A Week In Books: Shock no more

Karl Marx, who knew a thing or two about dialectics, grasped the hidden affinities that linked bourgeois culture with its bohemian enemies. In the mid-19th century, an opium-addled poète maudit might rapidly mutate into a starchy old academician. Now, the junkie, or punky, rebel becomes a cherished icon of consumer culture. And death, that ultimate career move, will only intensify the process.

Next week sees the opening of David Mackenzie's grimly memorable slice of Scottish erotic-noir, Young Adam. In the film, Hollywood's current best-beloved, Ewan McGregor, plays the amoral vagabond created in 1954 by the Glasgow-born cult author, heroin addict and on-off pimp, Alexander Trocchi. Irvine Welsh, perhaps less of a Trocchi heir than he imagines, has condemned the chaotic career of the novelist, editor and troublemaker, calling Trocchi "the George Best of Scottish literature". But then Trocchi (who died in 1984) never had the option of penning an opinion column for the Daily Telegraph. Welsh did.

The gap, both cultural and chronological, between bohemian revolt and bourgeois rehabilitation has now dwindled to a microscopic span. As late as 1962, the nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid branded Trocchi "cosmopolitan scum" at a Scottish writers' conference. If anyone chucked that insult at Mr Welsh today, it would be plastered all over the posters and press ads in a trice.

Should we lament that shock and sell-out now happen in more or less the same gesture - or rejoice? It may show maturity, rather than hypocrisy, that "transgressive" artists can at last lead stable and well-funded lives. Trocchi's own protracted free fall through drugs, dislocation and despair helped to wreck not just his own chances but those of his family: his second wife died of an overdose; his younger son killed himself. Far better, when you ponder such fates, to invite the latest enfant terrible on to the TV game show.

Young Adam in its original form (rather than the porno version knocked out for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris) evidently transplants L'Etranger of Albert Camus to the dour banks of the Clyde. Yet Camus himself, Resistance hero and upright public intellectual, spent a life devoted to minimising - rather than mimicking - random acts of cruelty and violence. The point of fiction, you could argue, is to talk the talk without having to walk the walk.

Still, we should not patronise Trocchi, nor imagine that a clean and sober version might have made his peace with power. The Beat-era rebels of Europe and America had dangerous dragons to slay. Their antagonists not only despised them, but longed to ban, fine and jail them as well. Beyond Philistine contempt lurked a legal system that still pounced on literary evidence of "obscenity". The tag of "outlaw" writer often meant just what it said. Trocchi's own junkie chronicle, Cain's Book, faced prosecution in 1963.

Thanks to the ordeals of the Trocchi generation, themes and techniques once confined to risky, underground writing now bounce along the mainstream with scarcely a murmur of protest. Sometimes we take this drastic shift utterly for granted. Imagine, for example, a fragmentary, satirical novel which mixes savage caricatures of royal personages with a cloacal dip into the sexual underworld. Only four decades ago, magistrates and editors would be panting for a day in court, in the firm and realistic hope of seeing a prison haircut inflicted on some sneering degenerate. But when Martin Amis releases Yellow Dog, do we cheer the robustness of our hard-won literary freedoms? Do we hell.