Book Review: Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby
Philosophy in the torture chamber.
An unnamed philosophy professor decides to take a more practical method of answering various philosophical questions about what it means to be human. Why not study the human directly?
For example, if one wants to find when a human stops being a “rational animal,” as Aristotle defined it, why not torture and mutilate them to see at what point they become incapable of rationality?
“Gillian was not an animal.
As I had disfigured her, she was a monster.”
Violent Faculties is written in the form of a thesis paper. Each of the chapters recounts the professor’s philosophical experiments, all of which involve horrific acts being inflicted on various people, mostly students and former colleagues.
In each chapter, her results seem frustratingly inconclusive. Her extreme acts on other people yield no real results.
This clearly has a negative effect on her already horrible mind state. As the book goes on, her thoughts become more fragmented and her actions more clearly being done more out of revenge and anger than to answer any sort of philosophy question.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if the world were dying outside?”
Violent Faculties is a pitch-black comedy, satirizing both certain philosophy questions and the way that academia handles the field. Many of the so-called questions the professor addresses are based understandings of biology that come from ancient Greece. She seriously considers questions of things like how souls pass through sexual contact and if a mutilated woman would give birth to a mutilated baby.
The final chapter, an appendix, reveals that the the professor’s killing spree was triggered by her philosophy department being shut down, due to being neither practical nor profitable for her university. Despite her best efforts, she couldn't prevent the shut down. It’s no wonder that the higher-ups at the university end up becoming her targets.
The appendix contains one of the funnier details in the book. This is the only chapter with any kind of editorial voice besides the professor’s. It insists that the chapter may not have actually been written by the professor. It’s clear that this as added by someone at the university trying to underplay any part the shut down of the philosophy department may have had on the professor’s motivations.
While full of dark comedy, the book is also extremely brutal. The descriptions of torture, rape, and mutilation made me flinch a few times, and I’m a fairly jaded reader. The fact we spend most of this book stuck in the head of an extremely disturbed character makes it all the more unpleasant.
Violent Faculties is my first Charlene Elsby book, but it certainly won’t be my last. Her prose is incredible, and the story is disturbing, hilarious. It may be too difficult for readers not well-acquainted with more extreme horror books, or the works of authors like Bataille or de Sade. For those who are, I highly recommend this.