The Register of Candied Decay

Fixed water: undead mermaids, undersea salons, slime

Content note: sexual imagery, reference to pornography, reference to self-harm.

Action Books has a reputation for aesthetic radical experimentation. Lara Glenum’s Pop Corpse tackles head-on the misogynistic hypocrisies inherent in fairy tales, which represent perfect essences of the sexual double standard.

Glenum dismantles the sugared horrors of the little mermaid and puts the story back together again by offering the central figure of her work—here named ‘XXX’—agency and then some. Rather than desperately craving true love, this little mermaid fucks, webcams and fights her way to sexual and personal liberation. The discourses of contemporary pornography mingle with violence, cruelty, disgust and celebrity—and the result is a sick vertigo of images.

Pop Corpse and the Register of Candied Decay

XXX, as her name suggests, is often shown to us through the lens of the pornographic. She is shown camming, masturbating and fantasising. This behaviour is made alien through the overall conceit that this girl is a version of the little mermaid whose sexual desires run to seal culls and extreme self-mutilation.

This register, which Glenum describes as one of ‘candied decay’ is itself a contradiction: the candied part is toxically preserved in sugar – a sweet, nasty stasis. The decay is shifting, changing, regenerative but only works through the violence of loss.

‘Goo-Goo Lagoon’ shows XXX in a ‘rococo undersea salon full of kitschy trinkets, her appearance, everything about the scene, should appear excessive and slightly off.’

This is a spectacular use of telling over showing, and Glenum is a master at subverting this holy rule. We are forced to inhabit the male gaze as we are directed to look at ‘a single spotlight’ trained on XXX. Glenum presents us with the most blatant of scopophilic pleasures whilst simultaneously refusing to describe the subject of the gaze. There is an accretion of detail here, but each detail has its own aesthetic discourse: kitsch; rococo; excess.

‘The Royal Disorder Panic Party’ operates in a similar way, combining explicit, sexual detail layered with political critique.

Where the original story offered butchery and brutality in exchange for ‘beauty’ by slitting the mermaid open, here the dubious autonomy remains with XXX who performs the act on cam. The description is queasy and follows the conventions of a cam interaction:

[Turns on webcam. Opens her cutting box & takes out scalpel. Carefully

cuts a hole into her scales where her snatch should be. Lubes her finger

with her spit and inserts it.]

The little mermaid story is evident, as is the transactional nature of the act. In this case the transaction operates within a consumer capitalist version of patriarchy rather than the feudal version of the original story. This uneasy tension between sexual autonomy and the politics of coercion is encoded into much of the sexually explicit language which Glenum employs.

Of the freshly cut hole, Glenum says: ‘Look at the fantastic hole in your torso / The historical light of misery flooding through.’

Not only is the self-mutilation validated and rewarded, but this is then undercut with the second line which reminds the reader that what they are witnessing, that what is at stake in every pornographic exchange is the potential for entrenched oppression just as there is the possibility of autonomous self-expression. That the sexual act is elided with an act of self-harm is not accidental, but neither is it morally unambiguous. Glenum is not a didactic prude.

Perhaps a more productive reading of this act, a parapornographic reading perhaps, is that the act of self-harm is not entirely oppressive and negative, but one which restores responsibility for the body to the self.

Self-harm is referenced several times in the collection and the rather dubious pun ‘self-harmalade / spread like jelly out of open wrists’ goes back to the register of candied decay. This register allows for violence and stasis both, and the ooze of jelly, standing in for blood, is addictively sweet.