Charting Monkey Island

with Levi-Strauss and Freud

Howard Singerman

I imagine I have been invited to write on Mike Kelley’s Monkey Island because I was at its sole performance, and that part of my task is to convey a sense of that performance as a singular work of art. Those of us who wrote about it ten years ago were struck by the performance's chaotic pace, driven by Kelley’s remarkable bodily energy and the seemingly disembodied voice on which his manic actions hung as though on strings. The performance’s subtitle was A Monologue Hebephrenic and
it was precisely the hebephrenic, the hallucinatory,
confused, and delusional that we noted.
As a sensual object, Monkey Island was, as I had written of one of Kelley’s earlier performances and my experience of it, hot, scattered, fast-paced and energized-a succession of repressions and explosions. While the viewer can pick out fragments and ravelings of a narrative, the performances’ sole gestalt is one of expended energy. But Monkey Island was a mixed object as well as a mixed-up one. Ten years after its performance, in its texts and drawings, the work is remarkable for its attempts at order.



Indeed, Monkey Island now seems a research project, a library assignment, Its disciplines range from the established to the discredited, from entomology and structuralism to homeopathy and witchcraft1 its eclectic citations include Dante and Homer, Jimmie Rodger’s “Honeycomb’ and Thomas Edison’s light bulb. What makes the environs of Monkey Island navigable are precisely the methods of the production of knowledge: Cross. references and repetitions, oppositions and comparisons. The project recalls, then, a spread of index cards, underlined Xeroxes, and oral presentations. Monkey Island isn’t configured with such stationery-store ephemera, but the objects and activities assembled under its name are equally disparate. The project comprises some forty black-and-white drawings, many of which spread across two or three panels; paintings in acrylic, as well as in Mercurochrome, semen, and powdered sea monkeys; sculptures of metal funnels, painted wood, and homemade drums1 stage sets of hula hoops, plastic cups, and stained paper bags. Monkey Island spreads temporally as well as physically. The performance took place at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, in 1983; the drawings were made over the course of three years, from 1981 to 1983. Sections of the performance’s libretto were published as artist’s writings in 1981 and 1982.
Kelley’s method is the researcher’s, or maybe the philosopher’s, it is wanderingly heterogeneous and inclusive, but at the same time it is insistently closed. Each item must be connected and cross-referenced: it must appear more than once as a guarantee of its significance. The work itself is a quest for knowledge, an attempt to make meaning and build a coherent world. Whatever confusions it contains, wherever it lapses into hebephrenia, these are the products of the attempt to establish a system which marks a place for everything, which can understand everything according to its place. Thus, Monkey Island begins systematically, and with a remarkable openness, as Kelley announces its content and explains its workings.
Perhaps I can begin to explain it this way Take a square piece of paper. Fold it in half from top to bottom, across its width from left to right, and diagonally through the center from corner to corner. Unfolded, it should recall the Union Jack; as it happens, the flag of the United Kingdom is also a map of Monkey Island. Let’s start, as Kelley does, with the diagonals. The X opens Monkey Island, its discovery initiates the performance, and more than that, its image determines the boundaries and features of the landscape that the performance describes. “X the square:’ Kelley chants, “X Out the eyes and what do I see? That’s when it opens out to infinity-not before” As he unfolds a huge piece of paper, folded as yours is, he narrates his actions.

The space unfolds in the continual growth forming the world.
The bisected square-the geometric base of organic compounds.
The primal shape which must be compounded to form all else.

“X out the eyes and what do I see?” It is not the empirical world but the structured world that is charted in Monkey Island. To X the eyes is to link from the outset theory, blindness, and death.







Kelley says as much, he pays his theoretical debts very early on. Speaking of the X-figure taped to the floor and describing the hourglass-shaped prop he holds in his hand, he pronounces:

The figure is two funnels connected by the content
Start with the content first
Turn it over either way and it will come out
The content is bilateral division itself.

