Lipstick Traces (37 page)

These events and others like them became myths almost before they were acknowledged as events, and within the matrix of the postwar rhythm the incident most immediately and completely mythologized was one of the first to take place. In the fall of 1948, a twenty-four-year-old gunman and triple murderer named Ivanhoe “Rhyging” (Raging) Martin became a hero in Jamaican shantytowns because, advertising himself in the papers with scrawled threats and two-gun photos, trumpeting himself as Alan Ladd and Captain Midnight, he sensed the pop dimension of the nihilist role. On 9 October 1948 he was trapped by police on Lime Cay Beach and shot to death. Featuring a picture of the corpse in the sand, the Kingston
Daily Gleaner
devoted its entire front page to the story.

CRIME DOES NOT PAY

KINGSTON’S SIX WEEKS TERROR IS ENDED! “RHYGING” IS

DEAD!!

“I SAW HIM SHOT”

THOUSANDS AT THE MORGUE

WHO WAS THIS MAN WITH A PRICE ON HIS HEAD?

ACE COP-SWIMMER JOINS HUNT

DOWN THE CROOKED ROAD TO DOOM

And, bringing it all back home, the inevitable prosaic angle:

LIME CAY, NATURE LOVERS’ HAVEN

In time, movies would be made, songs would be written, iconographic books and sociological studies would be produced about all of these occurrences, from Laslo Benedek’s 1954 film
The Wild One
to Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 tune “Nebraska”; far from being merely trapped in legend, Rhyging’s event was the founding crime of postwar Jamaican popular culture, and it was always understood as such. Rhyging was the ghost guiding the hand of every rude boy, the voice of every reggae singer. When Perry Henzell told the story in his 1973 film
The Harder They Come,
bringing it into the present, he made Rhyging the pop star that Ivan Martin wanted to be: this “Rhyging” not only killed people, he cut records, topping the hit parade and the most-wanted list at the same time.

Today these crimes would be a version of everyday news: in their time they communicated as a violation of it. Each briefly marked a moral panic, and an inflation of the moral currency. I sometimes think that to understand why these crimes turned into myths, and why the crimes of the serial or (savor the words) “recreational” and “theme” killers of the 1970s never transcended their numbers, is to understand culture—or the day Elmer Henley
Jr. was arrested in Texas for the rape-torture-murder of twenty-seven teenage boys. The TV news happened to run an interview with Juan Corona, who was appealing his conviction of the murder of twenty-five California farmworkers; “Well, Juan,” I was sure the interviewer would ask him, “how does it feel to lose the record?” It was barely a fantasy: “I’ve been reading about Gacy, and he says he killed thirty-three,” Henley told his prosecutor while awaiting trial. “If you cut me some slack on the time I can find you some more bodies and get my record back.” But then Theodore Bundy reached the forties; Henry Lee Lucas claimed 188 victims, then 600. Inflation outstripped any possibility of meaning; the only use value of a murder was its exchange value.

The violations of Rhyging, the motorcycle gangs, the Lagny trio, Starkweather and Fugate were packaged and sold, but they resisted commodification. They were a kind of noise and a kind of silence. They were still sufficiently outside the limits of the public conversation to be received as art statements: as attempts to willfully construct life, or to represent its absence. As mythical assaults they were self-justifying: art for art’s sake, which is a form of nihilism. For many, these crimes, in their very muteness—the noise they made, the silence they left behind, the refusal or the inability of the actors to explain themselves—were experienced as a common dream of the postwar period. Some people, following the news, felt they themselves dreamed these events—which, given the buried, shapeless desires for novelty, adventure, and revenge to which these events gave voice, they did. If they didn’t the media dreamed for them—after the fact, but also in advance. Just as Ivan Martin, a.k.a. Alan Ladd, saw himself in American crime movies, Starkweather saw himself in the central mythic story of his era, Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film
Rebel Without a Cause,
which dramatized the coming of age of one Jimbo Stark, as played by James Dean. For hours, Starkweather stood before the mirror, combing his hair, arranging his slouch, positioning his cigarette, adjusting his shirt and pants, until he and Dean, Stark and Starkweather, two ordinary midwestern boys, the first already dead, the second knowing he soon would be, were one. It is not hard to believe that, in moments, Starkweather convinced himself that what he wanted to do was no more than what Stark wanted to do—would have done, if Hollywood were more than a fixed game of chicken. Facing the electric chair, Starkweather refused to plead insanity: “but dad i’m not sorry for what i did cause for the first time me and caril had more fun.”

The appeal of Isou’s crusade cannot be understood except as a systematic version of this scattered no: as an attempt to turn emerging negationist and nihilist energies back toward the creation of a new culture. “The great American substitute for social revolution is murder,” the political scientist
Walter Dean Burnham said at the height of the serial killing fad; Europe had other traditions, among them Lefebvre’s long line of fatal spells, in which Isou had found a place. Lettrism was no less bizarre—and thus, to a few, no less seductive or exciting—than the Lagny killing or “It’s Too Soon to Know.” Like the teenage Lagny murderers, who could not explain themselves, and the Orioles, who refused to explain themselves, Isou began with rules and language; he knew, as the review
La Tour de feu
would put it in 1964, writing about the situationists, that “when the crisis of language and poetry is pushed beyond certain limits it ends up placing the very structure of society in question.” For both the lettrists and the situationists, that crisis was the goal; to reach it one had to say things others did not understand, and thus provoke them into doubting the ability of their own language to say anything at all.

