Posting

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clarification

i think i actually agree with almost everything alan says. maybe if i restate my objection another way, it will clear up this soil and tree business a bit. maybe not. i have no real problem with saying literature is art and pornography is not - i bring paglia up for the sake of argument, to point out that there are divergent views on this issue, et cet - nor do i have a problem saying that what leads to the emotional response at the end (or anywhere in the midst) of a story is essential to making literature art. the problem i have is with this idea that the way art and pornography work are exactly the opposite, as though there is a different operating system. this seems to me to be the same type of distinction you talk about between the soil and the tree, only worse, because - while i accept the notion that a pig brain (or a work of pornography) is less complicated than a human brain (or a work of art) - i accept (or i suspect, based on my limited understanding of biology) that they both function via synapses, dopamine, seratonin, et cetera. this is why i won't eat frogs' legs, and why mary gordon's comments make me a little uneasy.

but i don't know. i did say - at the outset - all that stuff about mary gordon's "over complication of art... putting it on a pedestal," so maybe i'm not so much clarifying my opinion as i'm altering it a bit, becoming more moderate in response to alan's comments. food for thought. but i still think there's something a bit prideful about this idea that we do not manipulate our readers in much the same way, and that this is somehow dangerous to the art itself, because it's condescending. artists are smart, i think, and they have to be smart, because art has to be smart, but if you go around writing like you're smart (and i don't mean you should write like a dummy, i mean you shouldn't talk down to the reader), writing with an attitude, like you think you're smarter than, say, regular people, because i worry that the compassion and the generosity will go out the window.

and while it's quite alright for literary artists to be elitists about literary art, it's another thing altogether to be elitist about one's own work; to say "my book changed someone's life, but that person was an ignoramus, who totally misunderstood my work."

which is what happened in gordon's essay.

that said, again, i liked the rest of the essay, and agreed in large part with much of what was said. mary gordon probably has plenty reason to take pride in her work. i'd like to read one of the novels; i read about it, but i didn't read it, so who knows? not me.

i beg forgiveness.

Allow Alan to Retort

Hello. This is Sam again, posting Alan's response to my comments on the Mary Gordon stuff. He sent the response to me, and asked me to post it. My understanding is that he was perhaps having some difficulty using the create/edit post function on the blog. So without further delay, I present his response to my thoughtless remarks.

Alan Says:

Hello sam. This is not a moral argument, but an argument in which I defend Gordon (helpless Gordon) and take a less egalitarian view of things. I am not responding to the Gordon thing, just your thing.

to say that ‘literature’ aims at some particular ‘response’ from the reader is right, but I don’t think most people will get what Beckett’s doing when Molloy’s sucking the sucking stones. Chabon’s argument seems apt here: literature is ‘entertainment.’ But what sort of ‘entertainment’ is it? it’s usually of a fairly intellectual sort, even the stuff that claims not to be. And even though literature in America is written in English, most people seem to think it’s written in a foreign language. Literature, story writing, poem, they’re all elitist things. And I’m not arguing that ‘truckers’ or ‘burger flippers’ can’t understand these things, they can, but most often they don’t care to because they don’t care to learn the language – this is not a problem of whether or not literary art is ‘better’ than porn or commercial fiction or genre fiction (there’s no such thing as ‘better’); it’s about the way these things are accessed and experienced by the ‘reader.’

Porn is a language we all get instinctively, truck driver or poet or both, whether it’s ‘art’ or not. And speaking of whether it’s art or not, it only becomes art or worthy of gender studies or political when one makes it so – but to do so creates a whole different language to view porn with and porn comes ready-made with a language of its own. typically, one can find what one wants to find in anything: searching for zen in this story? it’ll be there. on this, I think we agree.

