Meditations on Writing Hell

Abstract

This essay is a broken elemental thing composed of cuts, by which I mean outtakes. Outtakes are scenes or sequences that never make it into a film. The scenes collected here have been retrieved from the cutting floor of my mind's editing suite and reassembled in ways that hold onto an ambitious claim—to think of narrative cuts and silences as interruptive forces in the operation of writing and the imaginative rendering of the abattoir.

Working with outtakes helps me approach, in a new way (for me), questions I have been exploring for years: How can writers critically respond to the existence of abattoirs? What strategies might writers engage to render normalized forms of violence against animals strange and even intolerable through particularly literary practices, strategies, and generic forms?

Literally, caesura means “cutting.” It evokes a severance and a pause. Space for breath. And in that breath, space for detours of thought.

If the line—working on the assembly line and writing a certain kind of poetic line—is an orientation that draws literature and the abattoir together as is suggested by Joseph Ponthus in his autofictional poem essay On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2021), in this essay I suggest that the slash, the cut, the space for the breaths taken between words, is an allied critical-creative orientation that equally requires engagement.

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A cut, a slash, a slice, dichotomy—all belong to the abattoir, quantum theory, theories of oppression and justice, and certain pain-filled modes of writing.

The slash is a symbol of hierarchical values (Plumwood 1993). It points to the cuts made in the abattoir from the presticker to the trimmer (Pachirat 2011). It is also a rupture and can be used in writing to tear at customary ways of seeing via “poetic outrageousness,” as exemplified by many writings by the Marquis de Sade, including, “It has been estimated that more than fifty million individuals have lost their lives to wars and religious massacres. Is there even one among them worth the blood of a single bird?” (LeBrun 2008: 62).

This, quoted in Annie LeBrun's The Reality Overload: The Modern World's Assault on the Imaginal Realm, is used by LeBrun to exemplify poetry's ability to suddenly render present vast plains of violence and poetry's potential to refuse the enshrinement of the status quo, in which the enormity of violence done to more-than-human animals moving through industrial systems is invisibilised. By inverting a horizon of importance, poetic outrageousness reroutes certainties and habits of mind and asks questions that tear at humanist hierarchies.

Poetic outrageousness is bellicose and, I think, belongs to what Maggie Nelson (2011: 11) refers to as the art of cruelty that offers insights into certain “styles of imprisonment.” The point is not to uplift or help us forget the violence of the industrialized status quo, but to point to power and violence and to cut us off, momentarily, from everything that feels solid or good. Poetic outrageousness, the art of cruelty, does not alleviate pain but actually is said to contribute to it. Serious consideration of these works might take us somewhere different entirely.

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In poetry, a caesura, Latin for “cutting,” is a metrical pause or a break in verse where one phrase ends and another begins. It can be expressed by a comma or two lines // slashes.

The slash acts as a recognition of interconnection and entanglements, a suture (Barad 2007, 2010). As Karen Barad (2007) writes, the slash cleaves. And in Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene, Tim Dee agrees. He writes that to cleave is a verb that “all taxonomists must fear because it means to split and lump, to pull apart and bring together” (Dee 2018: 18).

Cleave violates a metaphysical commitment to the ideas of separateness. It signifies the downfall of individualism and the presumed disconnection of intelligibility from materiality.

The slash is a connective opening, and I use it here to designate the mouth of a passage leading to subterranean places, containers, in which certain lives, stories, deaths are shoved and must find a way to reside.

In these containers I search for things that are the subject of an energetic amnesia in life and so many literary contexts—the lives and deaths of farmed animals.

The passage down isn't straightforward. Its walls are lined with corpses and knives.

One name for the subterranean place is hell. This will not be a heroic descent.

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Hell is a slaughterhouse, and I'm not speaking in metaphors. What I mean is that through the slaughterhouse, a certain hell for animals is made immanent in history.

The abattoir is a space divided into finely regulated slices of horror. Like the Chapman brothers’ installation artwork Hell (1999), made of nine vitrines filled with tiny, defiling toy soldiers chopped up and remodeled, all doing the same thing over and over again, sixty thousand times—killing. Only the soldiers of the abattoir wear red hard hats, yellow hard hats, or white hard hats, according to their line of work.

Unlike the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno, the abattoir insists on a strict and amplified linearity. Live animals enter, meat exits.

