Outrageously Obscene

Yesterday, Saskia Walker said: Long live genre fiction! I'm a storyteller, and my aspiration is simply to entertain a reader or two. And Kristina Wright said: I have had long discussions about this in academic circles. I'm still trying to make sense out of the ridiculous idea that writing about sex as a positive experience means you end up being labeled as a "sex writer," but writing about sex as a destructive force means you get the label "literary writer."

And I felt myself break into this huge grin. Because I've had this post half-written for over a month, and now feels like the perfect time to unwrap the cord and plug it in. Truly, this post has been half-written since I was in high school and forced to read a series of classics so god damn depressing I decided our English professor must truly have hated teenagers. When I would bring my noir fiction in to read during break, this professor would hold up the books as examples of true trash. (He seems very much like the academic Saskia lived with. He sneered and guffawed and refused to even consider that a crime detective book could be a classic.)

I am a rebel by nature. Tell me I have to wear a dress, and I will show up in tattered jeans. Tell me what to read, and I will slide my book between your covers and shoot you the virtual finger.

Still, my post scares me. Because I know there are people who love the books I am about to mention. And my goal is not to put down other people's favorites, but to explain, somehow, where I'm coming from. And yet, I'm ready. I'm standing here. Proud and naked and letting you know that....

Oh, my fucking god, I despised Billy Budd. I didn’t like Heart of Darkness any better. And I would have beat on Edith Wharton with a stick to demonstrate how much I hated Ethan Frome had she not been dead already.

Of Mice and Men? Shoot me now.

I don’t need stories to have a happy ending. I’m a fan of Hubert Selby Jr., JD Salinger, and Joyce Carol Oates. I like a few by Hemmingway and several by Fitzgerald. But my Top Ten (I mean 12), list looks like this:

The Dain Curse
The Continental Op
The Long Goodbye
The Last Kiss
The Thin Man
The Maltese Falcon
The Godfather
The Switch
The Lone Pilgrim
The Snapper
The Big Sleep
The Commitments

(Apparently, I like books that start with “The.”)

My college English professor elevated depressing, morose, everyone-fucking-dies-in-them stories as the ones to be revered. Why can you not like books filled with joy? Or novels that examine the human condition in a way other than killing off innocents or the mentally unbalanced? Why is Steinbeck “literary” and Chandler “not”?

I have a similar problem with the term "literary erotica," because the phrase is thrown out so randomly. What makes one story literary and another one porn? The use of the word cunt? Or cock? If you spell "cum" c-o-m-e is it literary? (Oh, god, "Coming and Cumming" by Susan St. Aubin. One of the best sex stories ever.)

Seems to me like just another way to put people down. Along the same lines as: "What I like is erotica. What you like is filth." According to who? Based on what standards?

I have a knee-jerk reaction to disliking this type of distinction. Feels affected and highbrow to me, which is why I tend to say that I write smut. But come on—nobody seems to know what “literary erotica” even means. In this article about a play that sold for $88,300, the headline says, “Rare piece of literary erotica auctioned in London.” The body of the article calls the work “the best known piece of English pornography,” describing it as “outrageously obscene in its sexual and scatological references, language and content."

Can the same work be both? One or the other? Or is the play "literary" just because it’s old? In which case we’ll all be literary in a few hundred years. (Actually, according to this article on erotica in Australian libraries: The works of the Earl of Rochester, Boccaccio and Pauline Reage are now widely available. What was once considered obscene has now seemingly become acceptable by its historicism.)

I suppose I don’t strive for the term because I’ve never enjoyed reading the types of books other people call "literary." I prefer to be down here with the riffraff, curled up in the corner of the bar, reading The Continental Op and drinking whiskey.

XXX,
Alison

P.S. I am open for disagreement. Tell me what I missed in Heart of Darkness, and I will listen. (The horror! The horror!) But if you make me read that one again, I swear, you'll have to choose two from my list to read yourself.