Discussion → Art and Responsibility
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i'm w/ Gabe: Roxane's point is important.
what else to say?
quick thought about satire in fiction: satire's kind of out, out enough that the houses that publish the people who write it try to avoid the word..... Why? i guess from the writer's standpoint: satire is not art; satire is argument. That would be the prejudice (and i have to admit, it's one that i'm not entirely free of....)
But when you think of the great satirical novels (Waugh's The Loved One is one of my all-time favorites), they're not really arguments: there's nothing overly deliberate or premeditated in their approach to their subject matter.... Relevance, as i see it, does nothing to undercut the art......
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If I sense, for a blink, that a writer wants to teach me, I stop reading. Lessons--civic, international, socio-cultural--are usually just the writer venting. Dramatized essays. In my view,a waste of time, as every artistic decision a writer makes is political, especially, I think, abstaining from the temptation to "be" political, in form or content.
As an example, (a playwright to be safe), the early/middle Pinter is powerful and instructive as he angles on aspects of covert coercion menace and interrogation in everyday language and relationships. Late Pinter is insufferable, I find, and even retro-damages his early work. Was he actually saying, all along, such obvious things as "torture is bad"? Powerful people should be nice to weak people?
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You don't sit down and say you are going to create art. You either do or you don't.You write. It is what it is. That's not what anyone is saying here. It all gets so serious and silly so very quickly doesn't it?I very much liked Barry Graham's answer because it is correct--it's just not the whole picture.But it's still the truth.Writing and art may not be the same thing but they can be. So should the writer feel any kind of social responsibility? No, Not unless he actually does. It's pretty simple isn't it? You can if you want and you don't have to if you don't want to, but if your reader feels it and sees it anyway in your work you're unlikely to shut them up. I also heartily agree with Roxane that writers shouldn't be expected to carry a flag for disenfranchised groups. It isn't fair. But,again, that's not really what we are talking about here, is it?You at least have the responsibility to yourself to be real, who you are, and to create out of an honest desire to do so--for whatever reasons--your reasons are your own. No one is asking you to join an army.Katrina also nailed it right on. You are involved in living every moment and it has to seep in to what you do. That doesn't mean you are in some way obligated to group think.I like the very passionate responses everyone's given this question--it's fun and interesting to read--and not just a little thought-provoking.
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I gotta go with Barry.
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"You know, perhaps Barry said it best."
hey ben, do you think you could frame that quote for me so i can bring it in to my students. they must think im some sort of nutjob.
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“The love of the orange is political too.” ~ Helene Cixous.
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Blake Butler just posted a link to this interesting article. I think it speaks well to this discussion:
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Barry, message me your mailing address. We can call it even for you putting up one my stories in May.
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Ethel:
A great article. Thanks.
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late pinter WAS insufferable--the whole award at the end of his life thing was insufferable.
satire: my friend tom boyle keeps at it, selling galore, not a one of his books out of print. and, among the other dime store practioners, there is carl hiaasen, whose formula fiction has plenty of satire. both prefer the environmental, but both satirize, though they might be not be called satirists with the first label you'd want to throw.
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This Jim Shephard blog post at Electric Literature's The Oulet speaks to the issue:
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John, I like your understanding of literary postmodernism. I wonder whether it comes to two kinds of impulse or two kinds of writer. I know I go both ways in writing:
"So that I see two kinds of postmodernism. The first, the more common usage, are the writers who follow a nonrealistic tradition and emphasize the "play" of language, so that there is self-consciousness, gamesmanship, and/or metafiction. Then there are those who write realistic stories, but who live in a postmodern world (we all do) so the product is necessarily postmodern."
I wrote a short story in April 1990 (before I moved to Houston) called "My Crush on Daniel Ortega." One sentence in the story (also a paragraph) reads: "Politics kills romance." I still think about it: when is "politics" singular, when plural?
I remember the charmed atmosphere in my study while I wrote that story Tuesdays, my day off from working as wire editor at the regional newspaper. Writing it scarred or marked me in ways I won't know. I was proud of it aesthetically and formally but reticent about sending it. Even before the story was published, the title may have biased committees at state schools and community colleges looking at my c.v. The story is inductive. I wrote it unconsciously, before Alexander Cockburn's book, White-Out, drew the connection between exiled Honduran drug cartels and the Nicaraguan contras.
Washington Review published the story in 1998, when Ortega ran again for office. Heather Fuller, the editor and a wonderful poet, accepted it, even paid me for it. I was glad that the story was freely available in an art tabloid in the nation's capitol.
A couple years later something mysterious happened. Strangers to the Review appeared in the offices one day to take over the publication. The strangers took down from the internet the Journal's 20-year archive. The Journal was erased. Certain D.C. poets worked to save valuable back issues at a different website.
I like D.P.'s insistence that "responsibility" need not limit liberty; it may protect it.
I took it as a kind of responsibility in 1990 to include cocaine and other drugs within a short story rather than to leave them out, not because I was using drugs myself (I drank beer), but because drugs were in the environment: natural, social, political, commercial, and legal.
To include news articles as material within short stories transforms them, perhaps elevates their importance, at the level of "art."
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