Surrealpolitik: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present

Both temporally and geographically, the phenomena of taboo and transgression can be considered omnipresent, that is existent in all societies or cultures and at all times. If the ubiquity of taboos and their influence on social structures is generally accepted with regard to the past, which a narcissistic and supposedly enlightened present all too often views with condescension if not outright derision, what is remarkable is the fact that taboos not only continue to exist but that they can actually be said to be flourishing. A brief reference to the recent debates on political correctness, to shibboleths in relation to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, or to the ongoing question of how to deal with topics such as the Holocaust, should suffice to make this point clear. Specifically with reference to the British literary scene, one could, of course, also mention the more than thirty years of censorship imposed on D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, the uproar surrounding the staging of Howard Berton's The Romans in Britain and Edward Bond's Saved, or the outburst of violence following the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, so brilliantly portrayed in Hanif Kureishi's novel The Black Album. Thus, even in modern or postmodern and supposedly enlightened Western societies, taboos are still pervasive, the controversies just mentioned being only the tip of the iceberg of an ongoing cultural struggle with, against and in favor of taboos; a struggle which, as the above examples demonstrate, is especially well reflected, documented and hard fought in literature and the arts. (page 3)

[From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Terror, Taboo]

[T]he still unbroken interest of a broad public in this...topic of taboo [is] paradoxical because the concept of taboo has become a taboo in itself, because taboo is generally accepted as drawing the fundamental borders between the sacred and the profane, whereas a critical glance shows that these borders can scarcely be drawn unproblematically, since not only the concept of taboo as such, but also the concept of the sacred turns out to be polysemic, if not aporetic. While in most civilized societies the use of violence is strongly tabooed, it nevertheless remains inherently if not inextricably bound up with the notion of taboo. This does not only hold true for the cultivating potential inherent to relinquishing drives, but, as Christoph Türcke argues, "above all for the fatuousness of a specific ban on thinking that individuals en masse subject themselves to in order to be able to endure a society they did not choose themselves and yet allow to remain as it is.". (page 4-5)

[From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction]
Tags: [Truth & Real, Culture, Myth, Conspiracy, Taboo]

[Quoting Valeri] A taboo usually marks some event or situation that is likely to threaten the integrity of the body as the seat of the integrity of the subject. But...this integrity of the subject may in turn depend on the integrity of a certain external object, as determined by the classificatory system at large. If the focus of interest of taboo, then, is ultimately the subject, it does not exclude -- indeed, it must include -- all classifications of objects that have any bearing on the subject...Thus pollution, although focussed on the subject, modelled on the body's permeability to external objects, and principally concerned with the substances and processes were this permeability is located, may stray very far from them. It may...become entangled with all kinds of medical and magical theories and practices where they exist. Furthermore, it may be used to enforce rules, to shore up or even express hierarchical relations, and so on. (page 11)

[From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction]
Tags: [Taboo]

[B]ear...in mind that, on the one hand, taboos can be functionalized by a society to strengthen its identity (cf. the scapegoat), that they can create security since they exclude objects, actions and persons viewed as threatening and thus produce, albeit ex negativo, a legal sphere in which certain topics are precluded from being openly discussed, but that, on the other hand, this function can also be interpreted as a highly effective means of social control, that is as a collective system of repression and negative conventions that draw borders and help secure authority along the temporally and culturally specific axes of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure...[T]he concept of taboo...can be understood as an arena of contestation in which a society negotiates not only its values and beliefs...but also its borders and power structures. (page 13)

[From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction]
Tags: [Conspiracy, Taboo]

Since taboos are normally not the topic of open discussions but largely internalized, any form of critical questioning is realized, if at all, only through massive outside influence. Given literature's ability to constitute a discursive field in which even marginalized, aberrant voices can articulate themselves, to give voice to something which could be called 'the collective unconscious' and to transcend its time of origin, literature becomes an extraordinarily privileged medium for the depiction and analysis of phenomena such as taboo and transgression...From this in turn it follows that an approach that conceives of taboos only as social phenomena misses the point, that textual analyses need to pay attention to the strategies and the contents of symbolizations, and that aesthetic traditions need to be taken into consideration, such as, to give but one example, the modernist aesthetic of innovation which often depends on rupture and on violating taboos. (page 16)

[From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]

[From an end-of-chapter footnote #14] Literary texts are understood as being a central part of that "larger symbolic order by which a culture imagines its relation to the conditions of its existence" (Matus 5) and as a space "in which shared anxieties and tensions are articulated and symbolically addressed" (ibid. 7). Moreover, through active reader participation, literature renders imagination 'livable' -- the fictional world can actually be experienced and can therefore be 'tested' and criticized -- so that the literary text becomes a privileged space of simulation where the work on a cultural imaginary can take place (cf. Fluck). (page 19)

[From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Truth & Real, The Other, Myth]

As some topics are in every society precluded from public or even private discussion, taboos are an important element of the collective system of repression. The social function of taboos has therefore to be considered as the stabilizing factor in social and cultural systems...Taboos indicate or represent social control, especially with regard to class, gender, and race, cultural hegemony, the norms and values of legal cultures, or they can express the attitudes and mentalities of subcultures and countercultures.

