A few years ago – though by now this may as well have happened in another lifetime – I was giving a lecture on DH Lawrence’s short story The Blind Man. This was part of an undergraduate course in “Writing Practice and Study” delivered to second-year students who were taking a combination of literature and creative writing modules.
I was using the story as a way of talking to them about what Lawrence called sentences that “lived along the line”. “Lawrence is dangerous,” I said to the class. “You never know what is going to happen in his fiction. You never know where it might lead.” I went on to tell them about how his writing is put together in such a way as to make us have to pay close attention, that otherwise we might miss something or get it wrong.
I told them about how his work also often takes on subjects many people have regarded as challenging. There was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned for indecency; Lawrence’s various tricky interests in a Nietzschean kind of super-man philosophy; his rebellion against social norms and the concept of the status quo.
Lawrence loathed the idea of a status quo, I said, in literature and in life. He was a risk taker. I outlined his wonderful treatment of male intimacy in The Blind Man by way of example: how the reader is never quite sure just what the two men in the story are going to do to each other, the way Lawrence questions ideas about vulnerability and the frailty of our bodies and relationships.
I hadn’t even got on to the extraordinary part – where Maurice, the young husband, blinded in World War I, having met the man his wife knew in a former life, asks, because he cannot see him, if he may touch his face – when a young woman put up her hand and called out, “Excuse me, but I think it’s inappropriate that you are lecturing on a story about someone with a disability.”
I took off my glasses and looked up at her. She was sitting right at the back of the lecture theatre. I had to step away from the lectern to come forward and address her and there was ruffle of excitement in the room; students in the front rows craned their heads around so they could see who had spoken.
I explained that I was using this story as it was a brilliant example, not only of the short story form but of one that reflected particularly Lawrence’s method and technique of what I was calling by then sentence-by-sentence making.
This was an inspirational form of composition, I’d been telling the class earlier. Anyone who wanted to write creatively could learn a huge amount from Lawrence’s prose style and it was no wonder Katherine Mansfield rated his work above and beyond that of most of her fellow modernists.
“We are here to investigate literature and literary effects,” I said to the student. “But of course, if you don’t want to stay and listen, you’re welcome to leave,” and I indicated the door. She stood up, a clutch of friends with her, and did indeed walk out of the class. I carried on with the lecture, took questions at the end, set an exercise based on it, and finished for the day.
I say that all this may as well have taken place a lifetime ago because even by the end of that same term, I would not have got away with showing any student the door. I would not have been allowed to ignore a complaint about syllabus content or the way I referred to a text. I would have to have taken any remark about the content of a book seriously, no matter the level of the student’s education or breadth of learning, and then I would have had to alter my course and provide alternatives.
Indeed, at the beginning of the following academic year, we were all asked to present a list of our reading materials so that titles could be rated and approved. Literature now needed “trigger warnings”, notes appended by an elected board indicating potentially “troubling” content. Suddenly, that exciting “dangerous” fiction of Lawrence’s was being seen as potentially harmful to impressionable, vulnerable young minds.
Culture cues
It was at that point I decided to stop teaching on the undergraduate syllabus of that university – and, I suppose, started thinking about this essay. By which I mean that I started thinking about my own reading and writing in relation to the culture now. Because those words: Appropriate. Acceptable. Suitable … I was hearing them all around me. So, perhaps it was time to ask myself: What might I be risking in wanting to read – or write – a certain kind of fiction? As a writer, a teacher, as a mother, friend? As an ethically minded individual and responsible member of society? Was I paying attention to the right things, in the right sort of way? Was I taking care?
Because literature is dangerous. It’s what I was telling my class that day, and it’s what I continue to feel when I start reading a short story or an essay or a novel. To my mind, you should never know quite what a book has in store for you: exhilaration or terror, threat, appeasement, comfort, delight, horror or a mixture of any or all of these things, all at once.
All kinds of people live inside fiction’s world, with all kinds of lives – some appealing, some stomach-churningly unpleasant. Literature has us think about nice things, sometimes, as well as difficult and ghastly things that might take us into the darkest part of our own psyches, temperaments and prejudices.
The best books contain “multitudes”, to paraphrase Walt Whitman – someone who may be regarded as pretty risky and dangerous himself, with his casual philanthropy and powerful belief that he was always right. As with Lawrence, some of Whitman’s work was also found at the time to be obscene, and in fact, I think the two of them would have probably got on like a house on fire. They both knew that there’s lovely and awful, right and wrong, and often an upsetting and intellectually and philosophically challenging mixture of the two, in all good writing. That it’s not there to show us or direct us to think in a certain way. That would be boring.
