Rude or Prude?

My second assignment for my archives administration course is due in a little under two weeks time and I'm starting to feel the tingle of deadline nerves.  I drafted my first assignment nearly a month ahead of the due date, and discovered as a result that, yes, you can be stressed by having *too* much time to do a piece of work.  I decided that this time I wouldn't rush myself; I would take it slowly. But, of course, events have conspired against me - I've had to take off three consecutive weekends for various reasons, both delightful and not so much -  and am now having a silly little panic. I am also reading for, and preparing to write, a multiple-book review for Strange Horizons which I promised for the end of June.  Eep. I'm sure it will all get done, but in the meantime Alexandria and several other projects have fallen by the wayside. I patently haven't started reading Ulysses for example (apologies to Fabio in particular!), or reviewed the Orange New Writers shortlist (which I must, must do). I'm appealing to the gods for more hours in the day. Honestly, I don't know how Stephanie at So Many Books manages to study to be a librarian, and work, and blog nearly every day.  I bow down.  Hopefully I'll be back on track in a couple of weeks time.

To top it all off, I've just been defeated by a book.  I put Daren King's Jim Giraffe down after just 12 pages.  The quote from DBC Pierre on the cover is glowing - 'Jim Giraffe is a work of the uppermost echelon of imagination, a twisting supercharged affront to the mundane' - and the back is covered with praise from various quarters, but I couldn't bare to read it.  Why? I sheepishly admit that it offended my sense of propriety.

The blurb (which I only read after acquiring it through BookMooch) sounds an initial warning.  It introduces us to Scott Spectrum, a frigid SF geek who receives a ghostly warning, ala Scrooge, that his days are numbered if he doesn't 'quickly perform every act in the lovemaker's lexicon.'  (By this point I'm already wincing. Oh dear...) It goes on to promise a novel about sexual repression, also populated by Jim, a perverted ghostly giraffe, and Continence, a woman who dreams naughty dreams about black stallions. (Oh dear, oh dear...) Yet I kept an open mind and read on.  The first line made me smile - I have of late been visited by a ghost giraffe - and I dared to think that you shouldn't judge a book by its blurb. You have to admit that it has a certain folksy charm. Very quickly, however - in 2-3 pages at most - the book had degenerated into a crude, unfortunate volley of sexual puns and scenarios as Jim (you remember, the aforementioned giraffe) plays the ghost of Scott's sexual past, present and future. 

I don't like to think of myself as a prude; I hope that I'm a relatively open-minded person when it comes to sex.   I'm not ordinarily embarrassed by nudity or genitals, and I'm all for talking and writing honestly about the body and its urges.  Still, I have my limits. I had to stop reading when, on page 11, King slotted in a 'fifth leg' joke about Jim's 'huge' and 'dribbling' penis, and then proceeded to suggest he should hide it up someone's 'arse'.  I felt...dirty, like I was reading a little graphic porn at bedtime.  I was enormously discomforted and had to put the book down, never to be picked up again.

Yet I find this discomfort discomforting in itself.  I feel as though I've perhaps failed some test that Daren King was setting me as a reader; I fear I'm just a silly English prude after all, ashamed of bodily functions and unwilling to admit it.  Am I like the parent who complains that two men kissing in an advertisement for mayonnaise is beyond the pale?  Am I subconsciously censoring my own reading?  I reflexively shied away from King's explicitness, and I keep questioning myself: was I justified? Should I have given up on his so soon?

Has anyone else felt a violent reaction against a book's content, so much so that you couldn't go on? Are there some places you can't go, even in the name of literature?  On the one hand I think my reaction is perfectly normal - there is no reason why I should be ashamed of drawing a line in the sand for myself, so long as I don't want to do it for others - but on the other I feel that King has revealed a flaw in my liberal credentials.  Maybe that was what he intended all along.

~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Abigail]

I had a similar reaction just last night to the pilot of a new TV show that featured some racy sex scenes. Everyone has their limits, and there's a huge difference between saying that something isn't for you and demanding that it be banned entirely (not to mention objecting to something as sweet and benign as that mayo ad). Where the problem lies, I think, is in trying to critique the work in question. As you say, 'this is too racy' says as much about the reviewer as it does about the work, and though there are obviously cases where such criticism is perfectly valid (Torchwood and its juvenile sex obsession, for one), most of the time it's harder to draw the line between a work that makes one personally uncomfortable and one whose sexual content is puerile, exploitative, or maybe just not erotic.

[Mark Thwaite]

I'm happy to read anything: it can be as gratuitous as it likes. But this is just a terrible, terrible book. I regularly cite it as the worst book I've yet been asked to review. A real stinker. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid!

[Kirsty]

The only book I've had to put down for this kind of reason is American Psycho. I'm really quite squeamish and the level of violence was just too much for me.

Also, I just didn't think it was a very good book. :)

[Victoria]

Mark: I suspected as much, and I'm glad to hear it. At least I'm not missing out on a classic through being squeamish! Saying that, I was pretty certain when I put it down that the book was bad in other ways as well. I suspect that a good novel, well-wrought and balanced, would have integrated the crudeness, and used the explicitness, in a way that validated that use. Such things do have their place when they're justified by the whole.

I could say that intention is important and I'm inclined to think that King's intention was to shock and titilate rather than to seriously explore sexuality, repressed or otherwise. Which, in my view, makes _Jim Giraffe_ more than a little exploitative and almost entirely puerile. But I agree with Abigail that it is difficult to be objective in such cases. One woman's pornography is another woman's literature, etc.

