I’m not promoting censorship.
Just pointing out that FE3O4ENAIL’s take that Hogg is “bad” but somehow religious texts are “good” doesn’t really hold water and shows how this is a problem when considering censorship. In terms of people killed and other fun things like maiming women and what have you religious texts are far and away a bigger problem than Hogg could ever be.
I don’t think we need any single book in particular. What we need is absolute freedom of artistic expression. No human thought or impulse, however dark, grotesque or transgressive, should be excluded from that expression.
This thread has me wondering about the relationship between free speech and censorship. Canada has somewhat different free speech laws than the U.S. - we’re more likely to censure speech on the grounds of being hateful, and put more emphasis on not hurting people with your speech than protecting the rights of people to say anything they want, any time they want (my interpretation of how the laws differ). I have no problem with Canada’s take on free speech; I think some things don’t need to be said in public. That said, I also support no written censorship; I have zero interest in reading something like “Hogg,” but I fully support the writer’s right to write it, the publisher’s right to print it, the library’s right to put it on their shelves, and the public’s right to read it.
You’ve got me wondering about the difference in my opinions on free speech versus censorship, FE3. I think the difference is that when someone is spouting in public, other people have no choice but to hear it. A book is private - you can choose to read it, or you can completely stay away from it - the choice is yours.
Canada doesn’t have an equivalent to the First Amendment. Hate speech could not be banned in the US even if people wanted it to be.
In the Pit thread linked to earlier, Argent Towers said
I think that getting easily shocked or emotional about things, especially if it interferes with you thinking rationally about them, is a bad thing. But is being extremely difficult (or impossible) to shock a virtue or a vice? And how do you know when/if books (or movies, or video games) that render you less emotionally sensitive to “depravity” are harmful or helpful?
I cannot answer for him of course but again you run into the problem of what is depraved.
In some cultures women showing their ankle is depraved and may get them stoned to death. To me that is not remotely depraved.
Some may find Playboy Magazine depraved, others may see it as art. Even if you see it as pornography I am not sure it is worth getting in a fuss about. If you do not like it do not open one up and I agree with Argent Towers that it is a better result for the person to be able to deal with its existence and not get in much of a fuss about it.
So, who chooses what is “depraved”?
Some things I think most would agree is over-the-line into depraved territory (e.g. pedophilia) but then such a thing is actually against the law as it perpetrates a deep harm on another person.
This is a valid issue as well–some people are like polished granite and pretty much everything rolls right off them without affecting them in the slightest. Other people are like butter, they’re easily molded and imprinted and will even pick up flavors from something that’s merely near it in the fridge. There’s no real telling what kind of person you are until you’re tested, but I respectfully submit that those who are exposed unduly to the really out there ends of the free speech continuum before their minds have fully matured are unlikely to get an accurate assessment of their own vulnerability, as influential reading matter can be catalytic to the unformed intellect. Hence my objection to wafting a book like Hogg in front of a barely pubescent teen. To be fair, I’d also restrict access to a writer like Andrew Vachss, who writes on similar subject matter, but from a diametrically opposed point of view–he wants anyone who touches a kid sexually to be torn apart by monster trucks going in opposite directions at the very least. But his style and mode of expression are stark and scary and unsettling, the better to make his point. I’m mostly a granite person myself, but I can only take so much Vachss at a sitting or I get a rather nastily dark outlook grafted onto my world view if I don’t limit my exposure.
Strong literature, like other advanced material, should not be censored but judgement should and must be used when exposing children to potentially upsetting concepts and material. Young people are uniquely vulnerable to appeals to authority (understandably, since that’s how they learn) and can fall into the trap of thinking that because a well respected author wrote something morally reprehensible along with other works of undeniable worth that the concepts advanced in the piece of shit are equally valid as the concepts advanced in the worthy books. They just don’t have the breadth of experience and judgement to understand that just as a broken clock can be right twice a day, even the most saintly person is capable of having a bad day and espousing a wretchedly indefensible idea.
