Preview of 'The Necrophilic Landscape' by Morgan Vogel.
writing by Morgan Vogel and Raighne, taken from the 2nd printing.
Preview of the opening pages.
Text below is from the afterword in which Stephen Z Hayes suggested selections of texts that appeared from Morgan online.
i like good and am not the devil. texts by Morgan Vogel.1
Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature. His novel, Die Elixire des Teufels [The Devil’s Elixir], contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed from him, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too much material of the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes. We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double,’ which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another — by what we should call telepathy — so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.2
/
“The Necrophilic Landscape” was composed in 2010 and then shelved after being rejected for a grant. At that time the author was influenced by gothic and genre literature such as Melmoth The Wanderer and The Devil’s Elixirs, or Edogawa Ranpo’s detective stories. In my personal work I try to avoid nostalgia or escape into fantasy and I see a tendency towards nostalgia in the use of these generic references to male authors. I was asked to edit “The Necrophilic Landscape” and turn it into something suitable for release. I chose to foreground a theme that was only partially worked out in the original, that is that the narrative takes place in an almost entirely male world. The most obstructive editorial decision I made was to remove a central passage which contained the original’s only depictions of sex or a female character. The printed version of the book is more disjointed as a result of this decision, but it seemed to me that the only explanation for the narrative’s total mystification of sexual reproduction could be that it takes place in a fantasy world that contains only men and male children. The change in title reflects my critical distance as an editor and was meant to refer to a concept employed by a feminist theorist I like of a male drive towards necrophilia (versus female ‘biophilia’). I believe the color was removed because scans of the original artwork were not available.
I’m interested in what it means for there to be a cultural or political “mainstream” against which can be defined various subcultures or genres or fringe political movements. In terms of my critical perspective on my own history, I feel like emotional investment in “subculture”, such as underground comics, or punk, or the cultural aspects of certain forms of leftist or queer or feminist political organizing, can express avoidance towards deeper questions of a person’s political role or subjectivation within a political system. By sending off social signals that I am part of and accepted in some form of fringe culture or another, I can maybe elide or make myself seem separate from aspects of my subjectivation that make me feel uncomfortable, and I might even feel emotionally justified in doing this, since it feels unfair to be implicated in a political and biological reality in which I never asked to take part. Of course then I’m diverting my energy into the symbolic and away from the material. I would like to counteract this tendency by being as “mainstream” as I can as a cultural producer but I doubt my art can change anything. My participation in political strategies of separatism and “fringe-ism” seems separate to me from my practice as an artist.
I feel like my peers have been very gracious in accommodating me as an artist despite the intensity of my specific needs and my constant undermining of my own practice. I still feel bitterness and feel excluded, although I am aware I mostly choose to exclude myself. I don’t represent myself as an artist on social media but I watch what other people are doing, and I feel special bitterness about the significance and complexity with which some of my artistic peers are able to implicate their bodies or personalities in their practice, versus my need for invisibility and my feeling that my showing my body would be pathetic. I feel conflicted in this desire to remove my body from my practice, versus my awareness that there is nothing significant or new to say at this moment that does not implicate the body and that the dematerialization of the body is an page of archetypal feint of patriarchal discourse. I often feel the desire to express myself as if I were someone else.3
/
If I am unremittingly hostile on the internet, does that mean I will avoid accumulating ‘cool’ capital or that I will get more of it? When you use social networking services you are constructing a hideous doppelganger of yourself in virtual space. Can I kill it? If I say really fucked up things, is that it or me saying it? What if my facebook doppelganger doesn’t want to live? Can it unplug itself or do I have to do that for it? What if I have to take down the rest of the internet with me? If I set off a bomb in a restaurant in second life, is that real terrorism? What if real people can be hurt by virtual actions? If I feel the need to be hostile to virtual people on the internet in order to sabotage the construction of the public doppelganger of me, how do I deal with it if real people didn’t like it that I attacked their virtual selves? Is pain people feel about virtual objects legitimate pain? If you die in the matrix, do you die in real life?4
This is an afterword I wrote that appears in the second printing of ‘The Necrophilic Landscape’ by Morgan Vogel.
Afterwards. text by Raighne.
“Loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind.”
—Marilyn French
When I originally asked Morgan about publishing an earlier version of this book, then called The Prickless Man, she told me no. Fool that I am, that didn’t stop me from trying. Morgan was hosting the files on a dormant website, which I scraped to form the bones of what would become The Necrophilic Landscape. In 2015, 2dcloud would publish a limited ashcan edition of the work.
It was an involved undertaking, requiring the modification of low-res web files — heightening the contrast so that the images were primarily stark black and white. Reorienting the page design, shifting what had originally been no more than four panels per page to a mostly 9-panel grid format that mirrored the altcomics tumblr logo. In so doing, I was able to hide the fact that the original files were unsuitable for print. I did this without permission, knowing that I might be wasting my time and that Morgan might take great offense to my changing her work.
Morgan was perceptive, knew the effort I’d made, the time investment — and was touched by it. With this new direction, she began to guide me. What pages or panels to alter further. What to cut. And why. As her publisher, I found this to be an exciting role-reversal.
The messy blob of ‘ink’ on the cover of the ashcan edition is something I made and altered to Morgan’s specification. It was a mix of colors in acrylic paint on scrap paper. Something I had been using for a pallet. I took a photo with my phone, dropped it in photoshop, made it greyscale, and upped the contrast until it was nearly a black and white graphic. That image became the cover.
Morgan once likened changing online identities to being a crab crawling into another shell. It was in this way that she crawled into Tracy Auch — the name she used for the first edition of The Necrophilic Landscape. Tracy Auch was the invention of Andrew Burkholder; he used it when posting pages of Qviet to tumblr in 2011. Other names Morgan floated for the 2015 edition of her book were Clarissa Hennessy and Satan.
After Morgan died I saw anew the importance of building a space for artists like her. It does not have to be a space for everyone, but it is important that it exists.
</3
“i like good and am not the devil” was something Morgan said to Raighne in messenger.
comets comets blogspot comment excerpt.
Altcomics Magazine 4, interview w/ Tracy Auch.
comets comets blogspot comment excerpt.
Good work Morgan. I'm going back and reading it again.