It’s obvious then. We are told at the beginning that it is bilateral division that constructs the meaning of Monkey Island and of the world it describes. The binary operation is, for structuralism, “the smallest common denominator of all thought appropriately, it is marked in structuralism’s formal diagrams by an encircled X. The X lies at the center of the world and it builds the world in its image, through its repetition. But if it is the world’s core-its content-it is also, as Kelley insists, empty. The center is not one but two, not presence but absence. Echoing Kelley’s incantations over the emptied funnels, no less a structuralist than Claude Levi-Strauss maintains that “structure has no distinct content it is content itself." All the ways in which we reduce the continuous to the discrete depend on binary division and that division becomes, in Kelley’s illustration as in Levi-Strauss’ pronouncement, the final meaning.
All classification proceeds by pairs of contrasts... [the] final term will be provided, as intended, in the form of a simple opposition (high and low, left and right, peace and war, etc.), and beyond which it is, for intrinsic reasons, useless as well as impossible to go.



Monkey Island is the very object of structural anthropology, a native land. It is also a house of mirrors; the.X that determines Monkey Island’s physical geography is the spitting image of the mind that separates and categorizes. The identity that structuralism “pos-tulate[s] between the laws of the universe and those of the human mind is made liter-al in Monkey Island’s topography, in the very configuration of its coastline.

a lost boat
the islands move too
the circles intersect-a Venn diagram
forming the boat
the boat separates forming the horns
Of this Devil’s Triangle
the circles move away from each other
two fly’s eyes
all being sucked into the whirlpool mouth
the mouth of the river
flanked by the two wings of land
the geography-the image
of the insect connection

Pacing the floor, describing the masking-tape map of Monkey Island that forms his stage, Kelley simultaneously enacts its origins and explains its environs. The story of how the world has come to be divided has divided the world; the truth of that order is written in the landscape and confirmed in its repetitions, the way it mirrors the order of things. ‘There is simultaneous production of myths themselves, by the mind that generates them and, by the myths, of an image of the world which is already inherent in the structure of the mind!"



Monkey Island is a creation story that has left its mark on the landscape, and, like most creation stories, it tells of separation: of separating light from dark, water from land. But as the dividing continues, the image of Monkey Island is doubled; its order is repeated on an entirely different plane, its truth is written in the body as well. In Monkey Island, as in the Drysdale River plain of Australia, “the total system of social relations, itself bound up with a system of the universe, [is] projected on to the anatomical plane." In Kelley’s work, the anatomical plane is that of a honeybee. The X of the landscape is also the insect figure. The ocean and inlet form the bee’s head and abdomen, the triangular sections of land that enclose them are the insect’s wings. The ocean’s islands are the honeybee's eyes; those inland, the decidedly anthropomorphic and obviously female bee’s ovaries.

The two metaphorical totalities, the topographical and the anatomical, mirror each other; the features and functions of the one are repeated and reflected on the other.

Inside the landscape and within the body, the sites and incidents of each are paired and parsed along metonymical axes: up and down, left and right, mind and body, wet and dry.
“For it to play [its] part," Levi-Strauss explains of the stuff of the material world, the features of a landscape or a body, “it must be whittled down. Only a few of its elements are retained-those suitable for the expression of contrasts or forming pairs of opposites!’ tic) The images and objects of Monkey Island are whittled over and over; their attributes rearranged according to their task. They are “pertnutable, that is, capable of standing in successive relations with other entities.. .in the continual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa!’(lI) In his journey across the land-




scape and his explication of the body, Kelley insists on passages, segues, transformations. Each element inflects the next, becomes its possibility. Above the equator, in the honeybee’s head, the eye cries the tears that become the nose-as well as the scent that is the nose’s object.

the bag that drips
through the tear duct
into the tear drop
of perfume
there is no nose
drop it
he is a nose
the pheromone king and queen
smell is its embodiment


Below the belt, the tear-shaped sac is both bladder and anus.
the more coffee you drink-the more tired you get
I’m getting a spare tire-a bladder
tired of being full of liquid
the stops are more frequent-Stop!!
“Can we stop soon?! Pleeaase!!”
“I have to go”
Go! The goings more often
I want to stop
I’d rather be full of land
stopped up-going to pot
potting soil
stop (uuhh)-go (uuhh)
stop uhh go uh potty.