If we have no problem, as a society, with restricting access to mind altering drugs, sexual activity, and civic responsibility from those judged too immature to handle them responsibly there should be no cognitive dissonance in recognizing that access to potentially damaging ideas and artistic works can and should be delayed until maturity as well.
Just to be clear…
I think I should qualify this to say that I do not think exposing your ankle is depraved. Stoning someone to death for it is the depraved act in my view.
There are many things, in fact probably the overwhelming majority of books out there that we don’t need to print.
But there is a massive difference between not needing to print something, and needing not to print it.
Hogg to me certainly falls into the first category. I would be very wary of finding anything (written) to fall into the second, most definitely not on grounds of obscenity.
You use the passive voice a lot here. Who’s gonna do this “delaying” - institutions similar to those that keep kids away from drugs/sex/booze? Or should it rest in the hands of parents, which makes a lot more sense?
As for the question of the concepts advanced in the book, as someone who’s read it I’ll say…there’s just not that much there. Unlike similarly graphic books - American Psycho, 120 Days/Juliette/Justine, the work of Burroughs - the novel doesn’t approach any philosophical or conceptual level, not even the level of fashionable nihilism in Bret Easton Ellis’s work which appealed to me when I read him at a much younger age. Hogg is little more than a bland recitation of sleazy acts, and while it’s easy to see how it could be harmful to minds in the process of development, I don’t think the objection of kids being exposed to concepts beyond their ken really holds water here.
The ideas Delany advances in his other works are powerful and challenging, but I assume books like Dhalgren and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue are probably a little too sophisticated for young readers. There’s also the question of how the hypothetical kids in question would get their hands on Hogg - it’s an obscurity at best, and if someone’s learned about it and is actively seeking it out, there’s probably no question but that they’ve already been exposed to similar material.
No, of course there is not. That’s simply ridiculous.
I know you weren’t.
-XT
Eh, passive voice is useful when speaking in hypotheticals. Of course parents should be the final arbiters of what their children read, but since the OP is concerned with general questions of censorship I was pointing out that there are levels and types of censorship that are perfectly appropriate and unremarkable, whereas outright banning of specific works in general is a completely unacceptable concept regardless of how crappy and devoid of artistic merit they might be.
You make an interesting point in emphasizing the lack of literary merit in Hogg, and it’s that precise lack that makes it an exemplary work to use in this context. I would consider such a work to be much more potentially damaging due to the very accessibility of depravity *sans *underlying message. There’s nothing that demands thought or analysis or that’s liable to spark a genuinely good discussion on the value of using challenging literature to overturn assumptions that aren’t well thought out, and therefore the very numbing quality of this literary Sybian is infinitely more damaging to the unformed, uncritical mind than the same type of material inextricably wedded to difficult concepts and artistic merit. Kids are literalists, they’re already likely to grasp only the most surface levels in what they experience anyway, so it’s up to the adults to put the work in context, to point out that in literature as in life there are many facets that interact to make up the whole. I have a similar objection to kids watching pr0n flicks, whereas I might not have an objection to a child viewing a movie that includes graphic sexuality IN CONTEXT with a redeeming message. Crap has no context, and that’s pretty much what makes it crap.
Of course, in order for a parent to judge what category a book belongs in they need to familiarize themselves with it and form an opinion of the merit of the material as it applies to their individual child, family dynamic and moral structure. And that’s gonna be a problem, because most people don’t read and the ones who do aren’t generally up to a rigorous critical analysis of an unsettling book, and even if those two bars are met they’re gonna run into the “OMG I can’t even wrap my head around how the hell to talk to my teenager about this shit!” factor–and that’s likely to be a dealbreaker for most parents. I’ve had to do this after the fact when a kid got hold of something pretty inappropriate and was struggling to make it make sense and it’s not comfortable–but as a parent it’s my duty to tackle the job no matter how distasteful it might be to me personally. I don’t want to risk my kid getting a wrong idea or get preoccupied with the superficial message of the material without understanding there’s a whole lot more under the surface that requires analysis to form an educated opinion of the work. I’m a pretty smart cookie who’s read and watched the gamut and I still find this part of parenting to be difficult and unwelcome–I’m sure it’s a goddamned nightmare to those who believe in keeping themselves lily pure and unsullied. It’s at this interface that I totally understand those who want to ban books in school libraries, not that I agree with the vast majority of the material that’s usually targeted. If I found Hogg in a high school library, though, I think I’d have a word or six with the administration regarding it, just as I’d have a problem with a DVD of ButtBlasters IX–The Analling.