Mainly, what I don’t like here is the distinction made between the idea of the writer aiming for a ‘response’ as implicitly different from what ‘leads’ to said response (ie, the response is ‘visceral,’ while what leads up may be complex and intellectual, etc). I don’t like this distinction because the move made is overly egalitarian: it allows porn and literature, usually strange bedfellows, to walk hand-in-hand. So that, literature, like porn, is essentially about the ‘response’ the writer aims to evoke. I don’t agree: what ‘leads’ to the ‘response’ is essential to it; the two are inextricably linked and cannot be taken apart. This is a problem with western thinking: that tree is separate and different from the ground and is beautiful by itself. But not really. The tree needs the ground, the soil, the dead stuff in there, the air, the rain, the sun. In fact, it’s not just a tree, though it’s convenient to label it as such; really it’s a manifestation of all this other stuff; each thing interdependent on each; thus, beauty deepens. Like in a story. So, to say that the ‘leading’ up is complicated, but the end ‘response’ is not, doesn’t work. Say you read an Anne Beattie story and read just the last sentence or paragraph. Nice words, but it doesn’t ‘break’ your heart. Then you read the whole thing and it does break your heart even though you know what’s going to happen – it’s about the journey. Genre fiction or porn, on the other hand, can be fast-forwarded (we’re using a VHS porn here) right to the end ‘scene’ and a person can get satisfaction. I don’t think people who want to look at porn accidentally turn it on at the end scene and think, “Damn, this is doing nothing for me – what happened beforehand, I wonder? Oh, he came to fix the cable. Yeah, that’s getting me hot. What else? He actually fixed the cable. Nice. Oh wait, and while he was fixing the cable this girl came out and she was really good lucking. Oh damn, damn. Now I’ve got it.” Again, from my perspective, it seems that people display very little imagination in their daily lives, so I see no reason to believe that most folks would want to put the imagination to work when the point of porn for most is to turn off, to watch; don’t invent except to think, “Yeah, that right there on that screen, that is definitely happening to me right now.” We want to avoid generalizations in our stories because we’re making art; unfortunately, art is usually more surprising, more interesting than ‘life.’ In the story, the honky reads Sartre; in ‘life,’ nah.

So, in my opinion, it’s not the ‘response’ that is important in story (though, it’s fun and tidy and necessary), but the journey through the words on the page (this, also, distinguishes ‘literary’ fiction from genre fiction; it’s about the fabric). Also, I think it difficult to use Faulkner, who wrote The Sound and the Fury, to say nothing of his other very difficult novels, as a writer who aims at an ‘uncomplicated’ ‘response’ from the reader, as though the response comes on the last very last page or something: bam, heart-broken.

Anyway, I’m not terribly interested in the moral implications of literature (I sort of am, but only in a very limited way). And I’m not saying that ‘porn’ doesn’t have a similar ‘journey’ aspect (I wonder if she wants it doggiestyle now? I bet she does.) and can’t be viewed as ‘art’ or ‘postmodern,’ but there are different types of consciousnesses and these consciousnesses get joy from pornography and from ‘serious literature’ in very different ways. And though the groups are not exclusive, it does take work, a little climbing (maybe up that pedestal) to get into one, where the other, well, admittance is free no matter how you want to view it.

mary gordon says

at the behest of my superiors, i am posting my formerly retracted concerns regarding the following quote from mary gordon's otherwise not-as-terrifyingly (insert adjective here - i'm thinking "papal") essay on moral fiction.

she says:

“Fiction that aspires to the condition of art must work in a way exactly opposite to the way pornography works. Pornography offers images to elicit a very direct and very predictable response: sexual stimulation resulting in orgasm. The pornographer knows his market, and knows to what use his product will be put. Fiction writers have no such luxury."

while i was otherwise quite pleased with the article (particularly as it dealt with moral complexity, role models, and john gardner's perhaps overly rigid stance on moral fiction), this bit of business seems wrong to me. i'm struck by the apparent oversimplification of pornography, the over-complication of literary art. maybe i'm nit-picking for the sake of argument. maybe i've taught too many sections of 102.