The nose and the asshole are locked together by the complementarily of their functions:to create smells and to smell them. They are linked as well in their resemblance to each other, by the sac shape each has been given as though syntactically by its neighbor, by the teardrop or the bladder. These neighbors are themselves linked across the hemispheres by their wetness. Similarity and contiguity, these are the poles of what structuralism has discovered as “the twofold character of language. The insect figure, one might say, is a significant, even a speaking, body.
The insect figure is also, relatively speaking, anatomically correct; eyes and nose, bladder and anus, these are situated about where they belong. The bladder shape’s place within the landscape, however, is less secure. It is during his survey of the landscape’s features that Kelley notices-switching planes of reference-that “there is no nose!’ The bladder is not a permanent topological feature like the island eyes and whirlpool mouth; rather it appears in the landscape as a list of attributes: it is that which is filled, that which bloats or floats or hangs distended; it is often a corpse, “the dead man/bloated! bladder-like!’ It is the teardrop of semen that fertilizes the mandrake in the shadow of the gallows, and the hanging man who spurts his vital fluids to give it birth.

a corpse-a human sacrifice
sacrifices this human
fertilizes in death
the spurting erection in hanging plants its seed
hanging plants
the Mandrake



But the bladder also lends its characteristics to the mandrake’s mirror opposite, the waxy, floating, foul-smelling ambergris.
Whittled and fitted into various guises, the couplet ambergris and mandrake appear throughout Monkey Island, sharing and spreading their characteristics. Most often they mark a transition, a passage from water to land, or from underground to surface. They are, in fact, a couple; Kelley weds them early on in Monkey Island’s narrative. The landscape’s double on the biological plane is the outcome of their union.

the point that these congregate around
was one made up of two
a forced marriage in the mind
and they won’t divorce themselves
they can’t!
because there’s a child from this union
“My sweet little honey bee”
the insect figure
the landscape
one made up of two:
1)ambergris
2)mandrake
it’s something dark and tangled
ambergris and mandrake
the parents of this figure.



Despite their union, each dreams of a lost object. Ambergris is a product of the animal kingdom, yet it floats like an island, like earth. And despite its origins-it is a mass of anally passed indigestible matter-it is used to make perfumes; it is made to smell like lilacs. Ambergris is a mirror of the whale, the gray floating bladder that gives it birth,and mandrake, too, mirrors its origins. According to legend, mandrake can grow only in the shadow of the gallows, fertilized by the sperm of the hanged man. A root that grows in the form of a man, it can, in turn, only be harvested by being “hanged,” pulled out from underground by a rope. There is in all this mirroring what Kelley terms “a fleshconfusion”: “where the mandrake, a root, think it be man/where ambergris, animal sub-stance/become lilac perfume In order to be whole, to be everything, each strives to be the other, to include the other within itself. But in order for one to be, the other must be shut out, denied. Thus, when “the senses get mixed up” and the scent of the ambergris is mistaken for the scream of the uprooted mandrake-when one siren, the smell that attracts, is mistaken for another, the wailing song (or the whaling song)-it is amber gray wax that Kelley’s seafarers use to plug their ears.
Kelley’s formula for the birth of the insect figure, “one made up of two,” is a structuralist equation. The unity that structuralism demands and that it situates in the aboriginal mind-”the savage mind totalizes”is secreted by binary opposition, Levi-Strauss’ “smallest common denominator of all thought:’ But the curious arithmetic of the formula recalls Freud’s unconscious as well as structuralism’s, and there is between them a difference, a delay. As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, structuralism’s categorical, combinative, nonhistorical unconscious, mirroring itself in the laws of the universe is more a Kantian than a Freudian unconscious At the center of Freud’s unconscious lies a rather different kind of X, one that marks not the empty form of symmetry, but another sort of absence, that of an event or object that has never been-for at least as long as the subject has been a subject-and can never be replaced. The riddles of the Freudian unconscious do, indeed, follow the logic of the two becoming one. And they are formulated for the first time as the questions of childhood research: Where did I come from? What am I missing? Like the psychoanalyst’s, the child’s first researches are not only inquiries into the order of things, but also, and more precisely, historical inquiries, questions addressed to the past. The past is what threatens to unravel Monkey Island’s structural, synchronic divisions the past plays on the line the structuralist unconscious lays down.

right down the bilateral division
this rut-uhh
ohh-it’s rutting season here in the river’s bed
a rut of wilderness
a stream at the bottom of this tangled growth flows...
and flows down it toward the dark
The Past

