Dissertation Abstract

Charles Bukowski: Autobiographer, Gender Critic, Iconoclast

by David Charlson, University of Kansas, 1995

Often dismissed as the "Dirty Old Man" he once called himself, Charles Bukowski is an American author whose surface vulgarity masks a deeper purpose, for his prose and poetry challenge the social and cultural status quo of America. Through dramatizing much of his life in his work, he targets the deadening oppressiveness of the workplace, the questionable aspects of traditional masculinity, and elitist attitudes in art and academia. Because of his first-hand experience in a lower-class underworld, his work sometimes resembles the "Dirty Realism" of Raymond Carver, yet Bukowski's challenging autobiographical persona puts him more in company with Kurt Vonnegut, Frederick Exley, and Hunter Thompson.

Not an autobiographer per se, Bukowski told his story mainly through the persona of Henry Chinaski, employing Timothy Dow Adams' concept of strategic lying. In the first of three stages of his autobiographical project, Bukowski unleashed his "Dirty Old Man" persona to gain attention; the second responded to the attention and began to correct the intitial impression; the third, primarily through five autobiographical novels, presented a Chinaski quite like Bukowski--still confrontational but no madman.

Michael Kaufman's "triad of men's violence" (against women, other men, and themselves) can explain the general Bukowski persona as a complicated gender construct. Bukowski's Bildungsroman, HAM ON RYE, shows Chinaski as victim, practitioner, and critic of male violence, with the last role figuring prominently into his other work too.

Bukowski is also critical of what Peter Burger calls "institution art," in a gesture both populist and avant-garde. As populist, he resembles the British working-class writers described in THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS who aim to "disestablish" literature, yet he is no man of the people. His iconoclastic outsiderhood places him in the American avant-garde, defined as "the work of the socially marginalized" by Maria Damon. As general postmodern phenomenon, he blends the democratic accessibility of populist writing with the adventurous gesturing of the avant-garde. The blend includes the directness of Hemingway (an early hero), the freedom to be profanely honest, and the ability to laugh at himself and make us laugh as well.