The Transgressive Muse
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Notes from Underground
12 min read
The article explicitly compares its protagonist to Dostoevsky's 'Underground Man' and names him 'Fyodor 2.0' - understanding this foundational work of existentialist literature illuminates the literary tradition the novel engages with
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Transgressive fiction
12 min read
The entire article is a meditation on transgression as an aesthetic principle in modern literature, tracing it from Mailer to Welsh to Kerouac - this Wikipedia article provides the literary-critical framework for understanding the genre
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Les Fleurs du mal
11 min read
Charles Baudelaire is mentioned in key terms and his poetry collection was foundational to the transgressive aesthetic - his 'Carrion' poem and the scandal of the book's publication established the template for artistic transgression the article discusses
“Beauty is Truth, truth beauty,” said Keats, “—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”1 But the poet was missing an element. The last two centuries have seen the binary coupling evolve into a ménage à trois. A hot newcomer, Transgression, has joined the hallowed pair as the transcendent purpose and valorizing principle of art, bringing with it a perverse polycule of aesthetic virtues — shock value, envelope-pushing, norm-busting, taboo-shattering, bourgeois-épatering — without which the modern literary canon, and certainly its cover copy and promotional spin, would be seriously bereft.
The duly anointed modern writer must begin their work with an invocation of the transgressive muse. For example, Norman Mailer’s shoutout to the “perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break” that “elaborates a morality of the bottom.”2 Or Irvine Welsh’s trainspotted litany of bourgeois amenities — “big fucking television . . . dental insurance . . . leisure wear and matching luggage” — rejected in favor of joyous delinquency and heroin.3 Not to mention Jack Kerouac’s paean to the “mad ones . . . who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”4
Timothy Atkinson’s version of this benediction in his new novel Help Me I Am in Hell, a valiant new effort to get inside the transgressive muse’s well-worn pants, goes as follows:
We are the ones who do not exist in the consciousness of the world. We might as well not exist at all . . . . Our battle is one of the mind . . . waged inside our brains against the world. It is a fight against ourselves as we fight . . . to accept ourselves in the world as it is.
The “we” in this case consists of Atkinson’s nameless first-person protagonist and an ER nurse with whom he has just spent the wee hours smoking crystal meth. The protagonist — let us call him Fyodor 2.0 in homage to the author’s page-one namecheck of Dostoevsky’s equally anonymous Underground Man — is a hypochondriac of epic proportions. His kidneys ache. He thinks he has tumors. He suffers from night sweats. His limbs go numb. He can feel his neurons misfiring. He scours the Internet
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