and rigorously subjective first-person prose. Ray’s a drunk and foot-fetishizing womanizer of insatiable lust. Hannah tracks Ray’s most recent stab at marriage to a blue-eyed woman with a “small friendly vagina,” and his observances of his similarly unhinged and even murderous friends’ misadventures. Ray is a frequently disgusting man and just as frequently charming and hysterically funny and audacious—at least within the confines of his fragmentary self-portrait.

Hannah endows Ray with a poet’s linguistic facilities: “I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny.” Hannah takes equal care to render Ray a probably hopeless misanthrope-asshole on the verge of total mental collapse: “I don’t feel that good about women anyway, nor gooks, nor sand-niggers, nor doctors, nor anything human that moves, with its zealous raving habits.” Already a published author of scholarly medical studies, Ray has threatened to write a paper on women, who, he muses, “enjoy revenge more than the worst Apache.” Yet Ray has his moments of surrender to all those less offensive things he most deeply cherishes: “To live in delight of healing, flying, fucking.” Ray is the music of a terrifying id, and Hannah neither glorifies nor condemns his subject. Rather, he recognizes something ugly and fascinating in Ray’s DNA that is common to more of us than we might care to admit, and not just racist sexist sociopaths from below the Mason-Dixon line.

Is This Desire?: Daniel Bergner takes readers for four illuminating walks on the wild side

There’s a school of ostensible common sense that tells us our sexuality is among the most banal aspects of our identities, but a modicum of experience tells us the particularities of individual desire can form the threshold of mystery, and of deeper understanding. You meet someone, you go to bed, you discover, to use a fairly common example, that they like it a little rough. Maybe a lot. How far do you follow their lead? Spanking? Choking? Bondage? Elaborately constructed rape scenarios? How dynamically does your desire tangle with theirs? Where does play end and perversion begin? How much of this is experimentation? How much is base need? What exactly is it that this person is chasing?

Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco, $32.99) penetrates the labyrinth of human desire not with the intention of carefully mapping it out so as to make future travels through its terrain safer. This slim, engrossing collection of four essays is concerned rather with the varying ways we cope or even thrive with the strange desires that drive us, that sometimes compel us to feel guilt or keep secrets, that separate us from the comfort of social norms. Hard conclusions are few, but the book brims with insight and compassion. However, unless you share some of the unusual proclivities reported, I can’t promise you’ll find it sexy. In fact, some of it is positively alarming.

Jacob Miller is the most harmless and, sadly, most traumatized by conformity of all Bergner’s subjects. Jacob has his quirks. An American, he really, really likes Toronto, which he considers some utopia of social harmony. And Jacob really likes feet. I know, the Toronto thing seems weirder, but it’s the foot thing that messes him up. He can’t even listen to a weather report promising however many “feet” of snow without going orgasmic. And he feels ashamed of it. Bergner’s relentlessly inquisitive but also respectful of Jacob’s fetish and his difficulty in accepting it—something certain readers may lose their patience with. (Bergner also uses this first essay to lubricate things tonally. Within the first few pages we know we’re not in for anything overly clinical, not after Bergner’s casual use of terms like cock, fuck, and, my personal favourite, one that Bergner perhaps coined: “footcunt.”)

Baroness is the presumably self-designated moniker of Bergner’s second subject, a female sadist—apparently a real rarity—and successful clothing designer, though her recent work has been tailored exclusively for latex. She maintains a happy marriage to a guy with a ponytail and zero interest in getting a brutal beating while getting off. Her other life is rife with activities that many might have a hard time defining as sex at all. She recounts the time she had a guy slathered in honey and roasted on a spit. “I feel like God,” says Baroness. “There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m about to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence... you can feel time stopping.” Baroness can be hard to take, but Bergner’s open-minded immersion into her populous milieu is fascinating.

The book’s longest essay, one which originated in The New York Times Magazine, for which Bergner is a staff writer, concerns Roy, a man convicted for molesting his stepdaughter. It is the book’s most controversial and troubling foray into abnormal sex, and in some regards its most vital. Roy is sympathetic. His actual crimes were relatively minimal. He’s nothing if not regretful, seeks therapy for his urges and is engaged to an adult woman with whom he’s open about his past. But Bergner, who has two children, questions how much he can trust Roy, while asking equally difficult questions about memory and innocence and how the nature of our sexual experiences change as we reflect on them. This essay ends with the book’s most eloquent and haunting image, one of Roy literally trapped on a fence as he attempts to flee a scenario that threatens to mirror the one that he claims first drew him into his longing for preadolescent flesh.

The fourth and final of Bergner’s essays is so good it’s worth the asking price alone—it even has a happy ending. It’s a love story, about Laura, a young woman who loses her legs in a car accident, and Ron, an older photographer resolved to the fact that he’s attracted to the disabled. Laura is Ron’s perfect woman: smart, cute and legless. The mind reels at the conclusions one can draw from such a kink—I immediately thought of something I read years ago about the inherent misogyny of Gauguin’s Polynesian women, with their absent/incomplete limbs. But Bergner addresses these concerns shrewdly and concisely, all the while stressing the polemical value of Ron’s erotic photographs of disabled women.

In each of Bergner’s essays, he shifts dexterously between the narratives of his central subjects and, just as interestingly, those working to better understand and treat their cases. Most often, Bergner finds the available theories to be in direct conflict, and a consistent debate concerning nature versus nurture lies at the heart of the matter. Bergner also draws upon art and literature to elucidate the stories he tells. He discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, of course, with regards to Roy, but also the life and work of Surrealist sculptor/photographer Hans Bellmer (author of the lead-off image) and German writer/artist Unica Zürn in relation to Ron. (I found myself wishing Bergner would also discuss J.G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash, made into the equally infamous David Cronenberg film, which has often been criticized as absurdly grotesque for its proposed equation between accident and injury and eros—a proposal which resonates intensely with Ron and Laura’s story.) Through it all there is much to learn about things like gender difference, genetics and cultural conditioning, yet there’s also a subtextual analysis of something more fluid and elusive: the psyche’s unwillingness to go with the program. When it comes to our intimate lives, The Other Side of Desire proves that each of us is stubbornly unique, and yet none of us are beyond some contact with the sublime.