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]