Detours, swerves, backtracks, détournements are forbidden in the abattoir. Detouring equals the transgressive rephrasing of conventional discourse. It is precisely for this reason that I take them as a productive way to write about abattoirs and literature.

This awkward, bloody conceptual ground has been my latitude since 2014, when I became obsessed with thinking and writing about writing—its processes, ethics, and effects—and its relationship to those who are killed on industrial disassembly lines.

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The precise space of these containers that you are reading—call them paragraphs, vignettes, fragments, notes—is the obscene, the cultural equivalent to being “off stage” (Chambers 2004). Literary theorist and thinker of AIDS and cultural hauntings Ross Chambers (2004) writes that what is obscene is part of the occult, what is occulturated from society. What is known but not acknowledged, secret, hidden, or covered over, not apprehended by the mind.

Hel means “cover” in Old Norse, a term that attempts to cover horrors that cannot be spoken.

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Jenn Ashworth's (2019) memoir Notes Made while Falling uses the slash to designate the beginning of an untellable story. “A beginning,” she writes, “is a cut in the onward flow of things” (1).

The slash is used to show the intertwining of bodies and worlds, the proliferation of sickening bodies. And it signifies the place where words, sentences, and phrases have dropped off the page, go missing in action. It holds the place of erasure, absence. It shows writing as a leaky container, filled with holes.

Ashworth's entire memoir consists of drawing significant philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical connections between different kinds of cuts that bleed into each other: Alice's rabbit hole is also a wound in the chest that a fist can disappear into is also a hole in the head made by trepanning—a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into a human skull. A slash, cut, or hole in the head is, for Ashworth, a way into narratives of trauma.

Her deep need to explore cuts originates with complications of her C-section delivery, which meant surgeons had to rush her back onto the table and open up her wound. It was during the second operation that her epidural started to wear off. Paralyzed but awake and panicked, she felt unspeakable things: an extreme pressure inside her body, a wind tunnel blowing through her organs. Her legs were rubber. They were dream legs. She needed to move these dream legs to convince the surgeons that she could feel what was going on down below. Speaking of her trauma requires dwelling within and beneath her cuts.

Lori Gruen's (2019) essay “Just Say No to Lobotomy” links the surgical procedure—which also involves a drilling into the skull and severs nerve fibers in the brain that connect the frontal lobe to other brain regions—to forms of affective dismembering wherein talk of love is ablated from discourses on justice for multispecies others and emotions are cut off from cognition.

From lobotomy, an act of severance, Gruen talks of entangled empathy. Gruen, like Ashworth, like me, is anchored by the many possibilities of the slash to trace certain violences and write/imagine an otherwise.

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Regard the pain of animal others. The gun must be placed perpendicular on the skull surface, at an imagined center point. The X.

Imagine two lines drawn from the tops of the eyes intersecting in the middle of the skull. This guide is only for certain cows. A Holstein dairy cow, which has a long head, requires a different imagining. Their physiology is different, specific, unique.

When you aim for the X you are actually aiming for the hippocampus, the point of crossover for the nerve fibers of both hemispheres of the brain.

The idea of the bolt is to render a cow insensible. Induce a percussive wave within the brain tissue, increase the disruption to nervous impulses, which result in a shearing causing physical damage to the cells.

How to determine insensibility?

The head and neck must be loose and floppy—rag-like.

The tongue should hang out—straight and limp.

(A tongue curling in and out of the mouth may be a sign of sensibility.)

Eyes should be wide.

The stare blank.

There should be no blinking or corneal reflex in response to touch.

The effectiveness of this operation comes down to several things: the maintenance of equipment, experience of operator, correct settings, and use of traumatizing instruments.

Inevitably there is the very real possibility of poor gun placement.

Inevitably there is the very real possibility of a cow remaining conscious until they are bled out (Grandin 2017).

These puncture wounds are a manifestation of hellholes.

While I write these notes I am also writing a book about the hell of writing a scholarly monograph about the hell of industrial animal agriculture.

So, two types of hell are involved in the meta framing of the book. One is of the brutalism of systems of animal confinement, killing, and meat production. The other is of trying to speak this violence in an environment uninterested in hearing about it.

Forms of hell accumulate but do not approximate in this process.

After years of not knowing how to begin the book, I realize this hole is exactly the hole that must bring me into my own funereal story-mind. It must act as a severance and a reverse severance cleaving me to the life and death of farmed animals.

