The Body Artist

A review of Porpentine's "Torture Works"

The title of Porpentine’s new collection (which brings together stories from across their analog¹ writing career) is a study in ambiguity: Torture Works. There are a lot of things that could mean—a plant that manufactures torture; a declaration that torture will do just fine, as theme, as subject matter; or, most shockingly of all, Porpentine could be quoting Dick Cheney, in the ultimate heresy for a liberal of the War on Terror era: declaring that torture works, as a practical matter, that Gitmo gets results.

I believe that each of these is a workable interpretation, for the title of a collection which spans a career stretching from the very birth of 2010s social justice culture, into a high, punishing aestheticist immoralism which does not stop at any political or ethical boundaries, and in fact willfully transgresses them, in search of beautiful suffering.

Ironically, given the later transformations in Porpentine’s career, early press attention to their work² (vide NYT) was overwhelmingly focused on the “Gamergate” issue.³ The early stages of that miserable controversy made Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest, a hypertext twine game, into a cause célèbre, but real enthusiasts quickly made it known that the real artiste of the Twine format was someone named Porpentine Charity Heartscape, who had elevated the genre into high art, with poetic hypertext games like howling dogs and With Those We Love Alive.

In 2015, Porpentine wrote an account of their experiences in the Twine developer community, and what those experiences revealed about the wider dynamics in queer artistic communities. This essay, published in The New Inquiry as “Hot Allostatic Load”, may be (for better or worse) Porpentine’s most widely read and discussed piece of writing. It is a critique of what we now call “cancel culture” or “callout culture”, not just from the left but from the “identity politics” left.

At the time that HAL was published, the most prominent left-critique of (what we now call) “cancel culture” was probably Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, which attacks the practice from the hard-edged Marxist-Leninist left, as a counterrevolutionary tendency.⁴ But even in the early 2010s, most young leftist types didn’t want to see themselves as playing the part of steel-eyed Lenin in a latter-day Bauman Affair. “Hot Allostatic Load” offered a very different critique of the “callout”, identifying the practice as a site of communal violence specifically against transgender women and their ilk, a way for a superficially progressive community to purge and ostracize its transfeminine underclass once it had grown tired of exploiting them.⁵

This was the period in Porpentine’s career when they began to move definitively towards traditional prose fiction (inasmuch as anything in Porpentine’s ouevre can be described as “traditional”). It was in 2015 that they were commissioned, by Rhizome, to produce what would become their first novel/la, Psycho Nymph Exile—a haunting, psychedelic fiction of queer alienation in an anime-inspired cityscape racked by anomie and sexual violence.

Torture Works contains only one work from this period of Porpentine’s writing, the short story “The Maximum Softness Capable of Being Exerted by All Machinery”, which is a kind of muted, toned-down Psycho Nymph Exile in miniature, a science fiction allegory of transgender alienation (in this case, the protagonist is a decommissioned killer robot, trying to live among humans that still fear and mistrust her). It’s not a bad story at all, especially when it loosens its grip on social allegory and turns its anhedonic, penitential gaze on the world of fantasy itself (“She allows the fibers of her hand to loosen by unseen fractions. The hand has not changed visually, but the wind whistles through it. She listens to her singing hand.”).

Still, in later fictions, especially of the 2020s, which fill up most of this incredible collection, Porpentine takes a hard turn from this socially-responsible, autobiographical “issue fiction” ethos, and towards a decadent, transgressive aestheticism. The new Porpentinian ethos is clearly announced by the pair of stories which open this collection, a pair of over-the-top, biology-defyingly violent vignettes—“Saving Face” and “Your Mother Has Fallen Out of Love With You”—which depict, respectively, a cannibalistic mafioso and an an almost comically psychologically cruel routine of sadomasochism. From those two stories, one might come close to concluding that the cover’s implicit promise of a book of pornography was in some sense accurate—albeit sexless, stomach-turningly violent “pornography”. That there is ultimately no clear line between an intense work of serious art and a piece of especially esoteric pornography meant for someone else’s strange predilections is a theme that is implicitly explored throughout Torture Works.

The meta theme of what Porpentine’s artistic journey and aesthetic project look like is explored perhaps most explicitly in two excellent stories that are high points of this collection: “Cunt Toward Enemy”⁶ and “The Body Crushes the Soul”. These two stories, in my view, offer a pair of coded manifestoes relating to Porpentine’s philosophy of art, aesthetics, and politics (or anti-politics).

