Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
“LET’S GO SLUMMING! TAKE ME
SLUMMING!”
There’s a famous 18th
century painting that often comes into my head when I think of the literature
of squalor.
It’s the last painting
in William Hogarth’s series The Rake’s
Progress, sometimes known as The
Bedlam Scene as it’s set in the famous madhouse.
The rake, having led a
dissolute and disorderly life, is reduced to the final degradation of madness.
He lies half-naked and raving on the filthy madhouse floor, tended by the last
of his hangers-on. Around him the insane shriek and gibber in various postures
– the mad tailor pulling at a tape measure, the mad astronomer looking through
a rolled-up piece of paper, a loony who thinks he’s pope, another who thinks
he’s a king and so on. All quite sad and disconcerting.
But, to our eyes, most
disconcerting of all are two figures in the background. They are two fashionably-dressed
ladies, one calmly fanning herself (presumably because of the stink) as they
pass through the chamber. They are, indeed, wealthy and fashionable people who
have come to look at the insane as a form of entertainment.
It is well attested from
many sources that looking at the mentally-afflicted was once regarded as a
harmless amusement. Keepers of asylums were perfectly happy to take money from
curious idlers who wanted to have a look. From the painting itself (which dates
from the 1730s), there is no way of telling what Hogarth’s attitude was towards
this custom. Indeed, he may have considered it part of the just punishment
meted out to the rake for his sins. But to us it can’t help seeming barbarous
and inhumane, quite apart from other things we know about the way the insane
were once routinely treated.
And yet, I ask, haven’t
we found our own ways of enjoying the plight of the degraded, the poor, the
afflicted and the mentally-unbalanced?
It’s called popular
fiction.
Or at least a good part
of it.
I won’t follow false
trails here. Reason tells me that it is perfectly right for some authors to
write about the wretched of the Earth. Quite properly, all classes of society
can and should be addressed and considered by literature. So there will be some
books about the degraded, poor and mentally-unbalanced, ranging for earnest
exposes aimed at our enlightenment and future social reform; to novels that
realistically assess how people live in deprived conditions; to autobiographies
and memoirs of poverty and hard times.
I do not quarrel with
these, though sometimes my patience is tested even by highly esteemed works of
squalor that are considered part of the canon. (Doesn’t Zola often seem to be
looking down from a great height and with a certain degree of contempt upon his
assorted drunkards and whores and psychotic train-drivers in his great series Les Rougon-Macquart? Isn’t Celine really
getting his kicks by telling us how horrible the poor are in Journey to the End of Night?)
What I’m really thinking
of are films and novels that present degradation as sensational entertainment,
especially in the guise of thrillers. Here are the druggies and pimps and here are their whores and here are
the thugs roughing one another up in the most squalid sections of London, Paris
or New York and here is the psycho who likes to slice people’s heads off. And
here are we safe at home reading about them in this Trainspotting novel or safely sitting in a picture-theatre lapping
up that Lock, Stock and Two Smoking
Barrels movie as we crunch our popcorn – because we know we are not the
ones who live such awful lives.
Tales of squalor are out
catharsis, our way of feeling better about ourselves as we sniff, fan ourselves
and pass through Bedlam. Nostalgie de la
boue is one thing, but this process is called slumming.
Sometimes the high-brow
literary establishment can submit to the slumming impulse. Well do I remember
how James Kelman’s tedious novel How Late
It Was How Late won the 1994 Booker Prize – a pointless tale of a drunk
Glasgwegian blinded by violence and staggering through a series of punch-ups
with plainclothes cops, a series of booze binges and some meaningless sexual
encounters, going absolutely nowhere. Plotless, vacant, without redemption or form,
it was scorned by more than one critic and (to her great credit) one of the
Booker judges stormed off the jury, correctly pronouncing the book “crap”. So
why did it win the esteemed gong? Maybe because the literati felt they had to
acknowledge the book’s Glasgwegian dialect. And maybe because, being well-bred
people, they enjoyed passing through Bedlam.
May I add a paradoxical
footnote? When given the chance, the wretched of the earth hardly ever opt
for squalor lit, but go for escapism and
something cheerful. Rubbing your nose in literary ordure is a habit of the better-off.
But that’s the subject
for another day.
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