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When I first learn about caesuras, their use in poetry, I repeatedly make the mistake of writing that the slash signals a juncture between worlds. The caesura is the point at which one world ends, I wrote in an essay for my poetry class, and the following begins. I was marked down for having written world instead of word. But the mistake feels truer, bigger, heavier, more consequential than its corrective.

In music, a caesura is a pause, a silence, time not counted, and represented on sheet music by two slashes sometimes referred to as train tracks.

Détournement is a strategy for derailing, wandering off stage, getting off topic. It is figurative roller-coastering.

Rachel Falconer (2007), literary scholar of hell on earth, notes that in contemporary writing hell is treated as a caesura, an infernal pause. A severance. Like what Russian antiformalist scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) called a chronotope—a generically distinct representation of space and time in narrative.

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A piggery is a suspended place and time, a hellhole filled with beings turned into nonentities, ghosts. “An animal is an animal, and a pig is not even that” (Del Amo 2019: 235).

In 2019 the English translation of Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's novel Animalia was published. A friend suggested I read it. It's disgusting, she said and wished me luck.

The book is praised as a modern-day classic for its commitment to all that is stained, spoiled, and violated (Sansom 2019).

I started with gusto but soon could only read through parted fingers. At first, I placed this book on a literary shelf alongside the Marquis de Sade for its fetishization of mastery over flesh and consumption, its dirty, flayed, defiled, and scarified bodies—but mostly for its insistence that to live as an animal is to suffer.

But then I realized that there is no fetishization of violence in these pages, only a faithful—forensic—rendering of the endless work of killing for a living. A faithful rendering of a hellhole in which hordes of pigs are trampled, bitten, beaten, shot with bolt guns, stuck through the thigh with a hook and hoisted up to bleed out, drop dead (brought down by heart attacks).

The line between a fetishized and forensic account of abattoir as hell on earth is finely sliced. The novel begins in a rural hell. It etches out the morose story of a life lived on a pig farm in a fictional French village—Puy-Larroque—and walks down a muddy-bloody narrative track, following five generations of a family from one century to another, one tradition to another—peasant farm to industrial piggery—on a trajectory of descent.

It goes deep. Walks well into the mental night that turns factory farms, concentrated animal feeding operations, finishing sheds, and abattoirs into “shadow places”—disregarded places that elude responsibility (Plumwood 2008).

Not a narrative of technological or human progress and development but the brutality of industrialism with its slurry-pits and chemical infestations (Lindane, DDT [Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane], Chlordane, and PCBs [Polychlorinated biphenyls]), which deteriorate all life pulled into their orbit.

The industrial piggery at the center of the narrative—renovated, modernized, endlessly expanding—“cannot contain what it needs to constantly assimilate and regurgitate” (Del Amo 2019: 238) And what passes between the covers is intensifying madness. Tides of shit and prolapsed vaginas. Vaccines, hormones, pesticides—all poisons. Pigs lie in excrement to try cool down in the humidity and rancidity of their sheds.

Modified complexly for human desires, born to grow almost all muscle and no fat, the sickly pigs live 182 days spent “vegetating in the half-light of a pig unit” (258). And death is hard, of course. Short life, hard death. In this fictional (but so very truth-filled) universe violence is everlasting and porcine injustice is infinite.

One thought dominates me while I read. Del Amo kept his mind in this hell for the years it took to write the book. I can't be sure of this, of course. But that's what is pressed onto me as I read this katabatic work.

The “katabatic imagination” is a worldview that conceives of selfhood as a narrative construction of an infernal quest or journey, and a return.

Literally, katabasis means “going down” and is most notably associated with Dantean or Christian hinge narratives of descent into an underworld and a return to the overland.

Classical katabasis offers a narrative of heroic self-discovery, knowledge gathering, and self-realization, and most frequently it associates the quester as a man who descends into the female earth/underworld (Falconer 2007: 7). Historically, Rachel Falconer writes, hell in literature has associations with madness and femininity.

As Falconer explores, 1945—the midway of a century overrun with wars, genocides, systemic injustices of multiplying kinds, rapacious exploitations of the earth, and environmental catastrophe—ushered in literature that spoke of hell on earth, which was embodied in gulags, prisons, the aftermath of bomb blasts, and forms of environmental poisoning. To this list I would like to add the post–World War II intensification of factory farming, with its amplified production orientations that have led to the vertical integration of farms—meaning a company has control of an animal's body from birth until death, often in the same facility—the introduction of artificial growth hormones in feed and the use of antibiotics. This postwar intensification represents a time when animal subjects were living, moving through, and dying from an infernal journey in previously unmatched numbers and levels of suffering.

