SCANDALOUS TEXTS: THE ANXIETIES OF THE LITERARY By Alyson Miller, Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University September 2010 DEAKIN UNIVERSITY CANDIDATE DECLARATION I certify that the thesis entitled Scandalous Texts: The Anxieties of the Literary submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy is the result of my own work and that where reference is made to the work of others, due acknowledgment is given. I also certify that any material in the thesis which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by any university or institution is identified in the text. Full Name: Alyson Miller Signed…………………………………………… Date: September 6, 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Dr Maria Takolander and Dr David McCooey: for a beginning, a middle and the end of many green pens. Mum and Dad: for the patient belief, the coffee, the clean washing, and ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’, ‘at’ and ‘with’. James and Lisa: for pumpkins and boats, waffles and Mexico. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Scandalous Texts: Haunted by Words 1 CHAPTER ONE Unsuited to Age Group: The Anxieties of Children’s Literature 9 Framing the Child: Childhood, Children and Literature Igniting Debate: The Scandalous Texts ‘Feel Yer Tits?’: Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature A Scandalous Absence: Controversy and Race Masterpieces of Satanic Deception: Transgressing the Sacred An Anxious Connection: Children and Literature CHAPTER TWO Dismembering Women: Gender and Identity in Top-Notch Smut 39 Femmes Fatales: Madame Bovary, The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley’s Lover Une Complicité Libertine: Reading Political Correctness in ‘Posh Porn’ ‘I Am A Completely Demented Misogynist’: Decoding American Psycho ‘This Is Not An Exit’: Re-Drawing the Boundaries? CHAPTER THREE The Art of Persuasive Lying: Faking it in Memoir 76 Fakes, Frauds and Forgery: Situating Literary Imposture Reimagining the Unimaginable: Victims of History Delusions of Domestic Tragedy: Victims of Abuse Ethnic Vultures: Victims of Culture Fake Revealing Fake: Authenticity as Effect CHAPTER FOUR From Holy Books to Satanic Verses: Confronting the Sacred 136 A Question of Faith: The Politics of Critique A Battle of Facts: The New Religion of The Da Vinci Code Drawing the Battlelines: The Politics of Nationhood Out, Damn Whores: The Politics of Difference The Atheist Possibility: Blaspheming Something New CONCLUSION This is a Story: (Re-)Narrating the World 183 WORKS CITED 186 ABSTRACT This thesis critically examines a wide range of contemporary literary scandals in order to identify the cultural and literary anxieties revealed by controversial works. The thesis explores how scandal predominantly emerges in relation to texts which offer challenging representations concerning children, women, sexuality, religion and authenticity, and how literary controversies bring to the surface a series of concerns about the complex construction of identity, history and reality. Including works such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1996- 2007), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust (1997), Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), this thesis analyses a broad spectrum of texts in order to examine why books continue to provoke public debate and outrage, and what the arguments surrounding scandalous works suggest about literature, the literary and indeed, the world. 1 INTRODUCTION SCANDALOUS TEXTS: HAUNTED BY WORDS ‘But it would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots. That’s a strange sort of view of the world’, Salman Rushdie (in Appignanesi & Maitland, 1990, p.32). ‘The gravest charge against poetry’, Plato argues in The Republic (360 BCE), ‘still remains. It has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters, with very few exceptions’ (1955, p. 435). The poet, according to Plato, possesses the ability to gratify ‘the instinctive desires of a part of us’, a part without ‘adequate moral or intellectual training’, and allows the sensations better restrained in civilised man to ‘control us when we ought, in the interests of our own greater welfare and happiness, to control them’ (pp. 383-4). In a nation that celebrates poetry, Plato contends, pleasure and pain are the ‘rulers instead of law and the rational principles commonly accepted as best’ (p. 384). Poetry, Plato argues, ‘definitely harms the mind’, as it is disconnected from truth and reality and presents only enticing ‘shadows’ of the real (pp. 371, 375). In the ideal state, therefore, poetry—and the poet—ought to be banished in order to protect society from the dangers of simulacra. Literature seems to have always occupied a problematic space. From Plato’s proposition to banish poets from the ideal Republic to recent claims that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series will develop satanic impulses in children (Smith, 2007), literature has a long history of provoking suspicion and unease. Yet in an age dominated by media technology that allows the most daring creations—and