Basic conflicts over social norms and values that are taken for granted may then also be subverted or deconstructed by political groups. Thus, Quakers and other religious groups were confronted with "a ban on thought, a form of suppressing a set of political ideas and their utterance by means of censorship and other forms of political and legal repression" (Gurr, this volume), and this despite Milton or Bunyan daring to transgress censorship. (page 26)

[From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective]
Tags: [Culture, Lead Quote Candidate, Taboo]

The three primary agents of institutionalized social control in Britain, charged with supervising all kinds of religious, legal, moral or social actions have been the church, state and civil society...Thus, the authors of Sir Thomas More were told to leave "out the insurrection wholly and the cause ther off"...Representations of popular protest or references to popular unrest were considered to be taboo. Hence, the deposition in Shakespeare's Richard II failed to appear in the first printing. (page 27-28)

[From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective]
Tags: [Taboo]

[During the Restoration] Whereas the family remained the quintessential unit of the private sphere and its boundaries could only be violated by official bodies in very special cases, public sites of discourse became the domains of "policing" by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which were broadly middle-class voluntary associations trying to promote civilized refinement, to change collective identities and to purge the public space of transgressive behavior. (page 31-32)

[From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective]
Tags: [Community, Taboo]

The taboos that Gulliver's Travels breaks traverse whole areas of early eighteenth-century English society: the novel assails guiding principles of Enlightenment philosophy, absurdities of scientific progress, the rise of capitalism, Walpole's Whig government, party politics in general, religion, and the travel books that were fashionable at the time, but it does so in such oblique ways that eighteenth-century censors and modern critics alike are at a loss when trying to pin down the exact targets of the novel's satirical attacks. This is a quality that Gulliver's Travels shares with all good satires and results mainly from the fact that 'satire' does not constitute a fixed literary genre, but is able to occupy any genre parasitically and use these genres as hosts which it eats up from within. Therefore, modern satire theory has recognized the futility of trying to establish the generic boundaries of satire, but views satire as a "mode" (Connery and Combe 9) of writing, a "frame of mind" (Knight 7) and "an 'open' form" (Griffin 186). (page 55-56)

[From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]

[Regarding censorship-evading satire in Gulliver's Travels] Swift's masterstroke in order to negotiate between the Scylla of vague generalization and the Charybdis of blunt particularity was to merge both types of satire in such a way that they would both be constantly evoked by the text and that the reader would be unable to draw a neat line between them. Thus, Swift involves his readers in a satirical game of hide-and-seek in which they do not know exactly what to look for, or, if they have eventually found something are unable to tell if this was the object of their search in the first place. Equally, the censors were unable to tell if -- or where -- a transgression of taboos had happened. (page 56-57)

[From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]

After the Second World War, the growing social and cultural differentiation and pluralization of British society makes an analysis of the interaction between taboo and transgression infinitely more difficult. The abolition of institutional censorship in 1968 is just one symptom of a new permissive society which seems to accept an ever-increasing amount of transgressive behavior and its depiction in literature, art, and film. The Holocaust seems to be one of the few remaining taboos which cannot be transgressed through denial or other forms of showing disrespect without provoking public outrage or legal consequences. In such a climate of almost general permissiveness the role of literature as taboo-breaking force seems to have faded away, literature seems like a dog that is still able to bark, but has lost its bite. In other words, literature may stage transgressions more overtly than ever, but without any noticeable effect. (page 66)

[From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]

[I]t seems that the erosion of traditional norms has not shaped a society which is free from taboos, but one that has rather erected new taboos and orthodoxies which are linked with concepts such as female and gay emancipation, multiculturality, religious tolerance, and political correctness (which has itself developed into a form of moral censorship). The power of these taboos can be gauged by the euphemisms, careful phrasing, and self-censorship that (democratic) politicians revert to when they talk about the issues in question, which represent discursive minefields for anyone who openly challenges their validity. Transgressions of these new cultural taboos are usually performed by reactionary, anti-democratic, or anti-emancipatory social forces which oppose one or more of the values established by an open society and sometimes propagate authoritarian and totalitarian views of the world and of social interaction. Admittedly, the functions of literature in such a complex cultural force field are difficult to pin down. (page 66)

[From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]

Literary texts explore the limits of language and playfully engage with the border to forbidden territories beyond the empire of the Symbolic Order. (page 194)

[From chapter: Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Community, Culture, The Other, Taboo]

Most literary texts dealing with taboos only make a topic of violating taboos -- they are not violating taboos themselves. In the process of narrativization, as Schaffers (25) argues, the event is processed for the cultural archives. As this transformation assimilates taboos to the discourse of the Symbolic Order and thereby domesticates them, the question arises: How do we recognize taboos, especially if they are unconscious to a large degree? For Kristeva [Julia Kristen, essay "Powers of Horror"], feelings of horror, fear or dread, disgust, revulsion, and nausea or physical reactions like vomiting, fainting, or trembling signal that the individual is confronted with the tabooed limits of those aspects of reality which his or her culture has circumscribed as 'normal', 'real', or 'true', and which are included in the semantic field of a cultural reality. (page 195-196)

[From chapter: Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]

Transgression...is concerned with moving beyond a state where identities and concepts (i.e., race, class, gender, religion, nationality) are stabilized, well-defined, and petrified, toward a fluidity which serves as the basis for an implicitly ethical approach fusing aesthetic, epistemological, and practical aspects. (page 212)

[From chapter: Stefan Glomb, Revaluating Transgression in Ulysses.]
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Taboo]