Welcome to the danger zone

Young minds are increasingly being sheltered from "dangerous" fiction, especially in the US where many states are banning books for their sexual content. Surely, writes Kirsty Gunn, reading such texts makes us think.

- Kirsty Gunn

A few years ago - though by now this may as well have happened in another lifetime - I was giving a lecture on DH Lawrence's short story The Blind Man. This was part of an undergraduate course in "Writing Practice and Study" delivered to second-year students who were taking a combination of literature and creative writing modules.

I was using the story as a way of talking to them about what Lawrence called sentences that "lived along the line". "Lawrence is dangerous," I said to the class. "You never know what is going to happen in his fiction. You never know where it might lead." I went on to tell them about how his writing is put together in such a way as to make us have to pay close attention, that otherwise we might miss something or get it wrong.

I told them about how his work also often takes on subjects many people have regarded as challenging. There was Lady Chatterley's Lover, banned for indecency; Lawrence's various tricky interests in a Nietzschean kind of super-man philosophy; his rebellion against social norms and the concept of the status quo.

Lawrence loathed the idea of a status quo, I said, in literature and in life. He was a risk taker. I outlined his wonderful treatment of male intimacy in The Blind Man by way of example: how the reader is never quite sure just what the two men in the story are going to do to each other, the way Lawrence questions ideas about vulnerability and the frailty of our bodies and relationships.

I hadn't even got on to the extraordinary part - where Maurice, the young husband, blinded in World War I, having met the man his wife knew in a former life, asks, because he cannot see him, if he may touch his face when a young woman put up her hand and called out, "Excuse me, but I think it's inappropriate that you are lecturing on a story about someone with a disability."