Triptych by Larissa Wodtke

Author:Larissa Wodtke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible
ISBN: 9781910924891
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Unmanifesto: Selby and the Christing of the Miserable Self

Picking Last Exit to Brooklyn up again after all these years I notice that it has little quotations from the Bible before each chapter. I didn’t really remember much about this book, but I must have enjoyed it enough to read two more books by Selby — The Demon and The Room — before finally stopping: those two were simply too much, too extreme and violent for me, and perhaps too lacking in redemption. Also, Darren Aronofsky’s film adaption of Requiem for a Dream further alienated me from Selby. To me it glamorized drugs, and yes I know it ends badly for the characters, especially the one who has his arm chopped off, but in the meantime it creates a very fascinating and glamorous life for them. A glamour of misery and squalor. This is the world that Selby creates, alluring because the possibility of shocking, sexualized violence and human animal brutality is always hovering nearby.

In the introduction to the 1987 edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Anthony Burgess discusses the 1966 obscenity trial and wonders how anyone could consider the book obscene, in that it can’t be obscene because it’s not built for titillation, and that Selby rather “presents social horrors out of reformist zeal, not out of a desire to titillate or corrupt” (xvii). But I disagree: there is clearly pleasure in the reading of the book, even if that pleasure is a pleasure of horror and terror and fear. The reader is given glimpses of the characters’ depravity and violence and then is constantly on edge that something violent is going to happen — extreme and tragic violence is always around the corner.

Selby gives you characters from the beginning that are immoral or morally dubious, protagonists who do horrible or nasty or mean or suspect things. He then leaves you with these protagonists, so you fear for their safety, because justice must surely come to them. Inevitably, the characters encounter grisly ends (Tralala and Harry), which are compounded by the reader not really knowing what happens to them next: it is unclear if these two die, but in any case they have been wounded physically, socially and psychologically beyond repair. The effect is a kind of ritual sacrifice of the outcast, but the outcast is not some pure Jesus-like figure, but rather a compromised, morally bankrupt human being, the product of a social system which is a mess, but also their own sorry choices and human weakness. As Burgess says in the introduction, the feeling the reader has for them is compassion, you want to build a world that does not produce these victims.

Both chapters “The Queen Is Dead” and “Strike” have possible bearings on The Holy Bible, and in particular its treatments of gendered violence and masculinity. Selby’s novel is in various ways an indictment of patriarchal masculinities, perpetrators of and subject to all kinds of violence. The ever present threat of violence comes especially from the gang of hoodlums that congregates at “The Greeks,” led by Vinnie.

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