Wasps against toxic masculinity

Vasily Legeido - on Iain Banks' misunderstood anti-war manifesto

In 1984, long before English-speaking audiences knew the names of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, 30-year-old Scot Iain Banks published a novel that outraged one half of the readership, delighted the other, and shocked everyone without exception. Nowadays, Banks's debut, The Wasp Factory, can easily be called transgressive literature - an epithet to describe art designed to touch the audience, going beyond the generally accepted boundaries of the normal, first used by director Nick Zedd in the mid-1980s. At the same time in Britain it was compared to the so-called video nasty: this name, in the era of Margaret Thatcher, was assigned to low-budget horror films with an abundance of violence, which were censored and distributed in VHS format. The Wasp Factory's scandalous reputation continued many years later, when Banks had already become famous as a science fiction writer. But to reduce his debut to violence and shock effect is unfair: for example, the author himself called it feminist and anti-war, and some critics classified it as gothic and books about growing up. Why “The Wasp Factory” is really not a mindless exploitation, but a vault (albeit with shocking elements), Vasily Legeydo explains.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

“Two years after Blythe’s death, I killed my younger brother Paul, for completely different and much more serious reasons than those that forced me to deal with Blythe, and a year later I killed my little cousin Esmeralda, for fun, you might say. This is my battle score today. Three. It's been a while since I killed anyone and I don't plan to anymore. I just had such a period.”

This is how the main character, 16-year-old Frank Koldheim, teases his adventures in one of the first chapters of The Wasp Factory. He lives on an island in the Scottish countryside with his father and does not formally exist: there is no birth certificate or other documents that would certify his authenticity in the eyes of society and the state. Frank does not go to school - first he was taught at home by his father, and then he educated himself in the library in the town closest to their island on the mainland.

Frank's life on the family plot of land is somewhat reminiscent of the life of the shipwrecked children who settled on a desert island in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The teenager is mostly left to his own devices: his father is an eccentric misanthrope who spends most of his time conducting secret experiments in his office. Her and Frank's unspoken pact states that neither will interfere in the other's business. Apart from the two of them, the only one who regularly visits the island is an old woman who comes once a week with shopping from the city. In the city, Frank regularly communicates only with Jamie, a good-natured guy with dwarfism, with whom he gets drunk together to the accompaniment of punk bands in the local pub.

Frank spends almost all the rest of his time on the island. Despite this seemingly reclusive lifestyle, a teenager has no time to be bored. His entire existence is subordinated to almost military discipline and a clear system of rituals, the description of which takes up a significant part of the short novel.

The entire territory of the island is divided by Frank into places where he conducts rituals: Sacrificial Pillars, Snake Park, Skull Corner, Bomb Circle. Most of the rituals are associated with the remains of animals killed by the Franks. For example, the Sacrificial Pillars, designed to guard the approaches to the island and embody Frank’s power over it, are handmade totems made of branches with the heads of mice and rats, dead dragonflies and seagulls impaled on them. “The poles are my early warning system as well as a decoration, ” Frank explains. — Powerful infected things that block access to the island. These totems are my warning shot. If, after seeing them, someone still decides to set foot on the island, he should know what awaits him.”

Frank's main artifact, which he uses as a way to look into the future, is the titular Wasp Factory. It is a huge dial, turned into a labyrinth by a teenager. Frank launches the wasps he has caught into the center of this dial. Each division on the clock leads to a separate tunnel, and the tunnel, in turn, directs the insects to certain death. The direction they choose determines how they die: the wasp can be electrocuted, cut by blades, crushed. She may burn or drown. It can be eaten by ants, killed by a spider or a predatory Venus flytrap. Frank keeps the intricate mechanism in working order: lubricates the necessary elements, adds fluids, feeds the killers. For him, the factory is an analogue of Tarot cards, a way to look into the future. The way the next wasp behaves in the tunnel, and the way it dies - Frank interprets all this and applies it to his immediate concerns, trying to understand what the factory is trying to tell him.

Frank often thinks like a military man: like a sentry, he checks the boundaries of the island and makes defense plans in case of invasion by a mythical enemy. Skirmishes with animals in his interpretation represent epic battles. Everything in his life has its own name and purpose. Slingshot - Black Death, bicycle - Gravel, knife - Sure Strike. Despite his personal discipline and technical savvy, Frank in many ways seems too childish for a 16-year-old. His internal monologues often sound like the speech of a small child who has no ideas about social norms, good and evil. He spends his time like many boys: for example, playing war games or causing floods. The difference between ordinary children and Frank is only in the complex logistics and scope of these activities. The main character of The Wasp Factory makes bombs by hand, which he uses, for example, to kill rabbits. He also constructs huge dams and destroys them. And the structure of the factory is striking in its intricacy. Teenage sadism towards animals is by no means uncommon, but it is difficult to imagine the average teenager being as sophisticated and explaining his actions as Frank does.