re-creations—of self and society, the continuing recurrence of literary scandals seems somewhat peculiar. With social networking sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook growing increasingly candid, the limits of what is seen and produced are being constantly pushed. Innovations in computer generated imagery (CGI) and 3D methods produce complex simulacra which unsettle distinctions between the authentic and the fake. If the persuasive representations offered by poetry horrified Plato, what of the simulations made available in a film such as Avatar (2009)? Gaming culture is similarly invested in confusing the divisions between reality and fiction, as it encourages participants to construct virtual identities—avatars—that are controlled as extensions of a 2 ‘real’ self. In this digital environment, where what is consumed is limited only by the imagination of the consumer, it is curious that literature—no longer the defining form of majority culture—retains its ability to scandalise. In a culture capable of something as radical as genetic modification, the representations made available through fiction still possess the power to motivate death threats, public riots, lawsuits, censorship and accusations of black magic. In a world of technological and scientific phenomena, it is the word that continues to haunt us. The arguments of Plato, which express fear of the effects of literature on the minds of the public (p. 385), are instructive here, as they signal a tradition of understanding literature in terms of its unnerving ability to persuade. At its most positive, the literary experience is described by critics and writers in terms of the supernatural, and figured in the evocative language of magic and metamorphosis. Indeed, critics often represent books in a mystical way, one coupled with a romantic mythology of seductive ‘otherness’ and lyrical expositions on the near- religious experience of consuming a literary work. J. Hillis Miller in On Literature, for example, claims a text is a ‘portable dreamweaver’ capable of transporting the reader ‘magically’ to other times and places (2002, pp. 19-20), while the literary academic Jean-Pierre Barricelli contends that literature is transcendental (1995, p. 14). In How Literature Works, Kenneth Quinn argues that literary texts construct a space of enticement in which readers are seduced to submit to the reading experience (1982, p. 17). This mythologisation of literature as a ‘spiritual act’ (Hillis Miller, p. 20), ‘a kind of magic’ (Fforde, 2003, p. 50), or even a form of madness, presents an intoxicating vision of the literary experience. This framing of the literary encounter as ‘divine possession’ (Roche, 2004, p. 82) is fundamental to understanding anxieties about literature raised in the debates surrounding scandalous texts. Indeed, despite these euphoric descriptions of the literary experience, the interest of this thesis is in the negative framing of the transformative effects of literature in the discourses of scandal. The notion of possession is at the centre of anxieties concerning controversial works, as literature is negatively linked with the potential for radical new ways of understanding the world. Despite the popularity and innovations of emergent media, which appear to reduce the significance of literary works, printed word continues to raise similar concerns to those expressed by Plato in The Republic. 3 The fear is that the literary text will persuade its consumers to believe and invest in new ideas that are viewed as inherently false. It is worth noting here that critical emphasis on the transformative power of literature and literary scandal are both part of a continuing history of judging texts in terms of their ethical value. It is a tradition informed by the expectation that literature will perform a didactic or moral purpose, as evidenced by the use of religious texts such as the Bible and the Qur’an as instructional works in education, and the development of forms such as the mediaeval morality play. The contemporary ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies continues to raise questions about the moral effects of texts, as seen in the works of critics such as Wayne Booth (1998) and Martha Nussbaum (2001). Ethical debates similarly emerge in the discourses surrounding scandalous works, as critics and readers recognise the intimate relationship between language, the individual and the world. This thesis, in its focus on literary scandals, will examine anxieties about the relationship between text and world, and it will be unique in a number of ways. To begin with, the thesis will look at literary scandals as part of a paradigm in which particular trends can be detected. Novels such as Madame Bovary (1857) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1922), for example, have attracted significant criticism exploring the characteristics of the trials of their authors and publishers, and the censorship of the books, yet neither work has been examined as part of a broader pattern in which literature, for instance, about sexual women provokes controversy.