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]

how to be generous?

I like these examples and I remember the ending of Sam's story - I remember hearing that one at Cafenighta while back. The things is - the people in that story are not villians or the kind of villians Rick is talking about, at least not to my mind, right? The incest is in there, sure, but the character all this has happened to is not powerless - she's not a six year oldgirl who has no clue what's happening to her - she's a grown woman who's dealt with her life in the way that everybody has to.And through this event all the people involved do find some kind of mercy - the whole thing is generous. It's not probing incest becauseoh yeah incest is interesting, moral ambiguity is interesting. And it's not telling a story with characters who are not generous.Maybe it's a story about characters who remember how to be generous? I don't know what else to say about it yet.

[originally posted by Elizabeth Wagner]

the formal gesture

I think what I was aiming for was not only the formal gesture ("I Stand Alone"), where the camera does the work of sort of "making it okay" by me that this thing has happened, but the (perhaps)intellectual gesture that shows up in literary fiction from time to time, in which our established notions of morality are questioned. I used the example of one of my own stories because I couldn't think of another one of the top of my head, but it's not like I invented this,and generally speaking I don't do it as well as I wish I could do it,but - by and large - it seems to be the "gesture" that I gravitate toward.

The one example is the story in Product, where this woman gives her elderly stepfather (who'd molested her when she was a child) a hand job. He's all crippled and helpless on the bed, and he's lost control of his bowels, and it's all sort of gross, and on top of that there's the incest business that is generally considered morally repugnant, and what I was attempting to do was frame the hand job as an act of mercy, the idea being that reader will say, "oh, that was sweet of her." And like her better now, rather than saying "hey, that's incest, and incest, as well all know, is bad."
Rick was the one - incidentally - who suggested this ending, four years ago.

So I'm trying to think back on novels I've read, and the easiest one I can come up with makes me feel a little queasy, because - while I really enjoyed it at fourteen - I suspect I would find it a bit maudlin or sentimental, or something, now, and that's "Of Mice and Men," where - and as I said it was over twenty years ago I read it, so I may have read wrong - I was left to wonder whether I was looking at a mercy killing or at George making his own life a lot easier or both.
Another obvious example is "Beloved," where the act of killing your children has some moral ambiguity (seen as it is as an attempt to rescue them from slavery). Of course, I don't think the novel ever really says that killing the children was okay, exactly, but it does follow this character around - this woman who killed her children -with a great deal of compassion. So that perhaps be another example.

Trouble is the book is dull as dirt.

Chekhov does this business, too, though. In a story called "About Love," in "Lady with a Little Dog," adulterous affairs are the "trueloves," and marriage is treated as a stifling social institution that's in the way.

Anyone have better examples?

[originally posted by Sam Ruddick]

vil-lian

Following on this, I also want to drop the heat down some and talk about stories where the main character is not a "nice person," or a decent, kind, generous, etc. person. In other words, can we make stories in which the main players are not really evil, but seriously flawed, or even slightly flawed. The answer is "Of course we can," but what I'm wondering is what are the advantages and disadvantages presuming that there is some imperative to make stories that are themselves life-affirming or some such shite. What might the purpose of making a story where the main character is a jerk, a self-satisfied, opinionated, self-serving, bad guy? I guess the question I trying to pull back to is even if you grant that there might be little purpose in writing a story that glorifies some heinous act, imagining that such could be done, and imagining also that it could be done without the readership providing an automatic correction in the process of reading, at what point does the main character's flaw become acceptable collateral damage given some other overall story of which this character might be the main but not the only element?