When his father asks him if he has killed any animals again, Frank dryly thinks to himself: “Of course he did, otherwise. Where else will I get skulls and carcasses for the Pillars and Bunker if I don’t kill anyone? There is not enough carrion, the natural decline is too low. However, who can you explain this to?”

With this philosophical approach, Frank resembles not only a child who has not yet learned to fear death, but also a representative of some pagan religion known to him alone, a shaman and priest, for whom all processes are subject to invisible laws, much more significant than the life and death of individual creatures. For example, it is precisely by this logic that Frank kills captured rodents: he puts them in shuttlecocks and shoots them across the river into the coastal mud, where they inevitably die, and then - under the pretext that the unfortunate victims of his “tests” need to be buried - he digs up that part of the island where, as he knows, the family bulldog Old Sol rests. As Frank explains, “otherwise my father would never have allowed our family pet cemetery to be dug up - so the innocent animals had to leave the vale of sorrow in a not very noble outfit made from half a shuttlecock.” Having finally found the remains of Old Saul, Frank steals his skull and turns it into an altar, decorated with candles with wasps and the remains of other animals fused into them. By sacrificing the corpses of insects that died in the factory to Old Saul, Frank also seeks to understand the true nature of things, to look into the future, the inevitable and the one that will never come true: “I saw myself, Frank L. Koldheim, and I saw myself as I could be - tall and thin, confidently walking through life, determined and purposeful.” This is far from the only fragment of the novel in which the protagonist expresses dissatisfaction with his appearance. So what is it about his own appearance that he is so unhappy with?

The answer to this question turns out to be connected with the important role that Old Sol plays in Frank's mythology, and with the role that Old Sol himself played in Frank's life. As his father told him, when the boy was only three, a bulldog grabbed the child’s crotch for no apparent reason. Frank's genitals had to be amputated. Since then they have been kept in a jar of formaldehyde in the office, which his father always keeps under lock and key. Frank wants to get into this room and find out its secrets, just as the reader, with each new or nightmarish detail, wants more and more to understand what the hell is going on in this very strange family.

***

There is another important person in Frank’s life, who, however, until the very last pages of the book appears exclusively as a memory and a voice on the phone. This is the older brother of the main character, Eric, whose escape from a mental hospital acts as a catalyst for the main events of the novel. Like other mysteries of the Wasp Factory, Eric's medical history is revealed in parts. First we learn that Frank idolized his brother as a child, and he was a gentle, kind and empathic boy. Then it becomes clear that the trigger for Eric’s madness was a certain mysterious event, but what exactly it is becomes clear only closer to the end in one of those scenes for which moralizers dubbed the “Wasp Factory” a literary analogue of video nasty things. After this incident, Eric changes a lot. Soon, dogs begin to disappear in the town closest to the island. Later, owners and neighbors find charred bodies of pets throughout the area. And after some time, news spreads around the area that Frank’s brother is throwing handfuls of worms at the surrounding children, muttering something about the benefits of protein. All this is enough for Eric to be sent to a psychiatric hospital. But now, several years later, he escapes - and, it seems, with the doom of a character in an ancient drama, he returns to his native island.

***

The mythology of his own creation, which permeates and subordinates Frank’s entire existence, has another goal - through it the teenager asserts his masculinity. He needs this because he does not feel like a full-fledged young man, and realizes that he will never become a full-fledged man. Hence (and also because of his mother, who abandoned him after giving birth and left him in the care of his eccentric father) comes the hatred of women, the need to enforce army rules, and the passion for weapons and war games, which is off scale even for a boy. Hence the walks around the area, looking out for strangers, strict discipline and a penchant for militarism.

“This is a novel about gender,” says his colleague and admirer Neil Gaiman in a column dedicated to Banks. “This is a vast and strange topic for a book in which women seem to be almost completely absent.” Frank hates women and everything connected with the very concept of femininity." The main intrigue of "The Wasp Factory" is how Frank's misogyny, his reflection on family history, his own origins and mutilation, the secret of his father's office are connected with his crimes and the madness of his brother, burned dogs, handfuls of maggots blown up by rabbits, the need to assert his masculinity through the destruction of dams and the flooding of wasps with his own urine in one of the tunnels of the factory.

“My main enemies are Women and the Sea,” Frank reveals. - I hate them. Women - because they are weak and stupid, they live in the shadow of men, compared to whom they are complete nothing; and the Sea just drives me crazy, destroying what I built, washing away what I left, completely erasing the traces of my existence.” In modern terms, we can say that the entire existence of the protagonist of “The Wasp Factory” is subordinated to the principles and ideals of toxic masculinity. “Who, other than psychopathic children, arrogates to themselves certain privileges over the lives of others and tries to justify their right to these privileges? — says writer and literary critic Cassandra Farrin. — The answer, if the current political climate teaches us anything, is simple — it’s men in power. “The Wasp Factory is an attempt to understand how violence is rationalized.”

