What the Fuck is Transgressive Fiction?
A quick look into the most elusive, underground genre out there.
“Transgressive Fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters that feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of Transgressive Fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social or nihilistic.” — Wikipedia.
Whilst that is a perfectly passable explanation of what Transgressive Fiction may consist of, this underground genre is in need of some swift redefining in the modern world, especially when looking at some of the books considered to be ‘Transgressive’ of more recent times. Ask the average Jack if they like Transgressive Fiction and they’ll most likely shrug a “Da fuck is dat?” at you, but mention American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream or Fight Club and you’ll get an “Oh, duuuude, I totally loved that fucking book/movie.” So we see, Transgressive Fiction is known, yet somehow unknown at the same time.
Schrodinger’s Cat and commercial mediums aside, it seems that Transgressive Fiction is either condemned to remain in the shadows of the general public’s eye, but perhaps, that’s exactly where it wants or even needs to be. But should it?
Take Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, for a mega-mainstream example. On the surface, the book is defined as a page-turning Crime Thriller Romantic Suspense Revenge Drama, full of twists and turns and the usual guff publishers spew in order to snatch up as much coin as they can. Underneath it all and turning a blind eye to the ridiculous family-pro happily-ever-after though, Gone Girl is held together by the transgressive actions its characters willingly undertake. Using the much relied upon trope of the Unreliable Narrator (Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Plath, Palahniuk, B.E. Ellis) Flynn gives us not only one but two untrustworthy first-person narrators, each with their own agenda directing their motives and actions. Not once will you hear the word ‘transgressive’ mentioned in any of the reviews/promotional material though, which brings me to my next point:
Doesn’t every story contain Transgressive elements?
Take the Bible, for instance, a very fine piece of fiction indeed. Wouldn’t Eve’s apple-picking betrayal be considered the most transgressive act she could partake in, seeing that she was specifically told not to do it by He Himself? Whilst Wikipedia (or the men who wrote it) might simply point Eve out as being ‘mentally ill’, all she was really ever doing was indeed ‘rebelling against a society of sorts that she felt confined by’, once again demonstrating an inclination towards transgression as a requisite trait for the human condition. For, I ask you, what good is Utopia if you’re condemned to ignorance? Job too might have kept his faith, but I doubt that he could deny that God was a pretty transgressive little devil Himself as well now, could he?
Because that is probably the main point of Transgressive Fiction and most likely why it so often hides underneath the ‘bigger’ genres out there, including and maybe even especially of the religious kind, as I again hold my reservations that anyone could deny the ‘transgressive’ element of pimping out 72 virgins in the afterlife either.
Regardless of whether it ‘aims to break societal confines’ via a group of men willingly beating the shit out of each other or by exposing indecent lust through a prepubescent girl, the reason Transgressive Fiction seems to make us ‘uncomfortable’ is NOT because it simply aims to make us feel that way, but because the subjects and topics it so often tackles already exist within the societies we each inhabit, never mind where and when. The reason it makes us feel ‘squeamish’, I’d venture to say, is because of how it exposes just how damn transgressive we’re all capable of being, and, if we were to speak with impunity, just how fucking transgressive we already are and always have been.
The branding of its protagonists as ‘anti-social’ or ‘nihilistic’ is in some sense pretty ironic, considering that those are the labels many a sheep would use to describe anyone who speaks out against the status quo, even if it’s for its own benefit. Like Nihilism, Transgressive Fiction gets lumped into many a negative-leaning set of words when it comes to its description, which is another reason I believe it remains in underground infamy than celebrated fame.
In the mainstream world, entertainment has been raping art for so long the poor latter doesn’t even know what it is anymore, so the easily digestible and non-challenging genres with cutesy names to disguise to the Peter Pan syndrome of its audience have risen up, with a few of them even possessing the temerity to believe that YA actually ‘tackles’ some ‘super serious subjects’, but what none of them seems to realise is that those issues are nothing new in the slightest, whereas on the other hand, Transgressive Fiction has been exposing them since before even Dostoevsky. With the social media wet dream spunked inside everyone’s eyes, everybody seems content to merely project the image of progress and enlightenment, forgoing the grit and sacrifice it takes to not only understand art but to create art at all.
The proclivity for violence and illicit behaviour by the protagonists of Transgressive Fiction are not simply destruction for destruction’s sake, but out of a deep yearning to feel emotion, be it good or bad, and re-connect with a part of humanity that once ostracised them in the first place. Blood squirts, bodily fluids and hedonistic romps aside, the characters inside these worlds deal with philosophical themes of existentialism, nihilism, morality, and by questioning the world around them, search for the bigger answers. Whilst they usually fail (as the subjects have no definitive answer) that does not, if ever, make the quest for something more, something better, or bigger, a waste of time. For when it comes down it, Fight Club is a coming of age story, but the plot and structure are not what makes the book/film so memorable. It was our collective adherence to the viewpoint of the unnamed narrator, who spoke out against a society we’d all felt deceived by, as the dreams fed to us as children through commercialism slowly dissipated amongst the fumes of the over-polluted cities we are now forced to live in and to accept as reality.
It seems Transgressive Fiction may forever remain as the outcast of the literary world, just like its subject matters are also condemned to the shadows within the world we actually live in too. But for as long as that remains to be true then Transgressive Fiction is here for the long haul. Whether its outsider status ever changes is somewhat immaterial, as it’ll live within the other genres out there regardless of whether you’ve ‘heard’ of it or not.
