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.