Powers of Horror

Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject as notes in her essay Powers of Horror focuses on that which ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’, with a distinct focus on that the abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other . William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Angela Carter’s collection of re-worked fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, both exude the notion of the abject forcing the reader to question their own reaction . These texts focus on the abject notion of sex, that which is non-consensual, violent and invites a sense of moral judgement. There is a distinct portrayal of the liminal state between self and other and life and death in the two texts specifically in the destruction of identity through the excretion and exchange of bodily fluids, that which forces a reader to feel embarrassment or disgust for the characters. The concept of addiction features largely as an aspect of the abject, disregarding the borders of identity in gambling with people’s lives and the disrespect for positions in society in the drug culture of Naked Lunch. The notion of the abject is created in these two texts through carefully constructed imagery and language that forces the reader to assess their own moral compass and react accordingly with a suggestion from the author through narration as to how they should react.

In a decade where sex was so regularly silenced, Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch could only be seen as a pornographic and invasive portrayal of an act that the people of the 1950’s believed should remain behind closed doors. Burroughs’ graphic descriptions of sexual acts...

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...xplore the readers morality inviting them to judge the author the characters and even themselves based on their own reactions the vivid imagery and disgusting reality introduced by the language of Carter and Burroughs. The different readership on the initial readership of these two texts arguable makes The Bloody Chamber more abject as she represents what is believed to be a contemporary attitude, where as Burroughs’ was a representative of the beat culture that served to portray the underclass and the disgust surrounding this civilization and the way that it was received by a conservative society. Despite the years separating the two texts both authors concur on the notion of the abject illustrating that which disgusts and violates the reader as well as the characters in texts, inviting each individual reader to decide if it is abject through their own reactions.