Status Updates From Against the American Dream:...

Chapter Nine: The Fascination of the (Extra)Ordinary: The Short Stories of Charles Bukowski

Mahler, the complex composer, full of ambivalence, mixture of romantic irony and modernist ... techniques, an artist who (like Bukowski) is drawn to the sentimental and unmediated, to the naive and the raw in life and who refuses to deny the split not only between the individual and society but also within the individual himself between the material and the spiritual...

The 35 years that separate 'Ask the Dust' from 'Factotum', have had their effect on the American male psyche ... Bandini, after getting an erection, "jumps off the bed." Whereas Chinaski, on being assaulted by Martha, though upset at losing control ("If I come ... I'll never forgive myself"), ejaculates and, it seems safe to conclude, forgives himself.

Bukowski's novels ... are remarkably effective in their portrayal of one idiosyncratic yet at the same time representative persona; and their style, something I have barely touched on, constitutes an impressive achievement in its own right ... Bukowski is, after all, a novelist and not a social theorist and were he not so effective a novelist, we would not be concerned with social comment in his work.

In the past there had been a connection between work and wealth. With the increased efficiency of technology, and hence the increasingly small part played by human labor in the production of wealth, that connection has ceased, and because the causal relationship between labor and wealth has ceased to exist, distributing that wealth on the basis of one's work no longer makes sense.

The number of areas - specific and general - where there are striking similarities between the form and content of Brecht's and Bukowski's poetry suggest a cognate dynamic helpful in revealing (the later) Bukowski as a social lyricist.

There is a dialectic at work in Bukowski's poetry: on the one hand the subject is straining to maintain its integrity through continual self-assertion, isolation and the refusal of a larger collectivity in which it fears being submerged and losing all individuality, and yet this refusal produces the metonymy which, ultimately, effects that subject's own objectification.

It is one of Bukowski's strengths as a poet that he has managed to capture history and social dynamics in his poems without vitiating their aesthetic power.

Bukowski has written more poems depicting work and the American working-class experience than any other major American poet...

Bukowski's position is a not uncommon reaction to ever increasing structures of domination in society; however the idealist platitudes of a poem like "horse and fist" have been less and less evident in Bukowski's poetry, replaced by the recognition of the subject's ultimate mediation through the social world.

Metaphor substitutes and Bukowski did not want a substitute, though he did want to make vivid the object being described and this accounts for his reliance on metonymy. He did not see that "unity behind the apparent diversity of phenomena" which M.H. Abrams felt metaphor "discloses".