BUT:

it seems to me that gordon simplifies the line from viewing the picture in the magazine to having the orgasm by deleting masturbation, which would sort of be the equal of deleting the reader's imagination and participation in creating meaning in the text (visualizing the scenes, hearing the dialogue, et cetera). filling in the blanks. she also acts as if market for pornography is much less complicated and diverse than it probably is. i would imagine that the pornographer - much like gordon, when she had her oddball experience on the beach - runs into some surprises in his or (more often than i imagine we are led to believe) her audience.

does an anecdote of a racist/sexist woman mary gordon met on the beach provide enough compelling evidence to support her argument? by that rationale, would not a cache of pornography under dahmer's bed lead us to believe that a pornographer faces the same dilemma gordon faced in that instance, only on a much greater and more morally complex scale?

i'd like to think i strive to do something more sophisticated and more interesting than pornographers. but it's not exactly the opposite, anymore than writing a resume is exactly the opposite. i put words together in order to achieve an effect. it's just that what i do strives to be "serious literary art," and what they do strives to be pornography.

and the suggestion that this woman on the beach saying "that book changed my life" was something about "putting the book to (an unpredictable) use" (while pornographers know what use their work will be put to) makes me uncomfortable. i'm not sure pornographers count on being held up as examples of misogyny, and i certainly don’t think they count on having their work described as art: camille paglia, although routinely and dismissively labeled a “reactionary nut” by feminist scholars who disagree with her, is one feminist scholar, at least, who has actually described pornography as “art.” in any case, i hope i’m right in assuming that pornographers do not expect men to kill and rape because of their products, and i know i'm right when i say that - if someone does rape and murder after looking at pornography - it's not because of the pornography.

so i'm not sure that when one woman says "that book changed my life," it really means that she "put (gordon's) book to use."

what use, exactly? is gordon being a bit self-important, here? what is meant by "use." we know pornography is often "used" as visual stimuli for masturbation. it is also used to teach classes in gender theory. so as writers we should perhaps be sensitive to what words mean, and what they can mean.

i do not know that i agree with camille's assertion that pornography is art. it seems a bit far fetched, if only because, like gordon, paglia makes too broad a generalization. but i think it's disingenuous to suggest that literary artists are unlike pornographers because they don't try to elicit direct and predictable responses from their readers. they may not always be predictable to the readers, but the artist tries to predict them, at least to one degree or another, yes? to plan, to manipulate, to play puppet master. i mean, maybe not on the first draft, but on revisions, i often try to augment what seems to be there, in the hopes i will be able to "break the reader's heart." perhaps that's why my writing seems a bit stifled and wooden and dull at times. my failing, of course, but i don't think it's like hemingway and faulkner and camus had no idea how they wanted their readers to react. and, come to think of it, the reader does - it seems to me - go into literary work looking for something specific: "heartbreaking... funny and sad... tragic and beautiful... deeply moving..." these are all things that show up in the blurbs on the back of literary novels, especially the ones that win awards and/or sell. granted the response sought - by both reader and writer - may at times be more complicated than the response to pornography (what do the blurbs that advertise pornography say? not "heartbreaking," perhaps, but some equally trite and packaged bit of rhetoric, to be sure).

so, really, the response to literary art is not so much more complicated. especially not if it's successful, right? i mean, faulkner said "the human heart in conflict with itself," and i believe that, so i think that - intellectually and emotionally - there's often a great deal of complicated business that leads to the response we seek as literary artists. but the response itself - "the horror, the horror," - is often quite visceral, and often not much more complicated than orgasm. ideally, it's an almost - or, even better - an actual physical response. laughter, tears, a sinking or swelling of the heart.

and who knows what kind of fantasy a man or - let's be fair – woman is having when he or she is "using" pornography to masturbate? maybe he or she has a rich fantasy world, stocked with dialogue in the laundry room? in the garden? the back of the car? a wedding, a divorce, make up sex in the grass by a dirt road in soso mississippi.

is mary gordon suggesting that all people who look at pronography are truck drivers? that all truck drivers are simpletons? jerking off machines? with simple worlds? what about people who watch the qvc channel? what generalizations can we make about them?

aren't these generalizations that we, as "literary artists," should avoid?

so the audience issue is a troubling one for me. because i think it's safe to say that a tour of the tables at awp can offer us a pretty good view of our own market, as can a look at awp chronicle, or even a glance at the slick mags (new yorker, atlantic, harper's, esquire), and some of the titles on the bestseller list (though perhaps less often), and the prize winners and nominees, the list of new york times notable books, et cetera.

is it a more complicated market? we don’t know, because the market for pornography is WAY further out on the margins (not in terms of the money it makes, but in terms of whether or not the people who buy it want to show their faces in public as buyers of pornography).