I want to have the discussion deal also with ordinary bad behavior as well as the grotesque bad behavior, to see what we think it's virtues are in primary characters. There Will Be Blood can be used in this discussion, but I'd like to do the guy/woman next door, too. And as primary as well as secondary character or villain.

vil-lain (vil'uhn) n.
1. a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel.
2. a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot.
3. VILLEIN.
[1275-1325; ME vilein, vilain < MF < LL villanus a farm servant. See VILLA, - AN 1]

[originally posted by Rick]

a story of unrelieved evil

I don't know that I've ever read a story of unrelieved evil, unless it was just terribly written and thoughtless (which in my mind is pretty close to evil). I've actually been trying to think of such a novel or story to bring into this discussion, but am drawing a blank. When it comes to "rape stories" and the like, I have to go with Elizabeth--why is it in there? Is it just because rape is horrible and we all want to horrify? Do big terrible things happening in stories make them worth reading? I really don't think so. But big terrible things happen all the time, and I think writers should be able to write about them without morality or whatever secular term we've agreed upon being our main concern. I don't know if it's our job to supply morality, but to provide the reader with something to allow her question her own morality, and what morality, good/evil, etc., is. I like Sam's thoughts here about subverting what we think of as morality or a "happy ending."

I guess what interests me--what I was hoping to get at in my story from a couple of weeks ago, and what I think is all over Travis' story this week--is how rape (murder, pedophilia, insert other horrific thing here) affects a person, how he or she and his/her family, friends, lovers, etc., react to it. Not just the victim, either, but the person committing whatever act. And the reader. And what circumstances brought the event about. Thomas Glave has a story which follows a group of men through the process of gang raping a woman--we get all of these guys' thoughts previous to, during, and after the act, but the story ends in the woman's point of view, with her singing. It's haunting. What's interesting about it is that the reader leaves the piece horrified, but not so much at the rape itself (which is graphic and quite horrifying in itself)--rather, we're horrified (please don't let me use this word again) at these guys thinking that raping someone is going to solve anything or change their lives in any way. There's more to it than that, but it's heartbreaking because of the futility of it. I'm not interested in reading a story "about" rape, or murder, or sick things happening to children or animals or old folks. And if that's all there is, it isn't worth it. I don't think there's much of anything redeeming in a story that glorifies pain. But I'll pretty much read anything that gives me some sort of genuine view of people in the thick of pain. That's all I've got for now, but I'm enjoying the conversation so far. I can bring the Glave story to class next time if anyone's interested.

[originally posted by Beth Couture]

a small rectangular object, covered with fur

I'd be looking, too, for materials writting ABOUT this issue, starting with something of Gardner's, and distantly prior remarks on the job of literary art--what is we imagine we are doing? a small rectangular object, covered with fur, that breaks our hearts. Don had it as something like that (can't remember the exact quote), which would seem to suggest that morality, or even generosity, is not at issue, but rather at issue is the response, the effect.

But Elizabeth writes:

"about the question you emailed us all tonight. I agree we can't call it moral – I think maybe it's right to call it generous, a generosity of spirit with which we investigate the humanness of our characters, which of course must involve acknowledging that people fuck up, forgiveness is the purpose of incarnation, etc.etc.etc. And I think that I don't want to read about assholes being assholes. I think that's stupid and boring and a waste of time. And isn't some of it simply failure and lack of emotional imagination? . . . In all these rape stories (and part of it is simply that there seems to be a lot of them these days), the question to me is why is it in there? Because something "large" had to happen? Is the gravity of the experience for all parties involved appreciated or understood and made clear to the reader– no. Real bad behavior can perhaps be interesting when the reader can actually feel and be made to understand the risk of it and the loss, as well as maybe the pleasure of it or whatever it is that allows it – whatever goes missing in there. The complicatedness. It can't just be this well written thing that happens, no matter that it's horrifying (because then you get the feeling from the writer that it is about power, some weird videogame or something)."

and Sam writes:

" was thinking today about the ending of that story i wrote called"pigtails," and i mention it in my dissertation introduction, becausewhat it does is use a pedophilia fantasy to supply a happy ending.like, he has the fantasy, tells his girlfriend about it, she puts herhair in pigtails, and they live happily ever after. i'm thinking alsoof the end of "i stand alone," the happy ending there. i have a storywhere the happy ending is that an eight year old kid starts drinking.and the one in product, where the woman gives her step father a handjob. are we talking about fiction that toys with and inverts notionsof morality? work that takes things we would regard as ugly and makesthem lovely or kind in context? is this the kind of material youwant?

"i mean, not mine, obviously, but essays and fiction that deal withthis sort of business?"

