Why does the ecstatic prose writer need the low (mean, base, coarse, depraved, wretched) ?

Question

A few examples:

He acquired his sobriquet by his fondness for chuck steak, which in the wild days of his youth he cooked on a stick over gutter fires. [Herbert Asbury, "The Gangs of New York"]

It was only two weeks or so since she had the kid. And it was a pretty good size one. Eight pounds somethin. I dont know exactly, but somethin like that. She said it was like shittin a watermelon. Havin a kid. [Hubert Selby, Jr., "Last Exit to Brooklyn"]

...but she was a nymphet, and her ivory pale legs and lily neck formed for one memorable moment a most pleasureable antiphony (in terms of spinal music) to my desire for Lolita, brown and pink, flushed and fouled. [Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita"]

Answer 1

Shock value?

Answer 2

This depends very much on how we define ecstasy in prose. If we suppose that ecstasy necessarily entails the wild embrace of the world in all its wretched glory, then of course "ecstatic prose" will contain depraved elements. On the other hand, if writing "ecstatically" just means writing enthusiastically or with a certain vigor, then there is no reason to suppose that ecstatic prose would necesitate the "low."

Perhaps it is best to think of ecstasy from a Freudian perspective; religious and literary ecstasy are potentially only sublimations of physical ecstasy. Sometimes this is quite literal -- see Joyce's dirty letters to his wife for a good example of "ecstatic" writing -- but in other instances, the conflation of the sexual/religious or sexual/literary is more obscure. Your examples vary, but you can see the sexual metahpor at work in each of them: a desire to lay bare the subject and possess it fights against the desire to *be* subject, to be affected and possessed.

Given that kind of framework for evaluating ecstasy, we might then suppose that all ecstatic writing is necessarily base and low at heart. Yet I think that this would be a misstep on our part. If anything, Nabokov's writing is post-depravity; there is a real sense in which high and low culture have unified, and anything, if examined closely, is as "base" as anything else.

Some notes:
No, I don't take Freud that seriously.

Of the three examples you gave, Nabokov is the only one I would have identified as "ecstatic" without prompting. And in fact I may have been prompted by that stupid John Updike quote they put on the back of every Nabokov book these days.

Answer 3

Do they really need it, or is it just a sort of rebellion? I`m not certain. It depends on author and his hero. Some people`s minds just work that way,connecting to familiar things and expressions. So, to help us enter such world, or state of mind,the author puts us to such experience.