Kelley’s rut that leads to the past of both subject and species recalls

the cloaca, the cavity that serves both reproductive and excretory functions in certain lower animals,

and, for Freud, the human anus that is given reproductive power in the sexual misconceptions of children. Children, specifically male children, formulate the theory that babies are passed through the an us because they do not distinguish between the sexual and the excremental and they cannot imagine sexual difference. Or, as Kelley might say, they can’t see anyone different from themselves and they can’t see in the dark. Telling the difference, discerning what is down there and deciphering its significance is, for Freud, the central concern of childhood researches, whether the question is phrased as where do babies come from, as he suggested in his earlier writings, or what is the difference between the sexes, in his later revision. Whatever the object of the child’s interest, Freud placed much emphasis on the “sexual theories of children:’ The “instinct for knowledge” as such is “attracted unexpectedly early and intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first aroused by them."
Kelley, like Freud, links all knowledge to sexual knowledge; he too presumes that the source of the will to know is tied to and grows from the will to have that knowledge. And it was in the search for a theory of sexuality and of sexual difference that Monkey Island was discovered. “Why are their asses red,” the young Mike asked his mother at the zoo, at the sight of monkeys in estrus.

and why are their asses red?
a red ring
I know, they’ve hurt themselves
dragged themselves raw
can’t stop themselves
it’s an unstoppable itch
caused by an unstoppable agent



Kelley’s questioner answers himself, perhaps because his parents’ answer was unsatisfactory. In what Freud likened to “flashes of genius,”(17) children associate what is left unanswered in the questions they ask concerning adult sexuality with what has been interdicted or threatened in their experiences of their own sexuality.
Freud links the instinct for knowledge to sexuality not only through its origins in the infancy of the subject, but in its phylogenetic origins in the infancy of the species. As in the child, “in primitive men the process of thinking is still to a great extent sexualized When Freud writes of the thinking of children and primitives as sexualized, he is referring not-or not only-to what they think about, but to how they think their relationship to the world. They love their thoughts and overvalue the process of thinking. They share an “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world” through their thoughts, for they consistently mistake “the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagine that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things’ Freud notes the erudition of the primitive and, like Levi-Strauss, who credits the savage mind with a “taste for erudition and speculation and what sometimes looks like intellectual dandyism,” he insists that this knowledge is precisely a systematic and speculative one. Unlike science and, in particular, the science of psychoanalysis, it is marked by its completeness. While contemporary science may bring us closer to the truth of the world, animism is characterized by its demands for coherence and completeness. Grounded in a belief in the “omnipotence of thoughts7 it is necessarily “consistent and exhaustive...a truly complete explanation of the nature of the universe."
The world is unified by the mind that thinks before it, a mind that insists on the unity of the world as its mirror. Perhaps the proposition is more provisional or more desperate:the world must be unified in order for me to be. Freud terms this monocular and yet insistently doubled view “intellectual narcissism:’ and his definition would place the theoretician here, the structuralist who insists on identity and demands totality-on the couch along with the child, primitive, and neurotic. Unity and the completeness of explanation are the marks not only of childhood theories of sexuality or of primitive cosmologies, they are for Freud the characteristics of speculative theory. More than that, and linking all these disparate narcissists, they are the characteristics of “secondary revision:’ the ego’s share in producing the dream image. The task of secondary revision is to fill in the gaps: “Its purpose is evidently to get rid of the disconnectedness and unintelligibility produced by the dream activity and replace it by a new ‘meaning.”’ Thus, secondary revision stands as the very model of theory; it is

an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or of thought, that comes within its grasp; and if.. it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.

“Speculative, systematic thinking draws its force from the effort of the ego to appropriate an exteriority of which, as Freud will later put it, it is only the ‘organized part.”The ego, in Freud’s topology, is only an appendage, the formed appendage of the unformed id, the part that sticks out. The anatomy of Monkey Island suggests that ‘the one that sticks out” has other figures for itself on the body, other attachments in which it sees itself and with which it fills in gaps and holes: the eye and the penis.

THE ONE THAT STICKS OUT

attention is drawn to it
the exception is studied and mistaken as being
representative by the very fact that it sticks out

AN EASY CHOICE!

but
“in a fly’s eye I will”
in a fly’s eye
I WILL
image cohesion
I will it!

