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.