finally, it strikes me as odd that gordon begins her essay by pointing out that literary work is "on the margins." it seems a bit contradictory (and perhaps - i don't know - i want to say arrogant, or maybe just "dim") to procede from point a ("we're on the margins") to point b: "we don't have the luxury of knowing our market." it's like saying "my readers are generally the kind of people who read literary work," then saying, "i don't have the luxury of knowing who my readers are." culinary translation would be: "our customers like sauteed chicken with dill, but we can't count on them to eat poultry." fashion equivalent: "our customers shop at banana republic, but we don't really know whether or not they're looking for the type of clothing we sell at banana republic." huh?

Updates & Glave

Now all can feed these comments by clicking on widget to your right (or above right). Then any new comments will automatically be sent to you.

Also, for those who might not have received a copy, Glave's "Whose Song?" story can be linked to in the list of texts in right sidebar.

Glave Doubts

So if nobody's jumping on the Glave piece can I assume something? We love it but . . . . We hate it but . . . . Too cool for school? What? It's a screed, yes, gay screed, in preference of soft love, or soft "love," via the attack on heterosexual terror in the multiple rape deal, which is, how should I say, an easy target?, but, at the same time, giving us the opportunity to co-opt all that street talk, to wander in the avenues, so to speak, and pleasure ourselves with our endurance and our liberal reading policies, set up by the comfortable lesbian front end, which absolves us for any satisfaction taken? But were there satisfactions and what were they? And all those author questions--clearly Glave is not a street person so this isn't (that newfound genre) "street lit," rather a mockery of? Character? Any present? Sociology only? An instruction manual or ridicule of black heterosexuality by arch enemy Glave? Is this art or is this something else, and if so, what? Jump up and be heard. I call you out! Beth (supplier of the drug) first, perhaps.

"Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people's property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil)."

--from How to write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina

P.S. If you haven't read this funny Africa piece or the Mary Gordon piece listed at right, youse ought. Also the other interesting items listed there. Good stuff.

Evil hoards and stuff

Okay, let me preface this whatever-it-will-become post with my earliest ideas on the subject. My first thoughts when the larger question of villainous/evil/pedophilian fiction came up went to Lolita, a novel I still haven't read though I have seen two film versions. Part of me wants to say that James Mason (and later Cary Elwes) delivered such a captivating, torn performance that of course the end product may be justified as art. But that makes me think of what Rick said in class, about is this child pornography masquerading as art?, and I am not so sure. I mean, Sam's story about going home to the girlfriend's house where she keeps up a physical relationship with the wheelchaired stepfather who molested her as a child could be argued by some people to be in support of, or making allowances for the proliferation of child sexual abuse. But then there will always be those "some people" who try to make an argument for whatever agenda they support, using whatever forum or form they find most accessible. While I would consider Sam's story to be powerful in that it lets the narrator be flea-dipped into the extreme world of his female friend as he gains new perspective on the processes that molded her personality: "No, you're not like your mother at all" or however it is put, there could just as easily, perhaps, be a proponent of stepfather-to-stepdaughter incest who would point to this story as an instance of true human love, and it might be hard to disprove that claim, even if one was to protest that the female character was overcoming her mother's unending lack of charity with an ironic act of physical and spiritual self-sacrifice, or however her act might be described. And those wonderings got me to remember the insistance of generalized feminist theory which says, "Everything is political," which would mean that everything written (and conversely, everything read), is some kind of political statement (or act). And it is at around this point where things get cloudier for me, because as I remember, when I got into this being an artist thing, being political was what I did not want to do, and then I remember that when I started getting almost decent in the composition game I drafted a resolution to disassemble the student government at my school because they were forcing us to pay class dues to pay for the school dance (10th grade?). So, I don't know. If everything is political, even being apolitical is political, and I don't know where to go from there. The bottom line is somewhere around "I am not going to write to please anyone but myself." I mean, I can't write to please my grandparents, or my step-grandparents, who once said when I was in film school, "We can't wait for you to go out to Hollywood and make some quality, wholesome movies that we can all watch" (or something to that effect). And I don't know where the moral compass is going to take me. But I won't alienate the dirty, evil multitudes inside me just to please the chuchgoer in my family. As an artist, I cannot whitewash the messy ugliness that is just as much a part of my humanity as the rest. Maybe I can filter out the meanest bits of evil, to get to the balance we are looking for. But I can't write a story about happiness and puppy dogs and flowers without some hurt or want thrown in. Who can? And who would read that?
Oh yeah, I also thought of the Bill Shakespeare quote, "There is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." That was part of the troubesome tip I was chewing on. I don't mean to sound like I am trumpeting the right to be heard for evil hoards, but I kind of am. But evil hoards all the time is just as boring after a while as happy sunshines all the time, so what do you do? Give it a name. All you can ask of yourself is that you did your best.

