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'Understand' Transgressive Fiction

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'Understand' Transgressive Fiction Word and Text Vol. IV, Issue 1 26 – 39 A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics June / 2014 The Lacuna of Usefulness: The Compulsion to ‘Understand’ Transgressive Fiction Molly Hoey James Cook University, Townsville E-mail: [email protected] Abstract This article takes a brief look at why Transgressive Fiction from the 1990s has been under represented in academic circles and then examines why it was so often misread by reviewers and critics from this period. Transgressive Fiction intentionally frustrates readers using traditional referential modes of criticism by refusing to provide an objective meaning, ideology or structure. This refusal forces the reader to either engage in the text personally or begin a process of rejection and assimilation. This practice can be avoided if Transgressive texts are considered via subjective affectivism (the reader’s reaction and involvement) rather than by the quality of their execution and subject matter. This opens the way for the text to function as a place for consequence-free exploration and the enactment of taboos and their transgression. Keywords: Barthes, Bataille, Transgressive Fiction, value, subjective affectivism The term “Transgressive Fiction” was popularized in 1993 by LA Times columnist Michael Silverblatt1 and has since been used to describe a range of texts which expound the Sadean paralogy of violence, mutilation, cruelty and deviance for the pleasure of the sovereign individual, where the desires of the depersonalizing subject can be projected onto the passive object. This is evidenced in Will Self’s Cock and Bull when Carol assaults her husband with her newly emerged penis: He barely noticed when she turned him over. But he did notice when she entered him. He couldn’t fail to, her cock was such a big, hot, hard thing; and his anus, although casually lubricated, was still tight with self-repression, bunged up with the enduring legacy of auto erotic toilet training. She pushed into him and rent his sphincter, tore a crack into one of its muscular segments. But hold up! Tolle! How was it for her? Surely that’s the important thing. Fuck him, He’s a passive thing, an empty vessel, a field upon which the majestic battle may rage, but Carol? Well… Isn’t she beautiful?2 Transgressive Fiction emerged as a recognizable genre during the 1990s with the publication of Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend, Self’s Cock and Bull and A. M. Homes’s The End of Alice; since then the genre has received modest scholarly attention. Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney’s collection 1 Michael Silverblatt. “SHOCK APPEAL / Who Are These Writers, and Why Do They Want to Hurt Us?: The New Fiction of Transgression,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1993, accessed May 12, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/1993-08-01/books/bk-21466_1_young-writers. 2 Will Self, Cock and Bull (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 126. The Lacuna of Usefulness: The Compulsion to ‘Understand’ Transgressive Fiction 27 Shopping in Space: Essays on America’s Blank Generation Fiction offers critical insight into several subversive texts, including American Psycho and Frisk, and analyses why these texts have received limited scholarly attention. More recently, Robin Mookerjee’s Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition outlines Transgressive Fiction as a form of social commentary while Keith Booker’s Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque discusses transgression as a technique, rather than the basis of a genre. Smaller studies which offer readings of particular texts that are considered ‘transgressive’ include Julian Murphet’s Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide. Compared to other postmodern genres, however, Transgressive Fiction has received little critical attention. The relative lack of interest in Transgressive Fiction in academic circles can be extrapolated from the processes that Richard Ohmann outlines in “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975”. Ohmann describes the progression through which works of fiction move on their way to being considered “literature”.3 Transgressive Fiction’s absence from scholarly circles can in part be explained by its inability to make it past the ‘popular’ stage into the pre-canonical phase. Ohmann notes that […] [Readers] were responsive to novels where they discovered the values in which they believed or where they found needed moral guidance when shaken in their own beliefs. Saul Bellow's remark, "What Americans want to learn from their writers is how to live," […] three of the main interests people carried into their reading were a "search for personal meaning, for some kind of map to the moral land-scape"; a need to "reinforce or to celebrate beliefs already held, or, when shaken by events, to provide support in some personal crisis"; and a wish to keep up "with the book talk of friends and neighbors."4 Transgressive Fiction satisfies none of these needs, and Ohmann’s arguments suggest that its consequent inability to pass the initial stage of popularization and commercial success has hindered its movement into scholarly circles. This is not to say that Transgressive texts never bridge the gap between popular and more theoretical criticism but the few works that do win academic consideration do so either through notoriety, such as Ellis’s American Psycho, or through an academic’s involvement with the niche communities such as Elizabeth Young. Respected literary figures are often seen to disregard these texts. Salman Rushdie, for example, dismissed Dirty Weekend as a “hideous, kinky little revenge-novel”,5 while Norman Mailer belittled American Psycho with the quip that “the writer may have enough talent to be taken seriously.”6 Transgressive texts’ inability to progress into the pre-canonical phase means that the largest percentage of critical attention given to them is from magazine and newspaper reviews. These reviewers and critics, at a loss as to how to read Transgressive texts, have described them as sophomoric, misanthropic and psychotic, as 3 Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975,” Critical Inquiry 10.1 (1983): 199-223. 4 Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction,”201. 5 Salman Rushdie, “20-20 Vision,” Independent on Sunday, 17 January, 1993, accessed May 12, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books--2020-vision-the-best-of-young-british-novelists- campaign-has-met-with-sneering-condemnation-fiction-isnt-what-it-was-say-critics-or-has-our-culture- become-one-of-cheap-denigration-1479072.html. 6 Roger Cohen, “Bret Easton Ellis Answers Critics of ‘American Psycho’,” New York Times, March 6, 1991, accessed May 12, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/06/books/bret-easton-ellis-answers- critics-of-american-psycho.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. 28 Corporealities: Body Limits too hackneyed, too boring and too despicable to have any claims to literary or cultural merit. The future poet laureate Andrew Motion found American Psycho “[…] numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety.”7 Motion’s sentiments are echoed in the bemusement of critic Jonathan Dee: We look to writers to help make comprehensible the reasons why people act the way they act, why they transgress, why they fail to transgress. […] One of contemporary fiction’s most frustrating tropes, however, holds that even the most shocking transgression is made psychologically credible when the character carries it out not for exotic or obscure reasons but for no reason whatsoever. The technique itself is less startling than its rate of critical success, for the credibility of such inventions depends on accepting the propositions that they are not inventions at all but something more profound, more authentic, than mere art.8 These negative responses are produced by the dominant mechanism of Transgressive Fiction, which is not transgression but frustration. Transgressive texts systematically set about to frustrate all the desires that a reader brings to the text: the quest for meaning, the desire for escape, the consolations of mimesis, the pleasures of voyeurism, even the desire to transgress. Any reader hoping through these texts to realize violent fantasy is confronted by the impossibility of any such fantasy as is evidenced with the endings of Frisk and American Psycho, where the violence is revealed to have been imaginary, or the endings of The Dice Man and Cock and Bull where the story unravels into reflexive incoherence. The Transgressive text’s refusal to be entertaining, thought provoking or pleasurable, rather than its content, is what drives readers away from the text. As Wolfgang Iser claimed of Henry James’s The Figure in the Carpet the text is not a site for “meaning […] that can be excavated through interpretation”.9 The ‘trans’ in “Transgressive Fiction” refers not only to the crossing of boundaries, but also to its back-and-forth movement between text and reader. The text’s ambiguity and playfulness forces the reader to provide the moral and structural boundaries that the text refuses. Transgressive texts are actually dialectical; they manipulate the reader into becoming involved in a poetics of play. The work of Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser can be used to explain why the lack of
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