Kirsty: I haven't read _American Psycho_ but it went round my sixth form and I remember certain scenes being read aloud in the common room. *shudders* The part with the mouse (or was it a rat?) gnawing its way up the woman's... And with the coat-hanger. I'm not sure I could take that either. Extreme violence against women may also be a line I can't cross.

[Sarah Bower]

Victoria and everyone, it seems to me that what's really at the heart of this kind of debate is the quality of the book overall - if a book is good - well written with a strong narrative and something to say - then readers will stomach difficult scenes of sex and/or violence, even if they don't enjoy them. I'm going to come to the defence of 'American Psycho' here which, for me, is the defining text of its period. I love Ellis' prose and I love his sense of humour and I think he did something brave and important by turning the spotlight on his generation the way he did in that book. I don't buy the sexist argument - that's mixing up the author and his character. I'm sure Ellis doesn't expect us to like, admire or emulate Pat Bateman. We might pity him, of course, because whether or not he commits the acts he recounts or merely imagines them, he's a very poorly boy and a symptom of a very sick society. 'American Psycho' isn't porn, it's social satire - and it worked, here we are still talking about it how many years after it was published?

[Kirsty]

Victoria - yes, it was a rat. It was at that point I put the book away. In fact, I gave it away.

Sarah - I take your point completely, and I'm not suggesting for a second that Ellis *himself* is a murderous misogynist, I'm just saying that the violence - whatever its purpose - was too much for me. I'm squeamish! I flinch at Casualty! On top of which, I didn't particularly like his style of writing, hence not thinking it was a great book. I know there are millions of people who disagree with me, but that's the fun of objectivity.

[Paul]

Sometimes I read something, or watch a play or film, and am offended by the vulgarity of it. Not the vulgarity of what is being described or said or shown, the explicit detail, the contrivance and carnality.

No, what I find vulgar is the aspect that Vladimir Nabokov described as 'poshlust', famously elaborating in interviews on the Russian concept that Boym described as follows (wiki reference here)

+++++

Poshlost' is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality.

+++++

It's the pomposity and predictability of it all.

I also think, Victoria, that we live in a culture now in which sex has been voided of much resonance and meaning and it therefore has become a neutral signifier in art. The fact that you had to question apologetically your own response to this shows how confused we get about it all.

This is not to say that artful smut and erotic excess does not have a place or tradition. It does, from Rabelais onwards. But where do we go when our culture no longer sees sexuality as fraught with hesitancy, darkness, inhibition, doubt, and characterises these natural responses, part of the panoply of human sexuality as being part of an ailment called 'repression'? In its own way strikingly judgmental and moralistic in value.

Pornography is at least honest and sometimes enjoyable, and in its honesty can contain an energetic glee. Bad writing like this is just vulgar as all bad literature and art is vulgar and sub-standard, and it could just be that which put you to sleep.

[Stefanie]

I think Sarah has it right. If a book is well written I will stick with it even if I am uncomfortable by descriptions I find unappealing. From what others have said, this book sounds like it has issues with the well written criteria.

Please don't bow down. I manage to do what I do with school and all because when school is in session I have no life. Your archives administration course sounds interesting. Hang in there!

[Stefanie]

I think Sarah has it right. If a book is well written I will stick with it even if I am uncomfortable by descriptions I find unappealing. From what others have said, this book sounds like it has issues with the well written criteria.

Please don't bow down. I manage to do what I do with school and all because when school is in session I have no life. Your archives administration course sounds interesting. Hang in there!

[Fábio]

Victoria, no apologies needed. I started reading Ulysses but I had to stop due to translation deadlines and my doctorate thesis, among many other things.

But I tagged you in one of the latest meme running in our blogrolls: the Page 123. Check it out in PWT!

[Amber]

Nonsense. Don't beat yourself up - forcing yourself to be "open-minded" and "liberal" enough to like a book which you, in fact, don't or which is trash, is just as much intellectual avoidance/dishonesty as rejecting a book solely based on the fact that you're too conservative and the book's content is too "liberal", no matter what its literary value. In today's current literary culture, it's only kosher to condemn certain things - Victorianism, conservativism, etc. It seems we're all too afraid to condemn anything else for fear of being thought close-minded. Which leads to intellectual dishonesty because, often, in fact, the work in question does NOT have great(or any) literary value.

Also, I at least am of the opinion that sex is a very narrow framework to hash a novel out of - see, if you wish, my most recent post on the role of sex in novels, re Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers.
http://amberletterstotheworld.blogspot.com/2008/05/comfort-of-strangers-continued.html

[JB]

Sex IS a narrow framework, except insofar as it is human behavior, and human behavior is the stuff of every great novel. I'm thinking of a novel like Lolita, which made me terribly uncomfortable but was still great (did you know that many people's response to Lolita is "Wow, that Lolita, what a slut"?) or The Color Purple. Sex is part of what the novel has to say, it pushes the envelope, it's a key to the door, but it's not everything. When sex is all the novel is about, it's more geography than psychology.

(Hmmm. I bet if I included one more metaphor, I could achieve some kind of record.)

[Amber]

A very good point and I agree completely. It's not when it's included/a major part, but when it's the central content, that sex is a problem.

Let me finish this record for you. ;) Sex should be the lens to view the object - not the object being viewed.