Animals are not meant to return from the hell of the factory farm. Can a writer?

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The word obscene first appeared to me in J. M. Coetzee's (1999) novel Elizabeth Costello when the central character, a novelist called Elizabeth Costello, meditates on the ethical relationship between unspeakable acts of violence and attempts made by writers to speak them, to body them into the world.

The part of the book that I want to point to is when Costello, preparing to give a lecture at a university in Amsterdam, questions whether telling stories is a moral good in itself. She has become convinced that people aren't always improved by what they read. What is being risked, she asks herself, when a writer walks into dense forests of violence to research and tell or retell certain horrific histories? There is no guarantee that the soul will return unharmed. What she imagines of the writer's movement resembles the narratives of descents into an underworld.

When Costello tries to reconcile the desire for writers to enter the bloody basements of history and represent them to the world, she imagines a quiet procession of soul-damaging stories passing from person to person. If humanity is to be saved from itself, she thinks, some stories must be kept off the cultural stage, held in the obscene.

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TRUTH, reads the sign. Beside it, a woman in a Guy Fawkes mask carries a TV screen with footage of pig being beaten down a chute toward a knocker—which is a person who uses an air gun to drive a captive-steel bolt into a pig's forehead.

This woman has been holding the device as an offering of truth-telling and witnessing for about an hour. I've been standing there watching the footage loop for almost the same amount of time. The repetition without variation is brain-numbing.

A man is hitting a pig. A pig is crouching. A pig is squealing. A pig runs toward the knocker. A pig is being hit. A man is hitting a pig. A pig is crouching. And on and on . . .

This is the story of the world. It matters how this story is told.

At the protest, people walk past, some glance sideways, others not at all. A woman yanks her son to the other side of the street. A man stops and watches for a few moments. Soon he looks around to see if other people are watching him watch the man beat this pig. He says loudly, to the TV—and also, I think, to the world—WELL THIS IS JUST DISAPPOINTING. Then he, too, walks away.

His statement hits me with its willful passivity, filled with absent possibility that anything in this footage will ever change. (The man is able to walk away at the moment of his choosing without any threat of danger or pain.)

Maybe he'll go home, watch a movie, and forget all about it. Or maybe he'll clear his kitchen of meat, eggs, and dairy and bury them in the backyard. Either way, his outburst recalls what Namwali Serpell (2019) writes in “The Banality of Empathy”—narrative might simulate empathy, but that doesn't mean it stimulates it.

In this essay, Serpell takes apart the cultural orthodoxy that the ethics of the novel lies in its ability to bring the one to the many and the many to the one and in doing so will give rise to social good. Serpell traces this idea back to the eighteenth century with the writer George Eliot, who in a letter to Charles and Cara Bray said, “if Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally” (quoted in Serpell 2019). Important to note here: at the time, sympathies meant something closer to what we call empathy now. For Serpell the equation empathetic art = better world doesn't stack up.

Seeing real violence doesn't guarantee ethical action, so why, she asks, “do we think art about suffering will?” Actually, Serpell suggests that the empathy model can work, perversely, as a “gateway drug” to saviorism, which triggers emotional experiences while counteracting any actual ethical action. Thus, oppressive practices are preserved.

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Neither Animalia nor the protest documentary simulates empathy, though I think they offer a representation of hell for animals that can invite a reader to turn their mind to the position of an/other. But this isn't necessarily a form of imaginative dark tourism, nor does it have to equate to assimilation of self and other.

This kind of imagining is less about moral feelings than it is about political justice, “offering a broader view of humanity, while maintaining a keen awareness of who is friend and who is foe” (Serpell 2019). So Serpell moves beyond the idea of writers imagining their way into the life of another because there is a long history of an instrumentalizing and violent literary “empathy.” “Writers,” she says, “are not historically renowned for being good people.”

What Serpell is advocating is the expansion of the scope of representations through the question: Who is represented and how? A model for ethical writing is, she suggests, to imaginatively inhabit a position, not a person. And, importantly, this is not to be done just anywhere, but rather where you are welcome.

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Working through complexities of subjectivity and point of view in relation to beings-other-than-human is deeply significant to discussions of empathy, literature. and multispecies justice, particularly in the fields of critical animal studies, literary animal studies, and what might be called multispecies literary justice (Nagel 1974; Coetzee 2004; Gruen 2015).

