Possessed By A Pea Soup Of Pulp

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday February 3, 1990

DON ANDERSON

CAN ANYONE recommend an exorcist? I know how it felt for the possessed Linda Blair to have her head turned by her demon lover - the full 360 degrees. On the other hand, whereas luckless Linda vomited gallons of cold green pea soup, I feel as if I have ingested it.

I have just had a month off. Another busman's holiday. I yet again tried to give up reading, yet again failed. What can you do in a rating-free month when TV, that other anodyne, screens films that mock its raison d'etre? Truly, "in the very temple of delight/Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine".

Within 24 hours we had Max Headroom, in which the hero is a computer-generated television image which mocks the medium that massages him, and Deathwatch in which malign media magnates implant a minuscule television camera in an investigative reporter's brain so they can get footage of a dying woman. What the tasteless might call lobe-profile reporting.

As television was obviously into some sort of autocritical postmodernist phase, no respite from the rigours of regular reading was to be found there. So I was driven back on to my annual diet of pulps. The sort of books we are supposed to feel guilty about reading. What D.H. Lawrence really had in mind when he talked about the "dirty little secret". Not sex. Pulp. Pea-green pulp

Andrew Vach's Belle Blue (teenage snuff-sex), Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs (murderer skins female victims to fashion transsexual body-stocking), Frank King's Down and Dirty (homosexual ex-cop cracks fanatical death cult). Enough |

William Peter Blatty said of the film The Exorcist, which he wrote from his own book: "I throw everything (including cold pea soup?) at the audience and give them a real thrill. That's what they want. They don't want to go into a cinema and treat it like a book. They don't even read books |"

Pulps are books for people who don't read books. Or read too many books. Megapulper Stephen King - Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter - gets full marks for honesty with his admission that his books are "the literary equivalent of the Big Mac".

King's scorn for his peers is refreshing. "Jeffrey Archer is terrible(makes mock-vomiting noise). Frederick Forsyth writes as though English were his second language. Judith Krantz is awful. Robert Ludlum is unreadable. He's the guy wrote that sentence: 'His eyes slid down her dress.'" King obviously understands how it feels to ingest gallons of green pea soup.

At least King and his consorts don't write pretentious pulp. Try this, from something to be released shortly in your literary McDonald's. "I am not talking about pain. That is a controllable factor. You will be unconscious for at least 48 hours, perfused with potent anaesthetics." I ask you, "perfused" |Who does this guy think he is, Patrick Susskind? But the 48 hours seems right. Just the time it may take to sleep through the book.

I didn't mean to spend summer with pulp. I had virtuous intentions. I was going to read Anna Karenina. Having devoured Dostoevsky when an adolescent, I figured I was mature enough for Tolstoy. But sand got in my hair and pulp got in my eyes.

Come to think of it, Dostoevsky is just pulp with a college education. After all, Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad, to you)thought as highly of the Russian mystagogue as Stephen King does of Robert Ludlum, or Lech Walesa does of Moscow mandarins, or Mark Twain did of Sir Walter Scott (whose pulp the Southerner held totally responsible for the American Civil War).

One gets all the pleasures of pulp from Dostoevsky:

Student murders landlady with axe.

Anarchist assassins run amok.

Patricide a pleasure, Karamazov claims.

Conrad not surprisingly held Dostoevsky responsible for just about all the intellectual and spiritual evils of Europe at the end of the 19th century.

Literary intellectuals feel the same way about pulp today. Or was it yesterday? Today, as John Docker has assured us in these pages in his critique of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal's guidelines, if Neighbours is permitted, everything is permitted. It was different when John Docker and I and others were undergraduates, force-fed Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) with the hidden agenda of keeping us pure for literature, scornful of mass culture.

To elevate the lamentable tone of this column, permit me to quote the epigraph to Hoggart's chapter on "Sex-and-Violence Novels", taken from de Rougemont. "I would emphasise the symbolical fact that we have stopped making formal declarations of love at the very time we have allowed wars to begin without any declaration either. We are returning to the age of abduction and rape, though minus the ritual that has surrounded such violence in Polynesia.

For Hoggart, the undeclared war and rapine of pulps was being waged by America, with shock troops such as: Broads Don't Like Lead, The Killer Wore Nylon, Baby, Here's Your Corpse. The American generals had names like Spillane, Cain (sic), and Faulkner. For Hoggart, Pulp Corrupts; Absolute Pulp Corrupts Absolutely.

Hang on | Did you say "Faulkner"? Yes. Sanctuary, of course. But what did Jean-Paul Sartre say of it? "The intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story." The point is, surely, that just as some pigs are more equal than others, some pulps are better written than others. A pulp by Faulkner is like a Big Mac by Phillip Searle, or sanctuary at Oasis Seros.

Lest you think it mere eccentricity to bring the literatures of violence and haute cuisine together, permit me to quote from Julie Stafford's recipe for Chicken and Ginger Balls from her Taste of Life from the Microwave(Greenhouse, 1987). She advises you to use "one tsp finely chopped finger."That's true violence, and true pulp, for you |