The setup of “Cunt Toward Enemy”—a defusion expert confronting the newest invention of his terrorist bomb-maker nemesis—provides a very direct metaphor for the confrontation between the reader/critic and the work of art. That metaphor is made almost explicit at points:

Lazur trudges to the black case. He’d hoped that a closer look would reveal new details, but it remains surprisingly minimalist compared to Rubicon’s past work. He can’t see a way inside the monolithic form, it resists his touch, his interpretation. Maybe it’s a joke. A combustible koan.

and then later:

Rubicon tired long ago of the usual games. His last bomb was a gauntlet, testing every principle of bomb defusal, taking him through a history of explosives. Black powder, nitroglycerin, gelignite, dynamite, vintage plastic. A gift basket, a sample platter, a greatest hits anthology. It was almost interesting, after a career of defusing the same entry-level pipe bombs and garden-variety plastic explosives.

The point is, Rubicon doesn’t repeat himself. A pivot to minimalism makes sense.

But then the twist:⁷ that this bomb (appropriately, a “dirty bomb”) is built, with biometric sensors, so that it can only be defused by literally copulating with it, in a helpfully provided mechanical hole. This somewhat Ballardian premise is followed all the way through to its conclusion. Rubicon, the bomb-maker, is crippled and deformed by the explosion of one of his bombs in a previous run-in; now, the bomb, the work of art, becomes a literal prosthetic female organ with which the impotent artist rapes by envelopment the reader/critic.

The story is evasive on the function, the goal of this form of art—Rubicon⁸ has no stated political objective. One possibility is that it exposes and demolishes the moral hypocrisy of the critic, when he is confronted by art so prurient that he becomes necessarily complicit in its transgression:

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’d already tested your technical strength, took you through the intellectual games—”

“It wasn’t a game to me.”

“If you wanted to help people, you could have become a plumber. A nursing home aid. A shit scrubber.”

Lazur pushes a little deeper, trying to relax. The bomb hasn’t cut his dick off yet.

“But you became a bomb technician. You headed straight for the alien apparatus, the archonic convergence of it all. The screaming edge of the future.”

That complicity is enhanced by the public nature of criticism—this defusion is happening in a crowded shopping mall still reeling from a smaller, initial bomb. When he is finished, this is what we get of Lazur’s triumph:

But they’ll probably waive the sex offender laws for this one. Yes, I exposed myself to multiple children, your honor, but their molecular integrity was at stake…

His phone is blowing up.

Someone walks past him, covering their daughter’s eyes. Others join the silent migration. Soon, he’s the only one remaining.

It’s really the terrorist, the artist, who’s triumphed in the end, as the story’s enigmatic concluding paragraph makes clear:

You’re already thinking about your next bomb. I can’t stop thinking about it either. You tease my tight urban densities, drip hazardous chemicals through my logistic centers. My brain has become a list of parts and projections, the way I used to think about my favorite sports teams. You can barely move from your wheelchair but they’ll put the mandatory handcuffs on you, and you’ll look up at me with that crushed butterfly of a face, chained by those broken wrists, stuck in the exact second before ignition, knowing I ruined your beautiful explosion.

The countdown continues, in this red world.

There is more to explore about this remarkable story, more than I can properly attempt—for example, it’s set in a mall, filled with pop culture artifacts (Lazur constructs a modesty screen around himself with cardboard cutouts of leering video game characters), a temple of shallow cultural detritus which the artist/terrorist has to transform and sanctify through transgressive destruction. Even more intriguingly, the story is peppered with quotations from Krakatit, a 1922 novel by the avant-garde Czech writer Karel Čapek.⁹ I have not read Krakatit, so I can’t comment in too much detail on the significance of these quotations, but the implicit connection being drawn between early twentieth-century anxieties about dynamite and other high explosives with the GWOT fixation on the spectre of the “dirty bomb” is intriguing.

In line with its provocatively polysemous title, Torture Works contains several other stories, most of them very short, that touch on this War on Terror theme—the best of which is probably “Elf 9/11”, in book format sadly severed from the Blakean illustrative print (also by Porpentine) for which it was originally composed; there 9/11 and the GWOT black site are transformed into hallucinatory comic images—fantasy elves being harvested for their fluids and then crucified on icebergs for unclear, 9/11-related purposes. The denial of moral seriousness to these subjects is exactly in line with the rest of Porpentine’s immoralism and denial of ideological categories.

