This is the Ritual - Rob Doyle

The theory of Depressive Realism suggests that individuals with clinical depression make more accurate inferences of the world around them than non-depressed individuals. In literature, the term has been applied to the writing of Michel Houellebecq by the critic Ben Jeffrey, who argues that the value of his work comes from his repeated portrayals of his characters’ failure to transcend their surroundings, and their mortality, which imbues his novels with a greater degree of honesty and truth than can be found in less rigidly materialistic writing.

In This Is The Ritual, his first collection of short fiction,  Rob Doyle writes with a level of bleakness and savagery which would sit comfortably alongside Houellebecq’s early work, and yet, at times, his writing is able to transcend the ‘radical resignation’ of Atomised or Platform. His characters achieve a sort of transcendence through their grotesqueness, the frustration of their ambitions elevating them to a surreal level of despair. The overall effect is brutal, at times hard to cope with, but ultimately compelling.

Perhaps the most vivid example of his style comes in Anus – Black Sun. Off his head after a warehouse party, the narrator finds himself in front of his computer, trawling through increasingly debased websites, until, 'lodged in the murky peripheries of a horrendous, low-end porn site,' he discovers a window, 'surrounded by ads so vile I felt soiled whenever my eyes strayed to them' . The video, filmed on a single, static camera, under harsh, artificial lighting, consists of a 43 minute shot of a woman’s anus, with no narrative or mis en scene. The ability to skip forward through the film has been disabled, and yet the narrator finds himself transfixed. In his chemically altered state, he begins to read meaning into this dehumanised, anatomical image:

'Devoid of all context, even that of the body to which it belonged, the anus began to assume an abstract quality. It became unmoored from functionality, from its historicity, from all sense of reference. It was neither arousing nor repulsive. I am tempted to suggest an affinity with Kant's 'thing-in-itself’. In rapt free-association, I began to see in the anus intimations of a sublime geometry'

As Nietzsche so nearly said, ‘if you gaze long into an anus, the anus also gazes into you’. Anus - Black Sun manages to capture the deadening aesthetic of extreme pornography, the alienating effect of postmodern society and also our ability to intellectualise and read meaning into any form of visual stimulus presented to us. The nameless anus, and by extension Doyle’s story about it, becomes a Rorschach test for the viewer; our psychological fixations reflected back to us in the form of a gaping arsehole.

Many of the stories in This Is The Ritual concern failed authors. These characters, inevitably ‘angry and self-marginalised’, have singularly failed to transcend their surroundings, and been driven to the outer edges of sanity by their attempts. One of the most memorable is John-Paul Finnegan, would-be pioneer of the ‘paltry realism’ movement. According to one of the few people to have seen it, his thirteen volume novel, Nevah Trust a Christian, was obviously 'written in great haste, utterly devoid of literary flair' and 'displayed not the slightest effort to entertain or seduce the reader'. Having failed utterly to transform the literary world, he finds himself on board the ferry Ulysses, on his way back to Ireland, railing against 'good taste... literary classicism.... the boredoms of morality and plot - in other words, all the shit of literature'.

Projecting his self-loathing onto his fellow passengers, he declares, 'If I were to roar the word 'literature' at the top of my lungs, the vast majority of these people would run to the sides of the ship and hurl themselves over the edge to be drowned. They would sooner drown than confront a man roaring literature'.

Finnegan’s comment about ‘all the shit of literature’ refers back to a line in Doyle’s debut novel Here Are the Young Men, which portrays four adolescents determined to break free from ‘marriage, manners and money… the typical shit of literature’. That novel portrayed the exuberant, brutal iconoclasm of youth; This Is The Ritual looks at the aftermath. As one character says, 'being totally nihilistic is exciting when you're younger, you can get away with it then. There's still pleasure to be had in the destructive work. You haven't yet had to live in the ruins'.

In Ritual, the ruins are all around: one character, a writer at the level of Sebald and Coetzee, emasculates himself, before ending his days decomposing alone in his squalid flat, his hands and face eaten by his starving pet cat. Drawn to extremes of form and subject, they are fighting an unwinnable battle against convention and market diktats. Most end, like the fictional P Cranley, enduring psychotic episodes, finding themselves outcasts even among the subcultures of San Francisco.

There is real ugliness in This Is The Ritual, most notably in The Turk Inside. Here, Doyle depicts the interior monologue of a jealous, possessive man who has recently split up with his girlfriend, a stripper. The narrative quickly descends into a screed of racism and misogyny, the knee-jerk reactions of a man who views women as his property, and sees their exploitation by employers as a crime against him, not them. We are left to question how many of the offences he accuses his ex of are real, and how many are simply projections of his own fear and disgust.

At best, we see characters existing in a sort of resigned despair, as in On Nietzsche, a Geoff Dyer-esque account of a graduate who plans to write a definitive biography of the philosopher, but is overwhelmed by the scale of the task. He feels the need to write in order to 'confront and drive out the sense of total futility that had pervaded my life and thoughts for more than a decade'. He finds himself confronting the problem of boredom. Most pursuits are boring, he argues: even reading is boring, though admittedly satisfying. Ultimately, he concludes, the problem is that consciousness is boring. This knowledge is both liberating and paralysing. The study of Nietzsche is a strain and a comfort - it is something to base his life around, as long as he never has to actually work on it.

Blending boundaries between fiction and memoir, Doyle often appears as a passive narrator in his stories. Interspersed with traditional narratives are a series of short, fragmentary pieces gathered together as Outposts: a sequence of jagged images of sex, death and delirium repurposed from Bataille, Burroughs, conversations overheard by the author in hospital wards and train carriages. The effect serves to reinforce the book’s bleak portrayal of the human experience, showing that his concerns cross the divides between fiction and life, high and low culture.

This Is The Ritual is an unflinching examination of the darker areas of modern existence, of people who fail to achieve the levels of self-actualisation to which we are taught to aspire in Western society. Doyle’s style is uncompromising: at times it feels as if he is challenging the reader to continue. The hedonism which characterised the opening sections of Here Are The Young Men is largely absent here, replaced with a catalogue of despair and madness. And yet, the reader should carry on: Doyle is an author who addresses important philosophical and literary themes, and makes them integral to his work, rather than bolt-ons. He explores and acknowledges the limitations of human endeavour, but also demonstrates that literature can elevate our experiences beyond the constricts of ‘depressive realism’. This is a rare skill, and one to be valued.