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COWS (1997)

by Matthew Stokoe(Favorite Author)

3.57 of 5 Votes: 6

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English

genre

Horror

publisher

Spetember Press Books

review 1: I was led to this book by various reviews that said things like “the most extreme novel you’ll ever read” (from the back cover copy), “gruesome beyond reason,” “most intense book I have ever read,” “most gruesome book I have ever read,” “I almost felt like I was doing something wrong reading it.” Those are from Amazon, and it’s worth looking on Amazon for the review titled “Most disturbing book ever written. Period.,” posted June 29, 2011. That review is almost as off as this book.The question COWS raises (the book seems to be cited in all-caps, which is appropriate to the way it shouts its perversions and obscenities) have to do with the place of extreme subject matter in art. In visual art, it’s common for students to become interested in vi... moreolent or disturbing images, such as photos of car crash victims or medical deformities, and to try to use them in their work. Often it turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to use such images simply because they are so strong. A photograph of a man with Ebola just won’t fit with a collage of other images of Africa. Artists who have tried such experiments have sometimes found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. (The intricate aesthetization of the unusual images, as Max Kosloff pointed out years ago, is a way of counterbalancing the subject matter, and somehow making the image into art.) For a contemporary artist it shouldn’t necessarily matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose of choosing strong images, after all, is seldom to produce a pleasing or harmonious effect—but somehow it does. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity and collage instituted by postmodernism, despite a half-century of work done without interest in aesthetic effect, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately contextualized, made to work aesthetically. It’s a puzzle that we still want our art, in these cases, to be nominally harmonious and coherent. And it’s interesting that given all the pressure contemporary artists face to be avant-garde, difficult, new, politically visible, strong, or persuasive, and in general to stand out against a crazily crowded field—that given all that, it’s interesting that the very strongest images are not more commonly used.COWS is a way of thinking about that. It is not a good novel by a number of standards. It’s awkwardly constructed; its inner monologues and dialogues are seldom persuasive; it doesn’t respond to the last fifty years of fiction except in glancing allusions to some other extremist authors; and its writing is often mechanical. Stokoe doesn’t seem to have thought about the fragmented consciousness of Naked Lunch, or the ecstatic prejudices and violence of Céline. His rebellion is presented in the mold of simple fictional forms and basic narrative devices.I don’t think Stokoe is an especially good writer. But the book is more than memorable: it is, I think, entirely impossible to forget. And that is because of things that happen in it. I will mention just one: the main character breaks off his mother’s teeth, fixes his anus over her bleeding mouth, and shits, forcing her to eat. What matters in this book is extreme violence, perversity, and repulsion. I think those three shock effects (as Roland Barthes would have called them) are different. Extreme unexpected violence is repellent in one way; perversity works differently; and visceral repulsion is partly another matter. When these three are used together, the effects are disorienting partly because they are mixed in ways that are hard to separate. I think that to make headway on this problem of extreme subject matter (or images) it is necessary to distinguish these, and probably others, and consider them one by one. (Barthes distinguishes five species of photographic “shock” in Camera Lucida.) A purer version of COWS could be imagined, for example, in which nothing violent, immoral, psychotic, or perverse takes place, but the world is full of stench, slime, and opportunities for nausea. In that simpler version of COWS, it might be easier to see what kinds of narrative work would need to be done to bring the nauseating elements into dialogue with the rest of the book. I don't really have an idea how to perform such an analysis, partly because I can see how they work together to produce the book's effects, and partly because I can't enumerate the kinds of extreme subjects, acts, and descriptions. Are there more than three? Is visceral repulsion separable from moral repugnance? Is there a sexual perversity different from moral perversity? Another way to put this would be to say that COWS makes a rum mixture of a large number of important provocations: morality, ethics, sexuality, perversity, nihilism, sadism… nearly every concept I have mentioned in this review, including beauty and harmony, is contested. But that observation is just another form of the puzzle I mentioned at the beginning: why, if a book manages to combine all these, is it not more or less automatically an important book?A version of this problem has been well studied in the case of de Sade, where repetition plays a central part in the creation of the pornographic effect. But it strikes me a lot more work needs to be done to understand why a book as wildly imaginative and consistently extreme as COWS can be a minor novel, one that doesn’t need to be on the must-read list of everyone interested in contemporary writing. By the same token, more thought needs to be given to visual artists like Joel-Peter Witkin to understand why they feel the need to work so hard on their extreme images in order to bring them into the domain of fine art. Why, in the 21st century, should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized? It has been almost forty years since the inception of the anti-aesthetic, and longer since Duchamp: we have questioned nearly every sense of unity, harmony, and coherence that once existed, not to mention every sense of beauty, decorum, and moderation. So how do we know so clearly that COWS is not an important book?
review 2: Steven is 25 years old and miserable. He lives with his abusive mother who calls the Hagbeast. She is a disgusting, corpulent, abusive creature who paralyzed his dog (his only friend) and makes his every waking moment there as painful and horrible as possible. He just started working at a slaughterhouse and the job is his only escape from home. His dream is to have a wife, a child, and a normal home like he sees on TV. A woman moves in upstairs named Lucy who is obsessed with surgeries and finding poisons inside herself. Steven sees his future with Lucy and just needs to somehow get his mother out of the way, so he plans to kill her. What follows is disturbing, disgusting, and bizarre.Cows is basically The Human Centipede of books, except that in addition to being completely disgusting and bizarre, it has an actual message. This book is one of the most disgusting and disturbing that I've ever read. Here is a list of things included: bestiality, vivisection, excrement eating, murder, necrophilia, rape, talking cows, infanticide, self surgery, abuse, and cannibalism, among others. I was so happy I didn't eat at all while reading because it made me lose any semblance of appetite I may have had. Despite all its grossness and bizarre situations, parts of the novel are quite funny. Cows is a pitch black satire with a hugely healthy dose of surrealism and the bizarre. Lucy and Steven are weirdly relatable even though they are not even remotely likable. Lucy knows something is wrong with her and can't find it no matter how hard she tries. Steven just wants conventional loved ones and place to call home. Stokoe makes me feel for them and relate to their situations through all of the craziness. Without this element, I don't think I could have finished the book. I read Cows in a couple days. It was kind of like a train wreck that I couldn't bring myself to look away.I am relieved that this book exists more than just to gross people out. Steven is obsessed with the media's version of a nuclear family. He longs to have a loving mother, a doting wife, beautiful children, a big house, and a successful job. He tries to force people into the roles he dreams of or obliterates them when they don't fit. As he works to build this reality based on illusion, he forgets that Lucy is insane and doesn't really want to have children. After opting to ignore the brewing trouble and completely ignore Lucy and her needs, their relationship implodes in gore. That ideal life portrayed in the media is unattainable for many. Steven learns the hard way that people aren't characters for him to populate his fantasy. He also spent much of his life being dominated and abused by his mother. Instead of overcoming her abuse, he internalized it and became an oppressor on a much wider scale than his mother. He essentially became her and went well beyond her scope of abuse despite viscerally hating her. Because of these issues, and many more, Cows does more than sicken.Cows is a bizarre novel that requires a strong constitution to read. Avoid it at all costs if you are in any way squeamish. Matthew Stokoe succeeds in creating a abhorrent and memorable story with something real beneath all the layers of various and sundry bodily fluids. The only problem I had with the book was the ending. It was kind of a let down and paled in the face of the rest of the book that was so extreme and in your face. less

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