The height of this anti-political theme, and a fascinating refraction of “Hot Allostatic Load”, is found in the other highly theoretical story in this collection (while also being one of its most emotionally effective): “The Body Crushes the Soul”. The title comes from a line early on in the story:

Is the way your body turns out, the type of person you are?
No soul, just your body.
And if there is a soul
it’s incredibly small and inconsequential
forced to endure the body.
The body crushes and deforms it
as it undergoes puberty
and with every year
of life.

On its surface, this is the thesis statement of the story, which is told from the point of view of a neurotic, self-pitying serial rapist: your internal self, your ideology, your self-justifications are all blotted out, obliterated by the fleshly reality of the impulses you’re following in your everyday life, impulses which are as likely as not to be violent and cruel.

“The Body Crushes the Soul” is, in spite of (or because of) this bleak premise, a very funny story. The narrator’s internal monologue, with its blinkered self-pity, is often hilarious:

Being scared made me think I should have done more than jerk off on them. Like I should have penetrated or hurt them or worse. But I don’t like feeling pressured. It’s not a competition. Everyone is doing classic sexual assault every day. I have an image in my head and I want to complete it. There’s nothing wrong with that. The sexual assault part is wrong, but in a zoomed in context, people shouldn’t be shamed for being different.

or:

I look down. They aren’t moving. I panic. I don’t want this to come off like a hate crime. I’m not like that. I wonder how I can make it appear more like a normal crime. Maybe if I wrote something down to explain—

The “social justice” inflection of the narrator’s voice is no accident; they also use the excuse of a COVID mask to conceal their identity during their assaults. To unpack the “hate crime” bit a little bit more, it’s actually made clear that the narrator explicitly targets transgender women because of their vulnerability:

And women. Their voices carry. So high I got panicked, even if I could shut them up. It was like their voices were, what do people say in books? Ringing in the silence. I switched to crossdressers. Or that trans thing. If they’re drunk and tired and it’s really late, and it always is, their voices don’t carry as far.

—and yet is obsessed with their self-image as not prejudiced. This is in some ways all a restatement of Porpentine’s thesis in “Hot Allostatic Load”—that “wokeness” itself can be a rapist, driven not by prejudice but by opportunism to prey on transfeminine people. Or, even more to the point, that it’s really not about ideology at all; that ideology doesn’t matter, in the end. The body crushes the soul.

The swings from comedy to terror and back, from pathos to bathos and back, in “The Body Crushes the Soul” are brilliant, and tightly controlled. Porpentine swerves one way, and then the other, until finally hitting us with the ending, a calculated outrage that asks us, provocatively, to accept a resolution so “easy” that it becomes difficult again, a turn towards humanistic empathy which through our haze of moralism we can’t fully accept either as fully comic or as fully sincere.

With that ending, Porpentine seems to be challenging us: If you don’t believe in the flesh, if you think that the soul can really crush the body, then you have to accept this.

The ending of “The Body Crushes the Soul” is also the final rejection, in a way, of “Hot Allostatic Load”, a restatement of what Porpentine wrote in their recent semi-retraction of that essay: “in the end, people get hurt all the time. it’s not special.” That’s a harder pill to swallow than any fictional bodily outrage.

I will mostly skip over the shorter stories in this collection, which by and large are pretty good, as well as the one “game”. To this I’ll make one exception, and that to admit, I suppose, my incapacity: I literally did not understand the third story in this collection, “Why Have You Not Yet Gone To War”. It seems to be written in a deliberately stilted and awkward style, and its dreamlike, borderline-nonsensical plot seems to simply go nowhere, ending on an absurd and comical image with no obvious thematic weight. Is it supposed to be a commentary of some kind on… masculinity? Please, dear reader, write in, if you think you understand “Why Have You Not Yet Gone To War”.

(In the vein of shorter, less intense stories, however, I did especially like the gnomic and Bolañoesque “Puppy Star”, as well as the sharply comedic “Rabbits Cry Different”, which was so shapely and pointed I would not have been surprised to run across it in a glossy magazine of some kind—I mean this in a complimentary sense.)

Finally, I want to discuss a pair of long stories that I think exemplify Porpentine’s astonishing gift for decadently putrid aestheticism better than anything else: “Honeydew Toxicity Event”, and the novella-length debut star of Torture Works, “18 Foot Leash”.