And I write:

I mean, it's clear that Ellis is intentionally fouling everything he can, that is, that his forcing forward of immorality is a send up, a "treatment" of immorality that hopes to indict our culture by the (rather simple) expedient of turning up the volume on all the grotesque business that, in one form or another, at one volume or another, permeates that culture. This is what I was talking about in the orig note where I said "see the story as an "interesting" gesture against a backdrop of an assumed-shared "balanced" world view." I don't know the Samuel Delany book Ryan writes about:

But from the description sounds like it is similar in attack--shock us, or bring us to our senses, or similar, always set against the pre-existing (in our imaginations) version of a "decent" reality.

Which somehow leads back to Elizabeth's "a generosity of spirit with which we investigate the humanness of our characters," which posits implicitly that humans are (or want to be) generous, or aspire to generosity, or (and here's the rub) ought to aspire to generosity.

But maybe the question falls to the assumption that if the story is unrelieved evil, we the readers will supply the "good" to offset that evil and thus balance the experience.

But back to the "I Stand Alone" movie--which maybe we ought to watch in class?--which has no redeeming action, but which offers, as Sam says, "a happy ending" anyway, which as a formal act or art gesture is interesting because it suggests that the formal act can override the content of the story which it serves--a twisted idea but which is somehow thrilling.

More on this as news arrives.

[originally posted by Rick]

The Usual Suspect

[My first thoughts.]

The usual suspect:

• American Psycho, by Bret Easton EllisThis book is tough to get through because of how much

Ellis depicts the graphic nature of its subject--so much that the reader (and I assume writer) must question themselves, how much am I implicating myself in/endorsing the violence that the book is representing? Shit, we could book club it, everyone read for next class (most probably already have). I actually really like this idea, but maybe this isn't the class for it. And, Ellis isn't endorsing anything in the book; it's actually a very moral tale--but, due to how it is written, it still very much applies to this discussion.

There are others, of course, such as

• Almost anything by deSade, I believe (I have only read Justine)
• some of Bukowski's short stories (and the novel Women, I think)

But these works don't seem to be as aware of Ellis as the tightrope between writer of and actor within the subject he is writing about: basically, egoistic hedonism, rape, murder, etc.

[originally posted by Travis]

Samuel Delany's Hogg

Samuel Delany's Hogg comes to mind as something to consider...

Intentionally vulgar, pornographic, and offensive it offers rapists-for-hire, pedophilia, murder among many other unforgivable acts and characters. I am unsure of the ultimate moral structure or the exact point of the text other than to shock. Published most recently by FC2 press it could offer some answers, questions or problems with the aforementionned ideas of fiction andthe novel. Praised by some for its vision, boldness and reluctance to conform to traditional standards, Icould only make it through a chapter.

-But what to do with a novel no one wants to read?

Until then, let us mourn the surprise loss of Omar (a tragedy unmatched since Stringer Bell). Hopefully he,too, did not regret a life led until this point

[originally posted by Ryan]

Your job, should you choose

This idea of what a story or novel "has to be" is fascinating, thinks I, and relevant to what we do all the time, so I'm wondering if we could keep it open for an ngoing meta-discussion in the workshop, and I would ask you all to give it some thought, adn to bring into public awareness any sources of information about the question, other answers to the question, ideas and opinions of Dr. Faustroll, whatever.

I have some sense that a story, say, that condones rape under any circumstances (not saying that today's did) would have to be a polemic of some kind, with some additional overarching argument to the contrary, some greater good argument. That to make the work palatable this is necessary. But I have not thought long and hard about this, and am open to alternative views, in fact, would like to hear other views.

What happens if a story does not achieve a balance of (I don't want to use moral here, but some other, less loaded, more secular word) impulses , but rather allows (encourages?) full on indulgence of one kind or another? Real bad behavior (toyed with in the Gaitskill title)? Would not we, as readers, supply the therapeutic opposite and see the story as an "interesting" gesture against a backdrop of an assumed-shared "balanced" world view?

Man's gotta have a code, as Omar said.

Anyway, as they say in the trade, let's discuss. Read, research, bring materials, circulate stuff, etc.

More TK

[originally posted by Rick]