Because unlike some of the other things people are equating the book to, a piece of literature is simply an idea. An inanimate, non-corporeal, concept. It is something that cannot do anything on it’s own, and depends entirely upon an object to use it to exert it’s force. Thus, it’s harmless. Restrict how that idea may be implemented, that’s fine, but blaming the idea is narrow-minded.
Things would be worse if it was never printed because other people be less likely to aim for progressive ideas.
It’s my feeling - though I can’t prove it - that even short of censorship questions, the makers/consumers of “transgressive” texts (books, films, whatever) are often unwilling to allow the work to be discussed, analyzed, or evaluated in any way at all. It’s as if they are on the defensive - as though anything short of passive acceptance of such a work is just as good as censoring it.
The cinéaste crowd, anyway (say on IMDb user reviews), typically fall back on invoking “art” and/or stock phrases like “not for the faint of heart/squeamish/lovers of pap and mediocrity,” which twists the knife a bit: if you don’t go for this stuff, you’re either a sissy or a philistine or both.
Well, we don’t have the right to expect to be coddled in our love for perversity.
And anybody who doesn’t love tentacle rape porn is a baby.
Well, of course it does. It’s right there in the Constitution:
The legal details are simply different.
The United States does not have unfettered freedom of expression, as evidenced by, for instance, obscenity laws and laws that restrict advertising in certain contexts. Like most liberal democracies, freedom of speech is Constitutionally protected but there are a very limited number of exceptions. Many of the exceptions are common to all democracies, like laws against libel or slander. Some are unique to certain countries, but they’re generally very limited.
Hrm…I stand corrected. I don’t know why I thought that then. Maybe I was thinking of the UK.
So how does Canada get hate speech laws past its Constitution then?
This hasn’t been my experience at all. There’s been plenty of transgressive films in recent years that have been just about analyzed to death, both by fans and critics - I’m thinking of stuff like Martyrs, Twentynine Palms, Trouble Every Day. As for literature of this sort, sometimes aficionados just aren’t the sort who get into deep literary analysis of any stripe - I’m having trouble picturing hardcore Dennis Cooper fans moonlighting as literary critics. As for Hogg itself, the Wikipedia entry at least tries to introduce some analytical angles (though IMO not very convincingly).
Fair enough. I’d say the literary context of Hogg at least breeds some ground for discussion - Delany is obviously a brilliant man, and the question of why he’d write something like this ties deeply into the overarching issue of his views toward sexuality and its place in society. That’s the context in which I initially came to the work, and it makes sense as something of a literary pawn in that context - a piece without any real merit of its own, but one which reveals intriguing things about its maker’s worldview.
Yeah, the work of parenting seems to be the deal-breaker here - it’s impossible for parents to oversee everything a kid is exposed to. When I was around 12 I was reading some pretty age-inappropriate books like American Psycho, Portnoy’s Complaint, Naked Lunch, and some Sade, and they never did a thing to warp me - but then I was looking for something different than pure perversity in these works, and at that stage of development maybe it’s difficult for parents to distinguish between a kid’s interest in literature and the subversive vs. a kid just wanting to read really gross things he probably shouldn’t be reading. My parents mostly left me alone when I sought out books like this, and I know I’m well-adjusted 13 years after that intense spell of reading in my early adolescence - again I wonder whether a kid who knows enough about Delany and has resources enough to know about this book and to actively seek it out might not be ready for what it has to offer.