“Honeydew Toxicity Event” has been one of my favorite Porpentine stories, since it was first posted online a couple of years ago. I think it perfectly exemplifies the greatness of Porpentine’s aesthetic vision. In this story, they show us a pathetic case—the narrator is a shut-in, misanthropic incel, who is so addicted to Mountain Dew that he’s nauseated by the taste of water, and who slowly starts manifesting grotesque medical symptoms. Formally, I think this is one their most striking and well-made stories. And it works because, even though the premise seems inherently disgusting, it shines through that Porpentine, at least, thinks there is something beautiful about this guy. Not sad, not funny, but beautiful. They give us the golden streaks of dawn glittering in the suspended lemon soda, the careless strands of hair that fall across the acne-cratered face, the shattered body crawling in the darkness. Porpentine shows us that we can find this broken, bitter person beautiful, too.

That aesthetic hypersensitivity to the seemingly grotesque and disgusting is put to its most strenuous test in “18 Foot Leash”, the 70-page novella at the center of this collection. Depicting the desperate misadventures of a drug-smuggling junkie on a tropical island resort stalked by immortal, superintelligent tapeworms, “18 Foot Leash” spirals obsessively around scatology and coprophagia, swallowing feces and then vomiting it up again, and then swallowing it again, et cetera. Porpentine renders all this in torrents of exceptional prose:

A jungle steams in his entrails, mud flooding through the tile. The urinals melt like white chocolate and a porcelain palace rises above him. The bright walls run with shit, a display of heraldic flora. Black carpets of flies cover the atoll. Maggots teem, somehow bigger than the flies. Thousands of pale slaves in countless configurations of torture and execution. Infants slough into the canals to be raised in the filth, wading through waters green with algae and meconium, shackled by their intestines. A bacterial culture.

There is a lot that I don’t understand about “18 Foot Leash”; the mechanics of its alien creatures are somewhat complicated, and it’s also dense with allusions—I’ve never read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for instance, which is clearly being referenced more or less subtly throughout this story as a precursor text; nor am I versed in William S. Burroughs, who I suspect based on my secondhand understanding is a key influence on this tale of a heroin addict contending with parasitic worms. Nor, indeed, Clarice Lispector, who provides the story’s epigraph; and the religious allusion towards the end is opaque to me, and seems likely to reward more research.

But the aesthetic power of Porpentine’s prose, their ability to find beautiful seemingly any phenomenon, no matter how base and degraded, has a curious power; and I think they are right that this has something in common with pornography, in the sense that intense pornography intended for someone other than oneself (which some or all of Porpentine’s writing may in some sense be) has the peculiar power of demonstrating, inarguably, that somebody finds beautiful this thing that disgusts us. And Porpentine’s writing, unlike mere pornography, seems capable of disclosing that beauty to the rest of us. That’s the aesthetic power which underlies the whole project, what justifies a somewhat hard-to-display cover design, and legitimates a very searching and aesthetically serious work of art.

1. That is, non-interactive—although that itself is not strictly accurate, as the book does contain one piece that is a set of instructions for a bite-sized pencil-and-paper storytelling game.

2. Porpentine’s website now indicates a preference for they/them, so that’s what I’ve used in this review. (I fear I don’t consistently satisfy their criterion for being at liberty on this point.)

3. I can already hear some of you reaching for your Smith & Wesson. Don’t worry, I have nothing to say of substance about this hoary topic.

4. “Exiting the Vampire Castle” was published in The North Star, a circular whose own website at the time described it as inheriting the legacy of a Trotskyite—Maoist unity project.

5. Earlier this year, in response to an anonymous question from someone working on a translation of HAL, Porpentine essentially disowned the essay, restating its thesis but adding (among other remarks): “my art is the most important thing. essays are distasteful […] people want to roll it up into their ideology when the essay is about the evil of ideology. […] the only thing that makes me happy is building new things.” Interestingly, they even squeeze in a pointed class critique—that as a striving artist with fewer resources they had no choice but to write confessionally, in line with hegemonic political expectations, whereas they now have the artistic liberty to define themselves in other ways.

6. As collected in Torture Works, “Cunt Toward Enemy” is actually just the first chapter of an ongoing serial by the same name on Porpentine’s website. I’ll confine myself here to what’s in the book.

7. In this review, I’m going to “spoil” with impunity those stories that were already available for free online; those that are original to Torture Works I’ll handle with a lighter touch.

8. Note the name—the Rubicon doesn’t cross you; when you transgress a sacred boundary, you are crossing the Rubicon, the rushing river that is standing there, temptingly, between yourself and your prize.

9. Best-known in the West today for his excellent play R.U.R., which introduced the word “robot” into our language, and for his short short story “From the Point of View of a Cat”, which is a perennial hit on social media of all kinds.