Sex and Violence

Last week I read Al-Tayyib Salih's post-colonial novel, "Season of Migration to the North." It was fantastic. Like always, I found myself in class defending and exonerating the character that most readers, including my professor, associate with 'the bad guy'. "Cruel, heartless, inhuman..." are some of the words my teacher used to describe him. And true, he did murder his wife and cause several women to commit suicide - but I feel that the novel accurately portrays him as a victim who was only acting out the violent role that the British had already written for him, as an immigrant black Sudanese. As with several other novels I've read recently, the narrator is a guy who never does anything. All of the plot events are caused by the very interesting Said, who is mysterious, charismatic and seductive. True, bad things happen around him - but without him, there is no story. And in the end, it is the narrator's lack of action that allows the women he loves to be forced into an arranged marriage, as well as her subsequent suicide.

Today, I just started reading V.S. Naipaul's "The Mimic Men" and I'm already fascinated by it, although very little has happened. Perhaps I identify with the main character. He's attracted to foreign women, has an anxiety problem, and lives abroad. He keeps hinting at a terrible tragedy.

I've realized that the literary images which draw me in and haunt me even after I've finished a book, are generally concerned with sex and violence. Sure, great description helps, mood and setting, but its the event, the blood or sweat, that really binds my attention. Traditionalists sometimes blame the media, the News Channels or Movies, for introducing gratuitous visions of sex and violence into our lives - but without TV, wouldn't we resort back to thrillers and romance novels? Are the great classics of literature (Romeo and Juliet?) so powerful precisely because of the sex and violence they display?