Is There Value in Uncomfortable Literature?

The acclaimed Nobel-prize winning writer Toni Morrison dealt with narratives that were inherently uncomfortable. Her most well-known work, Beloved, challenged conventional norms in a way that was both thematic and literary. 

Beloved is the fictional account of a formerly enslaved woman literally haunted by the ghost of her eldest, deceased daughter. Despite employing magical realism, the novel is nonetheless brutally realistic, to a nearly unrelenting degree. Elements of the supernatural are inherently used alongside characterization designed not to elicit sympathy alone but to provoke deeper questions - morality itself, as seen by the protagonist’s Sethe’s relationship with her daughter’s apparition, has been scarred by chattel slavery and the systems of lasting violence it created. Ambiguous narrative framing, often utilized spasmodically, unbalances readers, forcing them to actively interpret moments rather than passively consume them alone. While Morrison’s work was acclaimed for its quality of writing there was at the same time immense pushback against depictions that many believed - and some still today do - were too graphic and visually extreme.

An invisible line has always been drawn in some way or another regarding the value of discomforting stories. There is a paradox inherent in how critiques of horrific aspects of reality are rejected for representing the real with too much detail. 

Perhaps the most well-known example of such a problem is Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita, depicting its protagonist Humbert Humbert’s growing psychosexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl. It is an incredibly cruel and deeply disturbing critique of pedophilia, yet does so through the vivid internal lens of an immensely detailed psyche. Humbert is not written as any monster but rather with full human attention. It is perhaps not the graphic nature of Lolita itself that serves as a discomforting factor - a brief mention of pedophilia as a crime would not elicit the same result. Rather, it is the fact that the book is read from a perspective that we can directly see into - and in it, maintain some form of recognition between. Lolita’s most terrifying aspect is that its subject offense is ultimately something capable of by anyone in theory.

Existentialist thought posits that we understand ourselves through contrast with an absolute other, whether taking the form of individuals or the environment or belief. It is easy to view the Other through a gulf of dissociation, simply treating it as an object of utter alterity. But uncomfortable literature challenges the distinction between it and the self. By understanding the extent of a greater problem we usually ignore by condemning or expressing basic sympathies, we truly are able to make deeper connections that have tangible meaning. There should be no fear in a literary challenge - rather an opportunity to cross from dissociation into understanding.