A couple of ideas. First, the idea that the story requires some "balance" now seems to me a kind of goofy idea. Where'd I get that idea? I repudiate myself and that goofy idea. Having said that, I wish to re-assert that the successful story requires . . . balance. Forget it. Nonsense. Dopey idea. On the other hand . . . well, I worry that the simple challenge to some assumed-shared system of values constitutes an enrichment of our reading. I regret that reading seems to operate on the idea that any violation of norms, any norms, accepted norms, presumed norms, makes the text exciting and dangerous. Yet this seems to be so. We lap it up. We drink its milkshake. What is wrong with us? We must navigate between the deadly dull and the foolishly interesting. More on this as time permits.

P.S. If you have not yet read the entire three million words of Erroll Morris's NYT piece, in three parts, and including all responses, please do so at your earliest. [link to article here]

Hansen and Wainaina

Two very relevant pieces on this discussion:

• "How to write about Africa," by Binyavanga Wainaina (from Granta)
• "The Ethics of Fiction Writing," by Ron Hansen
  

i was perhaps speaking idealistically

of what the story would do, ideally. what i thought it was/should be going for.

Sam sez " wasn't really thinking, at the end, "what an asshole." i wasn't thinking "go cowboy," by any means, but i was thinking he was horribly misguided, or way off track, and just wrong on so many levels that it was mind-blowing, yet i'd been more or less sympathizing with him right up along,"

But I'm thinking the root difficulty is that we're not thinking of him at all, we're paying attention to this literary text with various qualities (certain voice, certain cultural and personal attitudes, certain positioning of a "main character," questions of accuracy of Africa depiction, percentage of fantasy, percentage of wish-fulfillment, etc., insertion of "major dramatic action" there at the end). In short, are we too aware of the artifice to experience anything but the artifice?

re bowling

would be that much more interesting if person brother murdered or raped was someone you yourself hated (in case of murder) or lusted after (in case of rape).

complicity, fairness, bowling, and the rape of africa

i'm thinking the rape is an asset to travis's story, for a couple reasons. (i think; there might be one or two others as i try to explain this). first is that if character has not enough sense to see what he's doing, then perhaps that is human frailty that is interesting to reader, particularly as we've sort of been able to relate to him right up until it happens. so we're sort of complicit, as rick points out.



further, our fascination with the horror of act itself makes us complicit. this worth noting on individual level (shame on us, as individuals), as well as on political level, (shame on The West), and on a larger level (shame on humanity). but also maybe there is some compassion for this guy? like, i wasn't really thinking, at the end, "what an asshole." i wasn't thinking "go cowboy," by any means, but i was thinking he was horribly misguided, or way off track, and just wrong on so many levels that it was mind-blowing, yet i'd been more or less sympathizing with him right up along, so it seemed a nicely done bit of business. though i thought it could have been done better, more self aware, in the ways i mentioned in class. what i'm imagining here is if you could produce an experience for the reader that was like maybe your son or your best friend or your brother got arrested for rape or murder. what would that feel like? i mean, you'd still love them, right? but you'd sort of hate them, too, and maybe - this being the key to what makes it interesting for the story - you'd feel weird about yourself, because you'd be thinking, "geez, i hope they don't give him the death penalty or lock him up for life. we were supposed to go bowling thursday night."

so that in effect, this IS the "fairness" that we're going for. which i think is a much richer and more interesting experience for the reader - or at least a much more challenging one - than looking at the painting of the sunset on the motel room wall. i'm thinking it makes the whole notion of PURE EVIL (in red letters) sort of suspect, which is in itself a certain kind of moral gesture, in that it's compassionate (we pity rather than hate or fear the devil).

i guess i'm thinking that fiction must be "good/fair," but that means being fair with people my mother would perhaps not want me to be fair with.

