James posted an interesting blog about Lolita and the film Funny Games. It got me thinking about pieces of fiction (be they novels or film or comics) that make you feel uncomfortable and sometimes outraged but are none the less intriguing and enjoyable.
What makes art really worth sitting through? Lolita is the perfect novel for this sort of question but there are others that are quite disturbing, Naked Lunch for instance, although i have never finished that book so I shall not discuss it further. However there is a disgusting, foul, vulgar book I have finished and thoroughly enjoyed. Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis is, like Lolita, a detective novel, about the search for the real constitution of the united states, a piece of writing so influential that simply hearing it read aloud will compel you to do whatever it tells you to do. Throughout the book the hero faces bestiality, public masturbation, sadistic ritualistic murder, and sexual threats from elderly senators (and thats just the first 50 pages). Now your average citizen reading this would throw it down at the first mention of people who have sexual fantasies about Godzilla, however I kept reading.
Why do people continue on adventures like these? Very few people are comfortable with pedophilia or pretty much anything in Crooked Little Vein, or Funny Games, yet people continue reading them, and in the case of Lolita and Funny Games proclaim them masterworks of there respective forms.
My belief is that intelligent people enjoy these works because they can see that the creators use the uncomfortableness to prove the point. The point of Lolita is not the pedophelia, thats just the Mcguffin.
P.S. For those of you who have read both books I am in no way putting Crooked Little Vein on the same intellectual level as Lolita
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