Buckle up for WAAAAAAAYY too much pondering on the function of literature
I’m troubled.
I try very hard to keep myself honest, to avoid the trap of continuing to believe something because I believe it.
Some words from Chekhov that set in motion my current internal-water-muddying:
That the world “swarms with male and female scum” is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect… But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself. Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth – unconditional and honest…
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.
I just read this very annoying essay by Francine Prose in which she tells us about her semester commuting to teach creative writing, occasionally dropping pronouncements on her class, rules which she would almost invariably find broken by a Chekhov story on the commute home – y’see, there are rules, but all rules can be broken if broken well, see the two sides, PROFOUND, huh? (This seems to be the house style of the essay collection, well-worded positions of compromise between oppositional pairs, and it gets more fucking annoying with each iteration.)
But, the passages from Chekhov’s letters that she included near the end of the piece got my juices goin’ a little. I felt an instinctive intellectual kinship with them right away.
So, the very brief class discussion on the essay ends up making a quick run at authorial responsibility and understandings of authorial intent. I’m totally wet. One fellow student points out that when she reads submissions for publication, if she can’t see for sure how a character’s racism or sexism or whatnot is being used, she pitches the submission without remorse. Another fellow student and I protest that view of fiction.
Then it goes here: In 1996, in Moses Lake, 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis opened fire on his algebra class, saying that he had planned the attack carefully and taken ideas from Rage by Steven King (under his Richard Bachman pen name). The student who brought this up said that King claimed, when asked, that he had no responsibility, and yet, this student said, he was obviously accountable. I disagreed, we called it a matter of opinion, and class ended.
I got on the road back to Seattle with various versions of “I’m not buyin’it” running through my head (would Loukaitis have been a normal well-adjusted kid without the book? were there no school shootings before this? what if Loukaitis had been reading a non-fiction account of a school shooting? then who is accountable?), but building up quickly to this one question I wished I had the time to ask – What are the implications? What does it mean to be a writer if her position was correct?
I started getting uppity in my mind. What, are we only to write nice stories and morality tales? Regardless of whether there is ugliness in the world, there can be no ugliness in our pages? I suppose we should believe literature has this grand prescriptive power and only write stories of the world as it should be?
And, it struck me right then. What if we did? What if regardless of the sordid state of the world, all the creators of narrative wrote the world as they thought it could be? Given the power of narrative I so often lobby for, could we not write a better world? Share nothing but positive narratives to the point that we only have positive narrative metaphors by which to understand the world, construct the world?
Of course, it couldn’t be an enforced thing, but even considering it as a conceptual possibility, this was a crisis of faith for me. Because, my stand that the author is not accountable to the impact of his work insomuch as we can’t even begin to figure anything like actual intent becomes very tenuous in light of the power of narrative and necessary role of art as propaganda ideas I’ve been throwing around.
So, I’ve been floundering about with this. If narrative has the power that I claim it does, must not those who tap this power be held accountable to their actions?
I haven’t entirely resolved this to my own satisfaction, but there are some things I think I know:
- While I do believe in the power of narrative in a very real way, especially when you start looking at the unconscious metaphorical models for constructing morality that cognitive science claims we have (I currently love Lakoff), I think any question of whether creators of narrative can write a better world comes down to whether you believe that the human being is essentially perfectible or essentially fallible. I lean toward the latter, though I’d call it essentially atavistic in a way that favors individual over social.
- Censorship, even by implication (you shouldn’t be writing that) is never cool. The greatest promise of the information age is its power to subvert censorship, as it is all built upon an understanding of the actual networks that support the superhighway, in which attempts to censor are read as network damage to be routed around. That being said, I have little but contempt for excess for its own sake. Fuck the stupid asshole who made The Doom Generation and Nowhere, fuck Oliver Stone, and fuck Bret Easton Ellis.
- I instinctively lean toward a descriptive function of literature and away from a prescriptive function, which I guess I already said in pointing out the resonance I felt with the Chekhov quotes (and, by the way, he was my favorite on Star Trek, with his badass borderline-redshirt self a one-man fuck-you to the Russkies – you WILL be assimilated, Reds!)
- I think the place from which the dissonance emanates is the move from author to reader roles. I don’t believe artists should be constrained from operating under a descriptive understanding of fiction (as long as I do it honestly, it doesn’t matter what I choose to represent) by the possibility that a reader will come along and make a prescriptive reading of that author’s work.
- In the end, I have little doubt that this will become a negotiation of binary binaries. Meaning, authors must understand that the narratives they create will be read in some combination of descriptive and prescriptive modes and that their intentions will come from some combination of descriptive and prescriptive understandings, and readers must understand that the works they read will have some combination of descriptive and prescriptive intent and that their own reading will be influenced by a combination of prescriptive and descriptive understandings of literature.
(Oh, and quickly, how can a work operate prescriptively even without any prescriptive intent? By normalizing described behavior to some degree. In other words, if literature shows you what you already believe, you will believe it more strongly.)
How’s that for a definitive place to end? No wonder people find English majors so fucking annoying.
