A spectre is haunting English Literature, and has been for more than 65 years.
The spectre of R v Penguin Books Ltd (1960). Better known as The Lady Chatterley Trial1, this is commonly regarded as one of the great cultural watersheds of the modern era – the point at which the decades-long winter of uptight literary censorship gave way to a more permissive environment. The taboos of late Victoriana, which had once claimed Oscar Wilde himself as a victim, eased into an era where writers could openly tackle any subject-matter.
Right?
Well, not quite.
Taboo subject-matter continues to exist – a situation that seems paradoxical, given that ‘freedom to openly discuss’ really ought to banish the conception of taboos altogether. Contemporary taboos are fewer today than there were in the 1790s, when the Marquis de Sade was cheerfully engaging every scatological fetish he could imagine, but there are still certain subjects that will attract unease and outrage, even into the 2020s, a reflection perhaps of Joseph de Maistre’s long-ago observation that unwritten law is more powerful and binding than written law2.
I mention this as preamble, because my upcoming novel, Old Phuul, will delve into a taboo topic, via the lens of fantasy fiction. I shan’t spoil the details, of course, but this is one of those cases where the writer finds themselves treading an interesting line, lest the reader recoil at the violation of the dread taboo, and throw the book across the room.
There are, I think, at least three ways of handling such matters within the confines of modern fantasy fiction.
The first is to turn the story into a morality play.
This is where a character violates social norms (both those of the setting and those of the real-world) so badly they become a villain, and so earn their due punishment – to the undoubted satisfaction of everyone involved. Ironically, for all that this is unquestionably the safest way of dealing with taboos in literature, it is also the least satisfying, at least to my mind. There is vanishingly little challenge to tucking the reader up with a warm blanket and a glass of milk, and reassuring them that social taboos are something only the Bad People violate. Especially when this can lead to the “Do Not Do This Cool Thing” effect, which the likes of Christopher Marlowe openly played with back in the sixteenth century.
A second, more recent, method is something far less apologetic. Make the taboo front and centre, and rely on the quality of the writing and the depth of the thematic analysis to keep the reader in line.
The go-to case-study here is Nabokov’s Lolita, where the reader endures the interior self-justifications and delusions of Humbert Humbert, all the while wanting to punch the protagonist, and yet vicariously experiencing his mind through some of the finest prose in English literature. In terms of speculative fiction, Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant and Angus Thermopylae similarly take this thematic route to handling taboo – Donaldson’s writing is obviously not at Nabokov’s level, but the author spends hundreds of pages exploring the taboo-violation at the level of character and theme, and (because this is Donaldson, and the idea fascinates him) the potential for redemption. Some readers love it, others hate it.
((Editor’s Note: I have to confess I bought the whole Thomas Covenant series from a charity shop after hearing good things about it… then promptly returned all of them a few weeks later after an incident in the first third of the first book gave me such an ick that I couldn’t get over it.))
A third variant of taboo-handling arguably plays into the strengths of speculative fiction. That is, the realisation that there is no need for an invented fantasy or science-fictional world to operate by the social views of contemporary society.
More often this takes the form of invented taboos, where something is deadly serious in the invented world, and yet not an issue in ours – in a sense, this allows the author to explore a taboo without stepping on the toes of the real-world reader. Sometimes, however, the writer will be a bit edgier, and make a real-life taboo into something less shocking in their invented setting. George R.R. Martin’s portrayal of Targaryen Incest – considered normal in Westeros (at least among the royal family) – is such an example, Martin having previously noted that royal incest was considered normal in Ancient Egypt. The protagonist of Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword has been raised by hedonistic Elves, and so believes accidental incest is something that can be worked through.
There is arguably a fourth route too. Specifically, that of satire. Monty Python’s Life of Brian tackles some taboo topics – religious ones – via laughter. But I would argue this only works in some cases, or in black comedies.
Well and good. What route do I take in Old Phuul?
Largely the second variety, albeit with a twist. The character in question does not have this taboo-violation as their defining characteristic, even though it is an integral part of them as a character – and indeed it works at the symbolic level, playing into what this character most intensely desires.
The character also has other motivations too, and I tend to subscribe to the idea that readers will be more tolerant of an active character than one who perennially sulks in passivity. But the real twist, I think, is to borrow some aspects of the third category. Only some. The Viiminian Empire is an unusual and weird setting, but the taboo exists there even as it exists in real-life.
The point is that I have gone to great lengths to represent the psychology of this particular character as being utterly alien to anything one would see in the 2020s West. An alien character, one hopes, might be forgiven for acting oddly.
Sixty years or more of the Permissive Society – are we truly that permissive? To a large degree, obviously we are. And yet there remains subject-matter which treads upon cultural taboos, because every culture has such prohibitions, explicit or otherwise, and liberal democratic modernity is no different in that respect. To tackle such matters as a writer is a truly interesting exercise, one that arguably requires caution and sensitivity more than crassness disguised as courage. Such are my thoughts on this topic, having very much run up against a taboo with Old Phuul.
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