In a classic language, while there is blasphemy—the conscious and articulate insulting of the gods—there are no “dirty words.” Words, the words of the people, are used for what they fit. The idea that there are things in themselves not fit to be said is a romantic notion; the classic ideal is that anything, put well into the classic language—even the blasphemous—may be heard by all. Greek drama, of course, gave us the word “obscene”; but it is perhaps well to go back to its classical meaning: Ob-skene, Off-stage, i.e., “not-shown.” In the classic Greek drama, there were many things not shown; but there was nothing that could not be talked about. And the ob-skene actions, on which the plots of the tragedies turn, were described to the audience in exhaustive detail by the ubiquitous Messenger, just arrived from the blood-soaked bed-chamber, the corpse-strewn bath.

From a first reading of Hogg we get a first impression that the author has held nothing back. But a second look shows there is a whole complicated matrix of ob-skene events, far more horrendous that the on-stage ones, that are only talked out, or reported—by radio, by Monty and Bill, or by Rufus. Everything that revolves around Mr. Jonas, for example, is merely speculation. And Mr. Jonas’s death, certainly the most gratuitously violent in the novel, takes place in the break between chapters.

Violent as what appears on stage in Hogg is, the reader should note that, as with the Greeks, there is a point of violence—not of sex—that, as incidents approach it, determines whether they are to be shown or reported. As with the Greeks, this is not for moral reasons, but aesthetic ones. As Aristotle pointed out, once things go beyond this point, placed ob-skene they are simply more effective.

But we are already into the form of the novel.

III

Hogg is a version of a pastoral.

Most genre fiction (or “category fiction” as publishers now call it) is.

In Hogg, however, there is the difference that the Antiseptic Tenet of the pastoral is thrown, gear-grindingly, into reverse. From Sade, through Cleland, to Apollinaire, and on, how many pornographic writers have religiously provided us with the moment in which, after the sweat- (and worse-) drenched orgies are over, the participants leap up to wash? There is only one time anything near this happens in Hogg, and its use, effectively enough, is not for any symbolic (and, with those other authors, how hollow that symbol always feels!) purification, but rather to strip the character even further, to leave him more naked, with even the protection of his own dirt—the filth, the blood, the excreta—gone. Harkner, naked in the truck, newly scrubbed and still dripping, listening to another radio report, must be one of the most pathetic creatures in American fiction.