A good book is about how it makes us feel. So, all that Chaucer? Those scary Canterbury Tales full of sadism and violence, as well as rape, drunken thuggery, religious hypocrisy, disability and lasciviousness? And Milton? With his devil who is just far too seductive, who takes our breath away with his charm along with his pitiful human pride? It was just the beginning.
My entire education in literary studies, from Beowulf and the Norse sagas through to Mrs Dalloway, was a breakneck run at shock, horror, monstrousness, class-conscious bullying and sheer delight. The learning was in the finding out what one’s responses or reactions to the text were, turning “opinion into knowledge”, as the critic FR Leavis said. It was about picking though the words to find the meaning, a skill that prepares a person for life itself.
Expect the unexpected
Milton wrote about all this in 1644, in his terrifically well-argued essay Areopagitica, his exhortation, at a time of censorship, to read all kinds of books, including those that were “naughty”, as he put it, in order that we would become good, strong, independent thinkers.
The worst thing would be to know what you might expect in a book – to have everything tidied away and with nothing much for the reader to have to do – it’s why I’ve always thought the idea of a series, one title following on in the same pattern as the last, is a sort of death to literary engagement. The only exception, perhaps, being the CS Lewis Narnia series to which I would return over and over as a child, and would do so now for the nuance and surprise of stories that may have featured some of the same characters and set-up but placed these alongside each other, with each volume, in fresh relation.
In general, though, that’s an arrangement for children’s books. Grown-up fiction should tip you inside it, knowing that once you’ve got to the end, that’s it. No come backs. No second chances. After Natasha has been consigned to the nursery in the final scenes of War and Peace and we’ve realised that the big bumbling idiot she has married was actually more decent and understanding than the glamorously decorated Prince Andrei she’d first loved … Well, there’s no rearranging of the moral universe after that. Foolishness has come to sit top of the list of virtues, while military action just looks kind of dumb. Dangerous? I should say so. Andrei’s is the kind of soldier’s heroism still being peddled by politicians and warmongers today. What would they do if the entire world’s population became readers of War and Peace? They’d be out of a job and out of pocket. Neoliberalism doesn’t want dangerous stories. Lawrence was right. We should keep a close eye on who is defining that so-called status quo.
For it is threatening, this reading of ours; it risks the easy-held assumptions and sound bites of contemporary culture to take us somewhere else. Dangerous books require that we work hard at reading, that we let ourselves feel stupid and slow and unsure in order to think harder, think more. I want to be upset and confused and, okay, “offended” if it will help me think wider about the world and about the people in it.
Yes, this kind of reading takes effort, attention but it’s exhilarating to have to figure stuff out for ourselves from texts that we don’t necessarily agree with or like. I learn how to be mindful of society’s new rules and sensibilities by confronting, reacting to – and again that word, feeling – the text, in all its awkward iterations. In the end, I don’t want to read what’s “appropriate”. I want to read something that might be difficult and threatening to feel myself struggle with it and learn from that experience. If I just wanted to be entertained, guided through a story and brought easily to its outcome, I would kick back, order a pizza and watch Netflix.
In harm’s way
Dangerous fiction, risky books that are capable of harm. I am interested in the idea that all literature might come with a warning on its cover, like on a packet of cigarettes. That I might have to take utmost care with reading or otherwise I will damage my heart. That word “harm” in its original Old German form means “shame”. How exciting it is to think that what I read might shame me into thinking differently. Behaving differently. For shame, that most acute form of self-consciousness, can only bring in its wake humility, and then kindness, care and awareness of others its most lovely and generous affect.
And what other experience can I think of – all generated from the setting down of words upon a page – that becomes as though part of one’s own memory, something that is lodged right inside as intimate as a dream? It is private and unmediated reading. We hear our own voice when our eyes follow along the line of someone else’s words. We become – and here comes a dangerous word in itself, now – contaminated through reading an author’s phrases and words and dialogue. We speak their stuff with our own mouths and are changed by it.
I remember, as an undergraduate student at Victoria University, the first year “Introduction to Criticism” course. And what a course that was. It was simply loaded to the gunnels with dangerous literary material that ranged from John Donne’s predatory sex poems through Pinter’s violent misogyny to fascism and self-harm in Yeats and Sylvia Plath.
I recall being asked by Lydia Wevers, who was taking that marvellous class, to read out Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse with its thrilling opening line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” I’d just arrived at university fresh out of my private girls’ school, where swearing meant instant detention. I’d never read that word in a poem before – or said it aloud even. And here I was speaking it out into the seminar room with everyone listening. I was enunciating an antisocial, punishable word as poetic effect.
Dangerous or what? My tertiary education started there. Until then, I’d always thought of myself as someone who was rather “good” at English.
Now, all at once, I realised I didn’t know a thing. It was the beginning, of course it was – the not knowing, the not knowing but wanting to – of becoming a reader.
Kirsty Gunn’s new collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly, is out now.