Go Cowboy!

all fascinating stuff, in all msgs. but what i'm beginning to wonder is how we got to "evil" as topic, how we went from a question about "balance" in story making, to a question about PURE EVIL (in red) in fiction? while we might want eventually to get out to PURE EVIL, isn't it more likely we're intrigued by the more supple stuff of making a story that feels equitable,that is, it's fairness, interpreted generally, accounts for some or all of its value to reader. and, as corollary, deviation from that "fairness"produces dissatisfaction?

On a large scale take Travis's last story. Issues with the story seemed to center not only around the literal rape but first around the authorial use of Africa as itself a kind of rape, a tasty meal tarted up with tiny,misshapen bananas [OK]. The actual rape in the story raised a second question about the character, which was something along the lines of Go,Cowboy!, or Who's he (character, then author) kidding?, and thus called the question: Is the story mortally wounded by centering on this character who hasn't enough sense (or restraint) to recognize (alcohol or no) that Amy's rape is not a solution, but a rationalized excuse for his own pleasure taking (see Ryan's prior remarks in this area). Or, as Travis himself has written viz the Heath Ledger deal, "When are you making art and when are you just being an asshole?"

and we as readers are key parts of the problem, because we enjoy the horror of the rape, I think. We want the rape in Travis's story because it's big and dramatic, the victim is relatively "pure" (making the rape more exciting), the rape is wrong-headed but sense-making (in the sense that we can readily construct its explanation), etc. etc., so we're "allowed" to have it as readers, and we take the pleasure as offered. We are complicit,in other words.

So, does "fairness" even come into play when we're getting satisfied by the rape at the end of the story? Or (But?) are we thrilled exactly by the unfairness? This works against original thesis, saying that unfairness,gotten away with by sleight of hand, is a richer pleasure. Or maybe that's just a trick, too? A kind of easy "turn it on its head" deal that produces the quick buzz?

Setting that aside (while waiting for the msgs to come in about the Thomas Glave story we passed out today), go back to the original question: In a story with no large scale wrongdoing, are you interested in "balance" or overall "fairness" in treatment of character and subject, where balance &fairness are taken to mean something about the composite effect of the story being either non-nihilist or post-nihilist (i.e., there are reasons for doing things that are not rooted in whether or not existence has objective meaning)?

Or, in short, must we write "good" stories? And add to all the possible responses to that, the old (but new again, perhaps, mindful of Glave, for example) idea why is there a hierarchy of "quality" in art, why is deKooning better than John Doe, the motel moon-over-beach-art guy? Seems as soon as you accept the idea that some writing is better than other writing, you've got a problem that requires a fairly serious effort to evaluate all writing.

[originally posted by Rick]

Heath Ledger

Strangely Timely:

Everyone should check out this link. Esquire has, by commissioning and publishing a new piece of fiction about deceased actor Heath Ledger, stepped into the very mire we have been discussing, which could be superficially summed up as a question of: When are you making art and when are you just being an asshole?

Link again: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/books/06esqu.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[originally posted by Travis]

The creation of a false personality

In response to, and borrowing from, those much more intelligent than I...

At the heart of the matter seems to first discovering exactly what makes one a villain. Chekhov, which Elizabeth and Sam have already pointed out, deals not with bigotted gang-raping serial killers but ordinary people with sinful flaws.

Frank O' Connor, talks about the creation of a false personality (using Chekhov as an example) and examines which acts make one evil. "We are not damned for our mortal sins, which so often require courage and dignity, but by our venial sins, which we can more easily conceal from ourselves and commit a hundred times a day till we become enslaved to them as could be to alcohol and drugs. Because of them and our facile toleration of them we create a false personality for ourselves - a personality predicated on mortal sins we have refrained from committing,ignoring altogether our real personality which is created about the small, unrecognized sins of selfishness, bad temper, untruthfullness, and disloyalty" (The Lonely Voice, 87-88).

