It Was Like A Phallic Symbol
One of Johnston's best written lines, taken from the spoken word King Kong, is "And he climbed up the Empire State Building / It was like a phallic symbol / And he took his woman / to the top of that towering temple". It's a jab at rudimentary analysis, the Empire State building is incredibly obvious as a phallic symbol, so much so that it is almost stated in the movie. This is hinted by the otherwise detailed plot summary of the rest of the song, indicating that the building is a phallic symbol not by analysis but by simple conscious thought, and that any sort of supposed great meaning derived from seeing the building as a phallic symbol is obvious and not all that analytical anyway.
The connection to Selby here is the disregard for symbology in Last Exit to Brooklyn. It is realist, but so is The Awakening, so is Bluebeard, both of which are loaded with symbology, along with various other realist examples especially in the case of poetry, meaning that symbology cannot be written out solely because of the genre. It is Selby who defies Chekov's "Gun Over The Mantle" Rule, making a bottle of pills on the table just a bottle of pills on the table. Selby does not subscribe to needless imagery, there are no women on ladders above men indicating female supremacy; supremacy is indicated through physical force, regardless of gender. The infighting of the drag queens during the night with the men, the rape of multiple "women" by Harry, the leader of the punks outside Alex's abuse of his wife; these are all obvious comments on the society of the time, but they are so much more powerful in that they do not hide behind symbology, they disgust the dark and awful in full light; as Georgette blocks out the sun through the windows, she's making everything too dark to see, not wanting to see everything in its own hideous glory.
The darkness of mankind abounds in Selby's work, and that is why he matters. Were he to write in the same general style but focus on latent symbols, his work would be trash. Selby is not afraid to kill a man with his pen, he does not need justification outside that it is what his subjects would do in real life, and as such it is only realistic to do it. Were he to hint and dodge around full exposure, there would be no power, no emphasis; he would be another unsuccessful Ginsberg clone. The way he writes though, he is the next step in beat, he puts more meaning behind Ginsberg's pride and Bukowski's sexuality and Kerouac's adventures, he merges them all into a truthful, discomforting and disorienting reality that is a true hell on Earth that too many people actually lived through.
The connection to Selby here is the disregard for symbology in Last Exit to Brooklyn. It is realist, but so is The Awakening, so is Bluebeard, both of which are loaded with symbology, along with various other realist examples especially in the case of poetry, meaning that symbology cannot be written out solely because of the genre. It is Selby who defies Chekov's "Gun Over The Mantle" Rule, making a bottle of pills on the table just a bottle of pills on the table. Selby does not subscribe to needless imagery, there are no women on ladders above men indicating female supremacy; supremacy is indicated through physical force, regardless of gender. The infighting of the drag queens during the night with the men, the rape of multiple "women" by Harry, the leader of the punks outside Alex's abuse of his wife; these are all obvious comments on the society of the time, but they are so much more powerful in that they do not hide behind symbology, they disgust the dark and awful in full light; as Georgette blocks out the sun through the windows, she's making everything too dark to see, not wanting to see everything in its own hideous glory.
The darkness of mankind abounds in Selby's work, and that is why he matters. Were he to write in the same general style but focus on latent symbols, his work would be trash. Selby is not afraid to kill a man with his pen, he does not need justification outside that it is what his subjects would do in real life, and as such it is only realistic to do it. Were he to hint and dodge around full exposure, there would be no power, no emphasis; he would be another unsuccessful Ginsberg clone. The way he writes though, he is the next step in beat, he puts more meaning behind Ginsberg's pride and Bukowski's sexuality and Kerouac's adventures, he merges them all into a truthful, discomforting and disorienting reality that is a true hell on Earth that too many people actually lived through.