Jeff's Reviews > The Filth
The Filth
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Thoughtless or immature readers too often mistake unintelligibility with profundity. That is, they assume that the harder a work is to understand, the more meritorious it must be. Rarely is this the case. True, myriad (rightly) canonical cultural products are notoriously difficult to consume—Ulysses, Absalom! Absalom!, etc.—but even a cursory overview of Western literature reveals that such works pose exceedingly rare cases, formal experiments that actually manage to justify themselves. Quite a bit more frequently, formal tinkering functions to obscure a lack of content: the author with little to say compensates by saying it in a non-standard way. He manufactures tension and purpose by messing around with the work's spatial or linear organization, withholding information in a blatantly unnecessary fashion, and otherwise flooding his product with flourishes and frivolities sufficient to consume and dazzle the novice consumer, and with luck to convince him that something is going on amidst all that clamorous nothing, and that that something is just beyond the reader's reach. Of this strategy The Filth is an exemplar. It's plot skates the line between non-existence and willful obfuscation. The conspicuous lack of background renders the dialogue infuriatingly meaningless. The wincingly clumsy meta-fictional overtures are never explained and so are reduced in the reader's eyes to target less gestures. But then again, the guy is wearing a clown wig, so The Filth must be good, right? No. The Filth is bad. Worse, it's sleazy—masturbatory nonsense that abuses the reader's good faith. If you haven't read The Filth, don't. If you have, stop essaying to define what is good is about it. It's an impossible task, and you only look foolish undertaking it.
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Finished Reading
July 31, 2012
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May 27, 2014 02:13AM
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And I wouldn't describe The Filth as, "masturbatory." It was one of Grant Morrison's first works. Perhaps the words "embryonic," or, "experimental," would be more accurate.