He uses "The Duel" as an example of how a characterwho believes they are righteous because they have notdone anything atrocious (genocide, rape,etc.). "Interms of Christian ethics Laevsky is incapable ofcommitting a mortal sin, but the venial sins hecommits all the time are infinitely more destructivethan any mortal sin could be because he can suppressthem from his conscious mind and go on believinghimself to be a man of honor, a cultured man, aliberal, and a humanitarian, while in reality he isnot even a decent human being" (92).

I think a larger issue becomes whether violence itself may be fully justified. Travis's story, for example,uses the final act and the build-up in some ways to try and explain the rape. The rape functions as a commentary on US/Africa diplomacy and in terms of the actual plot, the reader can understand at least on some level why this character is willing to commit this act. After reconsidering previous comments to the contrary I think this is the ending the story needs to have because it jerks the reader and also provides a violence consistent with what the story demands.

In William T. Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down:Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means,he tries to explain perspectives, allegiance, and sympathy for violence. "The ultimate position of Rising Up and Rising Down is that moral values can be treated as absolutes in some respects, as relative quantities in others. I believe that every violent act refers itself back to some more or less rational explanation. To the extent that explanations are irrational, they can be quickly disposed of. To the extent that they are rational, they do enjoy the possibility of absolute status, provided that ends,means and the intellectual-moral logic in between have all been correctly assembled"

He goes on to explain: "On the other hand, any violent act may be supported by one plausibly absolute construction of justifications - for example, defense of homeland, with all the attendent logic just referred to - and invalidated by another, say defense of authority. One of the many tragic cases of this disjunction is the civil war which ruined Yugoslavia.Authority's federalism, which just happens to have a Serbian flavor, mobilizes its defensive violence against Croatian defense of ethnicity and localism.Here is where the relativism comes in.In short you have the right to make up your own mind as to whose cause was more just, that of Croatia or that of Yugoslavia."

All villains obstensibly have motivations which make them interesting. Iago wants Othello dead. Tony Montana wants to rule over Miami and so forth. The problem comes in when some action is done outside these general goals. Why smash an old rival over the head with a bowling pin when it seems that you have in fact already drank their milkshake?

It seems to me there are always justifications to do wrong. If the reader cannot understand them, then it becomes a fault of the writing. The villain has to be understood on some levels or they lose what makes them interesting. Writing about random or unconnected acts of violence becomes distracting, tiresome, and boring after a while, no matter how grandly conceived.

[originally posted by Ryan Davidson]

use real people and real life?

I'm not sure you MISSED the mark, Travis, with the rape gesture at the end of the story. I mean, I'm not sure it was misread, or that it didn't come off the way you meant it to. I think we got the idea that he thought he was saving her, that there was this haze of alcohol, and that she in no way needed saving, as she seemed like a strong person throughout the text.

I think what happened was just that we also read this other layer of meaning into it, related not only to that implication of those who thinks she need saving (and the condescencion or misunderstanding of the real situation in that), but also of the sort of narcissism or exploitation inherent in the act.

so i think you achieved EXACTLY what you set out to achieve, but that there was ALSO this other thing happening, a byproduct which added a richness to the text that we may have been paying more attention to.

maybe i'm off my rocker, though.

and, like you, i'm also interested in the question about to what extent we can use real people and real life, and when that becomes exploitation. i've gotten to the point where i'm a little hesitant to send out the story i wrote that was set in africa, anymore. i mean, i got an encouraging letter from zoetrope (they said it was"convincing"), which made me think i should keep trying to get it published, and ultimately the thing is very critical of how americans and the west in general regard africa, treats africans, et cet, but there's stuff about rwanda in there, and congolese refugees, that i just feel icky about. sometimes i'm not sure if it's like the story is interesting and entertaining as an art object and has something to say about the world that's important or interesting, or if it's just that sam's getting his kicks, jerking off and trying to make a buck or a name off the fact that he spent four or five weeks in this place where a lot of really desperate people wound up after their families had been butchered.

so go figure. i dunno.