The Lagnyites were not lettrists; Claude Panconi, who pulled the trigger, testified at his trial that he “hoped to become a writer,” but he scorned the avant-garde, rejecting Rimbaud (“frenzied”) and Baudelaire (“morbid”) in favor of Stendhal and La Rochefoucauld. Though Isou sometimes spoke of letter-song hits, he never wrote “Théorie des loriots,” which today would be fun to read. But like the Orioles and the Lagnyites, lettrism was utterly part of its time and outside of it, socially determined and the product of individual choice, a myth of a creation to be glimpsed in destruction. Unlike its contemporaries, lettrism demanded that one explain oneself, if only in riddles and runes; more than that, it required a willingness to understand just how one’s individual choice was determined, and how a tension between determinism and choice could be brought to the point of explosion. Most of all, it required both a sense of history and the faith that one could willfully transcend it.

The group Isou gathered around himself (by 1946, when he was twenty-one, the lettrists numbered more than two dozen) was full of the spirit of youth. It was anarchic and charged with strict codes of private manners, ebullient and full of resentment, ambitious and irresponsible. As opposed to every other youth manifestation of the late 1940s, it had taken on the burden of thought. The group was drenched in theory, in critique, in intellectualism. But it was an intellectualism so severe, so unfinished, and in the real
world so completely laughable, that in concert with the ruling passion of every other youth manifestation of the time it was never more than a few steps away from exploding into violence.

The tension Isou was creating demanded more than poems—it demanded a call to action, and Isou was eager to provide it. In that invisibly convulsive year of 1948 he and his followers covered the Latin Quarter with posters—“12,000,000
YOUTHS WILL TAKE THE STREETS TO MAKE THE LETTRIST REVOLUTION
,” they read—but few paid any mind. Thus in the next year Isou put posters aside and formulated another theory. What was exceptional—what, in 1949, when there was no such thing as a youth market, when all minds were on social integration and division was what Charley Starkweather was learning in General Math, seemed absurd—was Isou’s claim that youth itself was the only possible source of social change.

Isou wrote the first version of his
Traité d’économie nuclaire: le soulèvement de la jeunesse
(Treatise on Nuclear Economy: Youth Uprising) and made an attempt to form a national youth organization (coopting the once-scorned Breton who, according to Isou, sniffed a new constituency for surrealism). This fell flat, but the attendant publicity attracted the man who was to prove Isou’s most faithful and energetic disciple: Maurice Lemaitre, born Moise Bismuth, a young journalist for the anarchist paper
Le Monde libertaire
and a Jewish fan of the antisemite Céline. He showed up to do an interview and remained as a convert—a convert in a hurry. Dissatisfied with the paltry few who rallied around Isou’s “Youth Uprising,” in 1950 Lemaitre started the review
Front de la jeunesse
(Youth Front), meant as the flag of a “mass student union,” and published Isou’s unsigned “Our Program” in the first number. Radically anticipating Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and their epigones in the 1960s New Left, Isou produced an analysis of youth as an inevitably revolutionary social sector—revolutionary on its own terms, which meant that the terms of revolution had to be seen in a new way.

Isou’s argument was grounded in the notion of insiders and outsiders: “internists” or “co-exchangists,” those with something to sell within the
market economy and the means to buy what others sold, and “externists,” those with nothing to sell and no means to buy. Youth were automatically outsiders: people who could neither freely produce nor consume. But if society was a structure of buying and selling, then the young were not people at all: they were mere “luxury items,” “utensils.” Since they could not take part in the “circuit of exchange,” in real social life, they could only seek out and expend “units of gratuitousness”: aimless and consciousless activities (juvenile delinquency), or whatever degraded, trivial commodity compensations they could find (new clothes).

There was an opening in this argument, and Isou dove through it. If economic facts defined youth, then youth could not be defined strictly by age. Rather, “youth” was a concept, and it could be enlarged to include anyone who was excluded from the economy—and anyone who, through volition, or for that matter dissipation, refused to take a preordained place in the social hierarchy. It was only among those who, whatever their age, were not encumbered by the routines of family and wage labor that one could find the source of revolution.

By 1968 this was a cliché, if not a full-fledged ideology. “Our answer,” said Robert F. Kennedy as he campaigned for the presidency of the United States, “is to rely on youth—not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.” In 1950—well before an organized market appeared to capture Isou’s units of gratuitousness, before the youthful demand for cultural autonomy was sealed by the
Wild One–Rebel Without a Cause–rock
’n’ roll explosion of signs, before the youth market turned into a shadow electorate—it was pure fantasy, and right on the mark.