I try very hard to keep myself honest, to avoid the trap of continuing to believe something because I believe it.
Some words from Chekhov that set in motion my current internal-water-muddying:
That the world “swarms with male and female scum” is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect… But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself. Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth – unconditional and honest…
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.
I just read this very annoying essay by Francine Prose in which she tells us about her semester commuting to teach creative writing, occasionally dropping pronouncements on her class, rules which she would almost invariably find broken by a Chekhov story on the commute home – y’see, there are rules, but all rules can be broken if broken well, see the two sides, PROFOUND, huh? (This seems to be the house style of the essay collection, well-worded positions of compromise between oppositional pairs, and it gets more fucking annoying with each iteration.)
But, the passages from Chekhov’s letters that she included near the end of the piece got my juices goin’ a little. I felt an instinctive intellectual kinship with them right away.
So, the very brief class discussion on the essay ends up making a quick run at authorial responsibility and understandings of authorial intent. I’m totally wet. One fellow student points out that when she reads submissions for publication, if she can’t see for sure how a character’s racism or sexism or whatnot is being used, she pitches the submission without remorse. Another fellow student and I protest that view of fiction.
Then it goes here: In 1996, in Moses Lake, 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis opened fire on his algebra class, saying that he had planned the attack carefully and taken ideas from Rage by Steven King (under his Richard Bachman pen name). The student who brought this up said that King claimed, when asked, that he had no responsibility, and yet, this student said, he was obviously accountable. I disagreed, we called it a matter of opinion, and class ended.
I got on the road back to Seattle with various versions of “I’m not buyin’it” running through my head (would Loukaitis have been a normal well-adjusted kid without the book? were there no school shootings before this? what if Loukaitis had been reading a non-fiction account of a school shooting? then who is accountable?), but building up quickly to this one question I wished I had the time to ask – What are the implications? What does it mean to be a writer if her position was correct?
I started getting uppity in my mind. What, are we only to write nice stories and morality tales? Regardless of whether there is ugliness in the world, there can be no ugliness in our pages? I suppose we should believe literature has this grand prescriptive power and only write stories of the world as it should be?
And, it struck me right then. What if we did? What if regardless of the sordid state of the world, all the creators of narrative wrote the world as they thought it could be? Given the power of narrative I so often lobby for, could we not write a better world? Share nothing but positive narratives to the point that we only have positive narrative metaphors by which to understand the world, construct the world?
Of course, it couldn’t be an enforced thing, but even considering it as a conceptual possibility, this was a crisis of faith for me. Because, my stand that the author is not accountable to the impact of his work insomuch as we can’t even begin to figure anything like actual intent becomes very tenuous in light of the power of narrative and necessary role of art as propaganda ideas I’ve been throwing around.
So, I’ve been floundering about with this. If narrative has the power that I claim it does, must not those who tap this power be held accountable to their actions?
I haven’t entirely resolved this to my own satisfaction, but there are some things I think I know:
- While I do believe in the power of narrative in a very real way, especially when you start looking at the unconscious metaphorical models for constructing morality that cognitive science claims we have (I currently love Lakoff), I think any question of whether creators of narrative can write a better world comes down to whether you believe that the human being is essentially perfectible or essentially fallible. I lean toward the latter, though I’d call it essentially atavistic in a way that favors individual over social.
- Censorship, even by implication (you shouldn’t be writing that) is never cool. The greatest promise of the information age is its power to subvert censorship, as it is all built upon an understanding of the actual networks that support the superhighway, in which attempts to censor are read as network damage to be routed around. That being said, I have little but contempt for excess for its own sake. Fuck the stupid asshole who made The Doom Generation and Nowhere, fuck Oliver Stone, and fuck Bret Easton Ellis.
- I instinctively lean toward a descriptive function of literature and away from a prescriptive function, which I guess I already said in pointing out the resonance I felt with the Chekhov quotes (and, by the way, he was my favorite on Star Trek, with his badass borderline-redshirt self a one-man fuck-you to the Russkies – you WILL be assimilated, Reds!)
- I think the place from which the dissonance emanates is the move from author to reader roles. I don’t believe artists should be constrained from operating under a descriptive understanding of fiction (as long as I do it honestly, it doesn’t matter what I choose to represent) by the possibility that a reader will come along and make a prescriptive reading of that author’s work.
- In the end, I have little doubt that this will become a negotiation of binary binaries. Meaning, authors must understand that the narratives they create will be read in some combination of descriptive and prescriptive modes and that their intentions will come from some combination of descriptive and prescriptive understandings, and readers must understand that the works they read will have some combination of descriptive and prescriptive intent and that their own reading will be influenced by a combination of prescriptive and descriptive understandings of literature.
(Oh, and quickly, how can a work operate prescriptively even without any prescriptive intent? By normalizing described behavior to some degree. In other words, if literature shows you what you already believe, you will believe it more strongly.)
How’s that for a definitive place to end? No wonder people find English majors so fucking annoying.
posted by JJisafool at 7:54 PM
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