FUCCBOI

Thoughts on Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe

I’ve been holed-up hermit-style at my parents’ place lately, in b/n things—physicalities, phases—alternating b/n poetic mania and moored ennui. I’ve been downloading PDFs of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Guy Debord, Maurice Blanchot, Meister Eckhart, René Guénon, Dōgen, Mao Zedong. I’ve been saving as many JPEGs of El Greco paintings as I can find. I’ve read aloud poems from Pound and Blake and Kerouac and Hanshan to myself. I’ve been obsessed w/ repetition. But it’s been a lot of start and stop, a lot of reading a few pages, writing a few poems, then getting distracted by my cats or the trees shivering outside in the so-high sun.

After finishing New Juche’s Stupid Baby over a week ago, I was looking at the stacks of books I brought over from my moved-out apartment trying to decide what to read next. Faulkner or Beckett. McCullers or Duras. But, lately I’ve been ripping though the 1storypod YouTube channel alternating b/n passively and actively listening to Sean and Harold w/ guest appearances by Max Lawton (Moresco’s The Beginnings is definitely next up on my list when it drops and I’m able to cop a copy). I don’t really listen to podcasts much, but I’ve had more spare time lately so I’ve gotten through a lot of eps actually. Anyway, this is pretty much to say that I found myself interested in giving Fuccboi a read (Tropicália is in the queue as well once I work through my next reading project that’s been simmering for a while). I don’t really care about discourse and only catch glimpses of the topic of the week from tweets on the TL—I mainly just log onto Twitter to keep up w/ books people are reading and recommending and what authors I like are up to and any lit mags to check out / submit to, etc.—so I didn’t really have much of a preconceived notion coming into reading this besides that it seemed to generate a fair amount of controversy at the time of its release, 2022. In 2022 I was mostly reading translated fiction and classics so I guess that’s why this wasn’t really something I was interested in checking out at the time. But, alas, I read it. … It’s great!

Becoming as continuous cannibalization of the self. The ouroboritic cycle, the snake eating its tail, churning through the symbolic, reified in the present through the automythographizing of the past. Autofiction as the writing of the story which you live, read as you write it, as you desperately try to approach the ineffable essence of your life which can never be truly expressed, but which may be approached closer and closer, healing you more and more as the dead past is consumed by the present and metabolized into the future—the future which is only growth through an honest reckoning, a shedding of the scaffolds of socially constructed censors and fetters. Sean in Fuccboi embodies this process of myriad nuances through the literal shedding of skin through his excruciating eczema situation and his literal fractures in his bones—the structure and the facade being broken down then healed (though never really fully healed, b/c what is being healed but inhabiting a new Body of Theseus, ready to be broken down and built up again and again in pursuit of the TRULY LIVED—the perpetual sacrifice of meaningful life?) as he half manically sprints and half penitently drags himself through his personal Odyssey, his personal reckoning with that eternal self-cannibalizing snake. All around him is symbols. The women in his life don the monickers of “bae” (roomie bae, autonomous bae, ex bae, etc, etc.), others are abbreviated w/ first name letters (R, K, E, etc.), and others don myriad other symbolic placeholders such as “roomie bro,” “the ole man,” “lil sis,” “big sis,” etc., etc.. These symbols form this kinetic cloud, this charged storm through which Sean ignites various points through self-destruction and honest reconciliation—LIFE! Symbols only the more ubiquitous in this time of simulacrum, in this gig-economy relation-commodified overstimulatingly-complex tangled web of a life.

Like New Juche’s Stupid Baby, Fuccboi’s success (under the impossible metric of HUMANITY or TRUTH or CREATION) rests entirely in the author’s willingness to give himself over in honesty, in passion, and in self-reckoning, in critical self-destruction and appraisal, to the autofiction form. The risk Sean takes on top of the risk of transparency is his writing-as-he-speaks. The risk here lies in that the reader has to believe that this is how Sean actually speaks, how he actually conceptualizes the events he is recounting, b/c he bound himself to the autoficition form for this project, and, so, w/o a reader’s belief in the truth of his written style, he risks being read as hiding behind a scaffold of put-on false-colloquialism, of obscuring the story which he is trying to convince the reader that he is telling as it is/was. This is where a lot of contemporary autofiction writers seem to run into a fatal issue; they set out a narrative form supposed to convey honesty but then often hide behind a distanced mask of irony or unconvincing voice—evaporating the facade, leaving nothing but bitter-tasting fog sputtering out from a machine that you can find at any pop-up Halloween store. But, I believe that Sean successfully avoided this fatal flaw. The voice rings authentic in its self-conception to me. And, Sean’s honesty, or perhaps, at least, his character Sean’s honesty, feels like it is striving towards authenticity enough that it holds the scaffolds of the form sufficiently to construct a narrative that is raw, sad, funny, painful, and interesting for the duration of the 300+ pages. I did have some minor criticisms—such as that I thought introducing acknowledged uncertainty into specific moments of recall did not feel consistent enough to justify their employment and destabilized the narrative slightly at times—but they were just minor criticisms, and I really enjoyed the book as a whole. Specifically, there was a strong dual current of self-agitated urgency and empathy/sensitivity that I felt aware of in Sean-as-Narrator/Character throughout, and which provided a base essence that felt buoyant in its emotional substance, ferrying the story on, cyclically rising up in great waves which actually made me tear up slightly at one point (see the passage below):

Only spring had come. Ryden hadn’t emerged.

I stalled out in my spiel, registering this. My voice cracking then stopping.

The seasons just kept going.

We only had so many seasons.

I thought about what Ryden’s dad had said. Shifted my approach. This wasn’t the time for symbolism. Ryden was dealing with something structural. Something neural. His situation didn’t fit into my symbolic structure. Wouldn’t no matter how hard I tried to make it. (Conroe, p. 324)

Real life stuff. The myriad faces of the human life. Connected w/ the seasons which pass but always recur.

I appreciate what Sean was going for, and what he was able to succeed w/, in this novel. I’m very interested in seeing where he goes w/ his next book.

All of this autofiction of the artist—the examination of the tormented, incessantly becoming, inner life of creation—coincided in a coincidental culmination w/ me watching Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983) the other night. Of course it’s a Tarkovsky film so I loved it and I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life, but it did feel somewhat synchronitic b/c of how personal it felt in regards to Tarkovsky’s own life. Tarkovsky’s Italian film, his poetic examination of exile and home. The house of memory in the ruins of a church. The pregnant Madonna. The social constructions which divide us. The madman atop the monument of old urging the world to just listen and open their eyes. There’s this deeply affecting struggle b/n faith and futility, b/n the artist as martyr and the relationships of life. You can feel Tarkovsky wrestling w/ painfully spiritual essences and urges and questions and regrets and LONGINGS.

It’s only tangentially related to the thoughts I’ve sketched out above, I suppose, but it feels inextricably linked somehow, and is something I will have to continue to think on.

Becoming is life. Experiences are cannibalized by the artist, and true art TRANSFORMS. For what is more noble than to try to articulate, manifest, express, explore that which is ineffable, that which in the cycle of the snake devouring the self is consumed only to be reborn.