For years, I've said I like novels to be x, y, or z; often that x, y, or z meant (in some way or another)
unsettling,
challenging, surprising... But those words feel inadequate, because
inevitably there are things that are, for instance, unsettling in
unproductive ways — a pulpy, detailed story of child molestation is
probably unsettling and disturbing, but also
plenty likely to be worthless, exploitative crap that aims primarily for
the reader's gag reflex and puts the writer in the obnoxious position
of nudging us endlessly with the question, "How much can you take?"
As I thought about why Damon Galgut's 1991 novel
The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs
worked so well for me where so many other books I've tried to read recently did not, I started to
feel like I was finally moving toward some understanding of what the
word
disturbing, as praise, meant to me. It ties in with something
Galgut himself said in an interview with Kianoosh Hashemzadeh for
Web Conjunctions a few years ago:
...it
seems to me, if you provide answers—the usual forms of literary
catharsis are a kind of answer, things tie up and all the elements of
the plot are neatly knotted at the end—you might have a good experience
when you’re reading that book, but when you close the book you basically
have closed any moral problems that the book raised and that’s it.
Whereas if people are disturbed and unsettled, things have been raised
and not resolved, people have to carry that around and work it out some
way.
This is similar to things I've thought for a long time (I am, after all, a
devotee
of Chekhov, who famously said the job of the artist is to ask
questions, not answer them), but Galgut's formulation there feels like
it captures many of the qualities I value.
The usual forms of literary catharsis
is an interesting phrase, for instance, and makes me think of the
thousand stories launched by Raymond Carver's example, stories that
mistake bathos for epiphany. I think too of what Tom McCarthy
called
"the default mode dominating mainstream fiction and most culture in
general: this kind of sentimental humanism" that wallows in "a certain set of
assumptions, certain models of subjectivity – for example, the
contemporary cult of the individual, the absolute authentic self who is
measured through his or her absolutely authentic feeling."