The fact that Frank's misogyny is based on a story of childhood mutilation told by his father (who is described in the opening pages as a pathological liar) refers to the social nature of toxic masculinity - which, according to Banks, is based not on biology, but on how people are manipulated by power, the expectations placed on them by society and themselves, and how internal experiences become a way to legitimize cruelty and inhumanity. All of Frank's actions - drunken partying at the club, attempts to symbolically mark the island as his territory with urine, abuse of small animals, stockpiling weapons - look like an obvious metaphor for how politicians and military leaders fight for territory, authority and influence. In their world, as in the world Frank invented for himself, empathy and humanity are perceived as signs of weakness, and any cruelty necessarily has a higher purpose.

The most vivid metaphor for how Frank tries to rationalize senseless violence, which in reality is nothing more than an act of sadism, is the Wasp Factory. The mechanism of death is monstrous both in its elaboration and in the way Frank describes it: at the same time with awe and as something completely normal that should not amaze or outrage. And only at the very end, when the protagonist nevertheless enters his father’s office and learns that his entire picture of the world was built on lies, toxic masculinity loses its attractiveness, cruelty becomes just cruelty, and the glorification of violence, which Frank has been engaged in one way or another throughout the novel, begins to seem like just childish stupidity.

Frank states: “Believing in my great trauma, in literally being cut off from all “mainland” humanity, I apparently approached my life too seriously, and, on the contrary, too lightly to the lives of others. Murder is my version of conception; the only form of sex available to me. The factory is like artificial life, an attempt to imitate relationships that in their natural form disgusted me. Well, it’s always easier to succeed in death.”

***

Banks did not hide the fact that for him the shock effect of the novel was one of the main goals. By that time, he was already desperate to publish without resorting to provocations. “By the beginning of 1980, I considered myself a science fiction writer, but a failed one,” he recalled. — From 1974 to 1979, I wrote three novels in the sci-fi genre. I decided that this was my genre. I liked both classic and modern mainstream literature, but I admired science fiction for the scope for imagination it opened up. I decided that these were the kinds of books I would write throughout my career—if I had one, of course.” The latter, by 1980, raised big questions for Banks: all the publishing houses he applied to politely rejected his manuscripts. Then the young author “with a heavy sigh stepped back from the huge canvases, exchanged paint rollers for thin brushes, took a more modest palette and tried to create what, in comparison [with science fiction], could seem like a miniature.” However, Banks’ “realistic” novel came with a twist: too much in it contradicted the British people’s ideas about “normal” books. And it was with this manuscript that Banks finally broke the vicious cycle of rejection. His book was published that same year.

Banks' idea worked - "The Wasp Factory" shocked and outraged many critics. And it’s hard to think of a better advertisement for a book or film than furious condemnation in the media. “It is a sick, sick world in which a respected and astute publisher is supporting the release of a work of unprecedented depravity,” said The Irish Times review. The phrase “a work of unprecedented depravity” would have looked impressive as an advertising slogan on the cover - but even without this, the fame of the Wasp Factory quickly spread throughout Britain, and then throughout the world.

Yet this does not mean that the blue curtains were exclusively blue curtains and that Banks's book was just a mischievous thought experiment without depth or hidden meaning. This superficial interpretation was later refuted by the writer himself. However, for many readers, “The Wasp Factory” remained primarily a black story about two abnormal brothers: a wasp tormentor and a dog arsonist.

“I thought I was writing a pro-feminist, anti-war novel,” Banks said. “I guess I have to accept that, despite all my aspirations, I ended up with a horror film for the general market, even though I didn’t intend it.” In another article, he revealed in more detail the ideas that he put into the novel: “The Wasp Factory was supposed to demonstrate how we are shaped by our environment, upbringing, and the distorted information we receive from those in power. Во многом Фрэнк должен был олицетворять каждого из нас — он был обманутым, направленным по ложному пути, зацикленным на чем-то, чего никогда не было, без причины озлобленным и отчаянно пытающимся соответствовать некоему призрачному идеалу».

«Сказать, что „Осиная фабрика“ при первой публикации получила неоднозначные отзывы, было бы преуменьшением, — рассказывает литературовед Кэтрин Кокс. — Ее называли глупой, посредственной, омерзительной, больной, садистской, испорченной». И лишь несколько рецензентов обратили внимание на то, что книга, вообще-то, высмеивает насилие и показывает его бессмысленность. Такое недопонимание расстроило Бэнкса. Но оно же подстегнуло продажи и послужило трамплином для успешной карьеры, продолжавшейся вплоть до смерти писателя в 2013 году.

«Осиная фабрика» — один из самых убедительных за последние 50 лет аргументов за то, что литература, перефразируя Оскара Уайльда, не делится на нравственную или безнравственную. Книги прежде всего бывают написанными хорошо или плохо, а уж задевают ли они при этом моральные устои почтенной публики и сознательно ли эпатирует автор в надежде наконец закрепиться в писательском сообществе — это вопросы второстепенные. И именно поэтому «Осиная фабрика» с ее шокирующими твистами, скабрезными подробностями и прочими эксплотейшн-приемами имеет такое же право считаться серьезной литературой с важным социальным подтекстом, как и произведения намного более целомудренные.