[originally posted by Sam Ruddick]

a morality that might apply to all art

Am not sure if this is relevant, but, for what it is worth i wanted to say why i as a writer put that rape scene in the last story. originally, and for a few weeks, up until right at the end of drafting, evereything was the same except i had the young man killing the king and being repudiated (rightly, i think) by the Amy for this. then someone (a woman) had the idea that this was too far outside of the main thrust of the story, because the reason the guy was doing this was to "save Amy" in a way--a character who in no way needs saving. the idea then was for him to commit his courageous act in a no way moral manner (thus the haze of alcohol). and, or so the idea went, the rape was also supposed to in a very Ellis way implicate others who might feel saving is what Amy might have needed. She didn't (or I don't think she did).

My point: these were the intentions, but they were not clear enough in the draft to be effective on a broad level (and i guess I sort of knew this). And, more importantly, they bring up the idea of ficitonal morality--or, better, I think, a morality that might apply to all art. I am confused/worried/and fascinated by this. Where would this lie?

I can't help but--in all these sorts of conversations--think back to that other Daniel Day Lewis movie written by his wife Rebecca Miller called "the ballad of jack and rose." it wasn't an excellent film, but really good. it was about environmentalism and communes and incest--the whole works. Lewis, the environmentalist who began a commune 20 or so years earlier, is sick with cancer and frustrated by the end of the movie and goes to a commercial developer's home (our antagonist, up to this point), and comes eventually to this idea (saying this to the developer): "The only difference between you and me is that you like those cookie-cutter suburban houses and i fucking hate them." He thinks, suddenly, that it is all about taste. That morality, to unpack this a little bit, more than a little is built upon aesthetics. Not sure that I agree (I still recycle, reuse as much as I can, carpool, etc), but it sure gave me something to think about when I heard him say it.

Also, and a bit off subject maybe, I was wondering about the border of the real in fiction--such as, how much can you use real world signifiers in a ficitonal story before you are doing something amoral or wrong? Fiction doesn't, of course, give free liscence to this. I am thinking not just about my story, but about another writer recently who published a story online with a real person's name in it. The real person became pissed and asked the writer to change it. The writer, who is a nice guy and good writer, did change it. About half of the stuff in my story (certainly the stuff about King Mswati III) is made up. But I felt, at the time, that it was fine somehow because it was ficiton and because he (and Swazi) are famous/well-known, and sort of signifiers themselves. I mean you can write fictional things about President Bush and get them published in the New Yorker. The line probably comes back to what Elizabeth said about generosity, which I think has something to do with manners or something. Which, though not exactly interesting to me for art (meaning, polite), does seem to hit the nail on the head.

[originally posted by Travis]

ZOMBIE

I think, and I've noticed that the past two e-mails are just between you and I, so I may have screwed up and hit the wrong reply button, so if you can figure out how to send this thread to everyone and you want to, then by all means do, but what I think is that this whole idea of compassion is key. That the reader has to have some compassion for the character. So that if you want to write a story where you follow Hitler around all day, you don't neccessarily have to make me like what Hitler is doing, and you as writer don't need the story to tacitly approve of Hitler, per se, but you need to show his velnerability, or something, so that the monster is frail, et cet.

There's a Joyce Carol Oates book called ZOMBIE. I'm not crazy about JCO, because it seems to me that she's a little too enthralled by writing about disfunction: like, we don't need a real character,because I've chosen a name - Shelly - and Shelly is an alcoholic rape victim with ovular cancer, alcoholic, rape victim, and ovular cancer,doing the work of characterization, and then for the plot, well, let's say she's going to her estranged father's funeral (her father, no doubt, being the guy who raped her) so that the story is more interested in disfunction than in people. However, this book ZOMBIE was about a sort of Dahmer like 19/20 yr. old man. He wanted to abduct a 14 yr. old boy and lobotomize him to create a sex slave. It was in 1st person. For a while it was good, I thought. I mean, it exposed the psychos velnerability, and it was sort of tender and also horrifying.

But ultimately it got boring, and then it became pointless, because nothing changed, nothing was learned, et cet, so it was just 200 pages of JCO up to her old tricks, ogling at disfunction. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. It just means JCO overdid it and came up short. I had the feeling that if the thing had been about half as long and had ended with the kid's arrest and confinement, or with him actually getting the sex slave and being utterly disappointed, the effect would have been altogether different.

[originally posted by Sam Ruddick]