Book Review : Charlene Elsby - Violent Faculties (2024)
A long time ago, I was planning to have an academic career. I thought that becoming a professor was such a clever way to shield myself from the bullshit requirements of living in a late capitalist society. Although I got a useless master degree out of it, the whole endeavour was a fucking embarrassment that fostered a grudge I still harbor today. Charlene Elsby might be harboring a bigger grudge than I do, though. In her new psyonic mindfuck Violent Faculties, she explores all the anger at a topic she also obviously loves.
So, Violent Faculties isn't build like a conventional novel. None of Elsby's novels really are, but this one's structured like an academic thesis where her unnamed narrator is exploring different philosophical questions from one chapter to another by… uh, testing them on human beings. By that, I mean not in a Saw killer, philosophical dilemma kind of way, but more like in a Georges Bataille/Gunther Von Hagens let’s-slide-and-look kind of way and the vile nature of her experiments gets to her as much as it gets to you.
On the Practical Usage of Philosophy
Some of Charlene Elsby's protagonists are simply angry, other blur the line between angry and demented. The protagonist of Violent Faculties doesn't. She's fucked UP and she's using a scientific approach to try and answer age old questions about philosophy perhaps not meant to be anchored in practical reality, like "how much space a person takes?" or "do souls actually mate?" are not meant to be quantifiable unless you’re willing to cross boundaries into rape, torture and murder to get your answers.
Now, whatever the narrator does to her test subjects or whether or not she's eventually "going to be stopped" (let's face it, it's a Charlene Elsby novel. She won't) don't matter as much in Violent Faculties as her motivations for doing what she does. The narrator wants many thing: a) challenge the academic status quo b) anchor philosophy as something practical and most important c) anchor her distaste for human beings and conventional morals in some sort of reality. In other words: she wants to destroy everything.
The narrator's actions might not be relatable, but her motives kind of are? I mean, show me someone who claims to have never fantasized about force feeding their worldview to society in one way or another to stop suffering and I’ll show you a liar. That kind of genuine, thick creative tension between desirable and deviant behavior is why I always find time to talk about Charlene Elsby's work. Her character's flaws aren't poorly disguised attribute, they're flaws that marginalize them. They’re not antiheroes, they’re antivillains.
You can't ever quite get yourself to hate them.
Finding God (Or Lack Thereof)
I was afraid that the thesis "gimmick" (for lack of a better word) would get old quick and the chapters of Violent Faculties would end up blending into one another, but not at all. Charlene Elsby hasn't published fiction for like, decades, but she's experienced enough to have figured a way out what seemed to me like an inevitable problem with this idea. She figured it out in the best way possible, by channeling shamanistic writings in the style of one of my favorite working writers today, Blake Butler.
You read that right. There's a fucking plot twist to a fake PhD thesis. How fucking awesome is that? I won't ruin it in this review, but I'll this: there's only one way things can do for someone who is trying to alter the nature of her reality and Elsby elegantly finds that path for her character. There are so many ways a book like Violent Faculties could've been written that would’ve made it corny as shit, but it works here. It's a testament to the gracefulness of Charlene Elsby's writing, which is not known for this particular trait.
*
Violent Faculties is my favorite Charlene Elsby novel. The thesis angle gives it a structure that allows her to better express her ideas and lay harder into what I call "controlled bad faith" (that writing makes you question or not an author is fucking with you). It still fizzles into a frustrating abstractness at some point, but it feels more unnerving and purposeful here. Violent Faculties is coming out on February 27 via the always entertaining CLASH books and you might want to secure a copy early.