Multispecies literary justice does not aim at individual moral improvement through reading/writing—the idea that “art encourages empathy and empathy will save us all” (Serpell 2019), nor that art enacts a kind of forceful, “orthopaedic” intervention on society (Nelson 2011: 4). It moves toward the idea that multispecies literature broadens representations of multispecies life and death and, doing so, can imaginatively build solidarities across differences, similarities, and complexities of beings. I think about it now as a form of literary political representation that teaches writers to re-cognize the world as it is, to level a rupture in default stories that mask the world's material realities and violences.

And more, it invites you give up on the familiar—“voracious,” as Serpell writes—practice of inhabiting others and instead to imaginatively visit with them, to ask the question: What would I want the world to do for me if I was born into the situation of meat?

The project is enormous and, I think, incompletable. But it is related to one of the most pressing questions facing writers in the twenty-first century—How do we reduce the violence, hatred, and deadly indifference that have so often marked human and more-than-human animal interactions?

This question considers how to lessen the amount of cruelty in the world. I want to think about that, yes. Though I am stuck working through expressions of cruelty and representations of hell on earth for animals and asking what they might offer a world already congested by these very things.

Thinking back to Elizabeth Costello, I have to ask, again: What is the ethical wager for the writer who brings to life (once more) the details of even one of these cruelties, let alone their intersectional sadisms?

What is the ethical risk a writer takes when she trespasses on the life of another's death? Into whose death can she be welcomed? Like Maggie Nelson (2011) in The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, I would like to understand more about compassion, and so I take a risk she has already taken and I study cruelty, carefully.

Literature, writes James Wood (2008: 52), is an art that teaches one to notice. While life is full of amorphous detail, literature directs one's focus to certain details, helps develop the ability to recognize the most ordinary thing as a most remarkable thing. What is merciless is also banal, what is horrifying is everyday, and what has become everyday is actually horrifying. For Woods, detail brings the fullness of living, a “thisness”—specificity of detail that dissolves abstractions with sheer palpability—to a work of fiction. Specificity is a kind of cruelty that can be enacted in writing.

Earlier, I said Animalia wasn't a Sadeian novel. But that's not exactly right. What is Sadeian about it is its refusal to allow knowledge of cruelty to remain general. Part of the novel's cruelty is its commitment to specificity, its commitment to realism. I don't want to be general about realism, it's too important, so let me say that I'm talking industrial realism and realism of the flesh.

Industrial realism—individuals and masses represented at work in factories and sheds; intimate moments within huge labor-filled environments; aesthetic exploration of sweaty bodies, exhausted lunch breaks, blood, and injury; everyday existence. To show a truthfulness about the laboring world through art.

Here is a slice of flesh realism in action from Del Amo (2019: 258).

Industrial and flesh realisms are rendered through a commitment to detail. Detail is also part of their commitment to exploring a form of representative thinking that is openly, radically incomplete, a wavering, momentary suffering shared between subject, writer, and reader.

Critically, it is shared at a distance, does not pretend to collapse the distance between subject, writer, and reader. Nor should it be thought to exist on a scale analogous to the suffering of those pigs who physically languish under the dim lights of a shed and miscarry onto their own feces. Seven dead piglets in one stall, nine in another. All to go in the incinerator.

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When I think of Elizabeth Costello's ethical knots I ask myself, If enough cruel stories build up in our systems, will they do damage to the living tissue of the world? I think Barad would say yes, since the dichotomy discourse/materiality is false, is dis/continuous. Words and things, speech and action are always threading through one another—waves entwining as they drive into the shore.

And there are these words from Hannah Arendt (1969: 80) in On Violence, “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

The representation of violence through poetic outrageousness and more rigorous imaginative modes of writing can bring clarity to the world as it is. As I see it, it is a matter of loyalty to the dead to re-presence them among the living. This is not a conclusion, but it is what I am sitting with now.

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Back on the street, in front of the protest, there's this guy who enters the scene. He moves to stand in front of the TV that the woman in the Guy Fawkes mask is still holding. The man looks at the crowd and performatively unwraps a McDonald's burger. He stuffs it in his mouth, eats with over-the-top orgasmic delight—eyes rolling, pelvis grinding. I raise my phone to take a photo. He gives me a sauce-wet smile and a big thumbs up.

He is a man standing at the mouth of hell.

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