I’ve been rediscovering the pleasures of uncomfortable fiction. And uncomfortable fiction tends to be disreputable fiction, in some way or the other. I’ve been pairing my reading of Ulysses with transgressive horror short stories (queer and otherwise), and I watched Tromeo & Juliet today, which makes disreputability a veritable virtue.
It’s still comparably easy to enjoy a lot of these things at a distance – books like Ballard’s Crash or Ulysses have been rendered respectable with time (or, like Story of the Eye, come bearing academic analysis as defence). And on the other hand, with transgressive horror, or with bizarro fiction, the discomfort is built in – like a musical without songs, you’d be disappointed if you read these without any discomfort.
It’s also, as a writer, not something you can necessarily think your way into – these things have to come from within, by you confronting your ghosts or your demons. The things that bother you, and the things you’re a bit scared that they don’t.
Almost all of these examples have moments that strike the wrong note – parts that make me think, I wouldn’t have gone there if I were writing this. But the problem with writing such stories is – I don’t think you can get one without the other. You can’t transgress without going too far.
It struck me particularly today, because I just read a short story whose central concept I had come up with independently when I was a teenager. I never wrote my story, because I felt, at the time, that it went too far, that it was too strange and unpalatable. And I finished the story I was reading, and I figured that I liked my version better, because the one I read didn’t go nearly far enough.