This passage, recited at the end of Monkey Island, insists on the relationship between the eye and the penis; like the nose and the asshole, they are complementary objects-the



part that sticks out and the attention it draws. But more than that, they are mirrors; indeed, they are identical twins. These lines are inscribed in abbreviated form around the borders of a drawing of a ludicrously elongated, and obviously penile, eye: the eye that sticks out, The Bug Eye. Kelley’s final demand-"Image cohesion; I will it!”-links this double appendage to theory and the visual order of things; as Hegel noted, distance and vision-perhaps at the length envisioned in The Bug Eye-are the attributes of theory: “vision finds itself in a purely theoretical relationship to objects."
By the time this speech is delivered, the orderly explication with which Monkey Island began has evaporated. Kelley’s voice is raised, his final demand is shouted in panic, as



though-to use Freud’s analogy for the threat posed to the little boy by the sight of his mother’s seeming lack-”throne and altar are in danger! Kelley’s linking of ego, eye, and penis-of theoretical knowledge, sight, and the phallus-might be given the name phallogocentrism, particularly if one ties this triumvirate to throne and altar. Perhaps I should have said from the outset that Monkey Island is a critique of the patriarchal order and its binary ways of knowledge, the “hierarchical opposition of marked and unmarked terms” that reflects through every discourse and each institution “the decisive/divisive presence/absence of the phallus But to have said at the beginning something as bald as that Monkey Island is a critique of phallogocentric modes of thought would have been

to insist too soon on the very coherence of meaning
that I was suggesting the work attacked.

Atanyrate,asAdornO wrote of uncovering the various links between surrealism and psychoanalysis, any such statement “already subjects it to the tastes of officialdom 7 and is necessarily followed by “the complacent statement: ‘We know this already.'”
Moreover, such an affirmation at the outset might have blunted the fact that Monkey Island isn’t so much a criticism as a failure, It is an attempt to establish throne and altar, to enact quite literally the connections between the eye, the penis, and knowing.



Taking metaphors literally, refusing to tell the difference between figurative and literal language, is one of the mainsprings of the comic, particularly when those mistaken metaphors are situated on the body.

Returned to the body,
every abstraction and every attempt at the sublime
is sullied and degraded.

The structuralist tells Kelley that all narrative recounts the same story, the story of “entry into a closed space and emergence from it," and argues:

Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as “a cave," “the grave;’ “a house," “woman” (and correspondingly, be allotted the features of darkness, warmth, dampness), entry into it is interpreted on various levels as “death;’ “conception;’ “return home” and so On; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical.

Kelley takes the structuralist’s word for it. He, too, insists on the sameness of all these ins and outs. Moreover, he refuses to tell the difference between the theorist and the baggy-pants comedian. Every explanation contains a certain degradation, the rendering of the unknown and mysterious in terms of the known and banal, but Kelley takes theory’s revelations as indecent exposures. If all these acts are identical, indifferent, then Dante’s majestic vision of the Mystic Rose fertilized with the nectar of God can be mistaken for-or even understood as-a flower fucked by a large and anthropomorphic bee.
The gravest error Kelley’s manic organizer makes in his attempt to establish order is to confuse his little penis for the grand and invisible phallus. He has mistaken the organ that is always popping up at the wrong times, the little fuck-up that is always in trouble, for the phallus that divides and interdicts, that has already submitted to the threat and taken the cloth, that “play[s] its role only when veiled." The comic for Freud arises from an unveiling, precisely a show of the body: “it can show human beings in their dependence on bodily needs (degradation) or.. .reveal the physical demands lying behind the claim of mental love (unmasking Or, as KelIey says, “the best way to fuck something up is to give it a body." What is figured in The Bug Eye, then, is not visual and theoretical distance but vision’s “flesh confusion’ In cartoons, at any rate, the bug eye is an irrepressible eruption, a betrayal by the body of the subject and his cool.
Kelley’s attempts to hold himself together lay bare that which Freud suggests the comic always reveals, the body beneath the mind. But in addition to the physical body, these efforts reveal “the monotonous psychical automatism that lies beneath the wealth and apparent freedom of psychical functions." Kelley’s comedy unearths a mechanism that is signaled, like most machines, by its repetitions and that, like his performing voice, seems to run him-to jerk him around-from somewhere else. That is to say, it reveals the insistence of the unconscious and the mechanical sameness of its demand, the reductive “I want” that betrays the subject’s autonomy, his aspirations to maturity and his presence to himself. It is this repeating, whining unconscious that is figured in the landscape of Monkey Island; it leaves its trace not as a projection, a continuation in its own image. Rather it emerges from somewhere else as an eruption, a comic disruption, here and there in a landscape that is at best a compromise formation.