We Are All Utterly Helpless or On The Artist and Social Criticism
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the experiences of people of color in MFA programs. First, there was Junot Diaz’s piece at the New Yorker last year. And just recently, David Mura wrote up an essay on Gulf Coast‘s blog. Both of them describe their experiences as people of color in the MFA hegemony, and I have no doubt that their frustration is real. There are a lot of white people in MFA programs, and it can be alienating I’m sure. (We only had one person of color in my MFA cohort and only a handful of professors of color, and I cannot say how they did or did not feel. I did notice that race was rarely discussed but only because it seemed that the white people tended to write about white people and the people of color tended to write about people of color. I did not feel, fortunately, if it was brought up, that it would not be ignored or trivialized.) But in both articles, there seemed to be an underlining idea, one that made me somewhat uncomfortable as an artist. They suggested that writers have a certain responsiblity to depict their reality, which I agree with, but that comes with a caveat: that a writer’s reailty should consider the reality of others.
And this got me thinking.
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In Mura’s article, “Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program,” he says that a lot of white people are ignorant to this topic of race, unwilling to discuss the ways they consciously and unconsciously uphold white supremacy in their fiction. He writes:
If and when the student of color voices her objections to the piece, more often than not, neither the white professor nor the other white students will respond to the actual critique; nor will they inquire further into why the student of color is making that critique.
They disregard this opportunity to discover their own whiteness, to investigate why a particular character is a stereotype, and potentially, right the problem. I think these are all fine ideas worth exploring. (I am, after all, Italian-American and, therefore, bleed marinara.) But there’s an implicit assumption, if the writing workshop recognizes and discusses and agrees upon this attempt to fix things in their stories, that I find problematic: Artists, with a little help from others, can fully control their message and its effects on the individual reader.
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A few years ago, I was reading an article in College English by Gay Wilentz. It claimed that The Sun Also Rises was an anti-Semitic work, conveying the nation’s anxiety over the Jewish usurper. The author gave many examples and laid out her case as best she could, but it was something I didn’t buy. The novel seemed so much more complex than that. Sure, there were a lot of characters who hated Robert Cohn because he was Jewish, but I wasn’t sure if the novel necessarily endorsed that type of behavior. After all, Jake Barnes’s opening narration presents Cohn as a somewhat tragic figure. Barnes describes him as “very shy and a thoroughly nice boy,” who “never fought except in the gym.” He even tells us that the reason Cohn took up boxing in the first place is “to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he felt on being treated like a Jew at Princeton.” If the novel is trying paint Cohn as a Jewish stereotype, it doesn’t seem to be very successful. Even later, when Barnes goes fishing with Bill, Bill asks him to say something pitiful. Barnes answers, “Robert Cohn.” That seems to run contrary to this idea of Cohn as the Jewish boogeyman. And furthermore, while the rest of the cast are quick to call Cohn a “kike,” Barnes, as far as I can remember, never utters the word himself. But instead of recognizing these points of contention, the critic ignored them: They weren’t relevant to her data set.
She had an argument, and she was going to prove it.
Most people would ask what was Hemingway’s point? They might even wish to summon the author through séance and ask him his reasoning, but I feel this too wouldn’t be very valuable. Why should we worship Hemingway’s analysis? He’s not God of the text, just the vehicle from which it came out. There’s a complexity there, and it’s not easy to say exactly what it is or is not.
And it’s not just in literature that I see this either. Tyler Shields, a photographer did a photo shoot with Glee cast member Heather Morris.
A few people said that these photos glamorize domestic violence, and the photographer himself later issued an apology. Now let’s actually look at some interpretations of these photographs.
In the first photo, the woman, who has a black eye, is restrained by the iron. She clamps down on the cord to bite it. She is dressed like a 50s housewife. The first way we can perceive the image is that it is a sexualized fantasy, depicting what some wife beaters probably masturbate to. But personally, that’s a little simplistic. She’s restrained because she’s bonded to domesticity, a burden the iron represents. Her husband, most likely, gave her that black eye. But the fact that she’s biting through the cord suggests resistance, the desire for escape. And if we look at the next photo, where she places the iron over the man’s crotch and smiles, there seems to be another message, and that’s one of empowerment. I’m not saying these are the only interpretations. And none are superior. But there does seem to be a problem with saying that because one of these interpretations angers us, that is no longer valuable or useful. It’s art, and it isn’t designed to have a specific, concrete meaning. That’s the beauty of it, the–as the deconstructionists would put–undecidability of it.
So why does the artist need to apologize? Should Shields have foreseen this possible consequence? And if he did, how could he correct it? There’s no doubt a meaning Shields perceives as viewer himself (not that his is the “correct” one). But let’s say someone mentioned this possible interpretation, and he reshoots. Won’t there be another argument against him–somewhere? Isn’t there something which will always rub someone the wrong way?
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Roland Barthes, in his book Image, Text, Music, wrote: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”
It seems like giving a text a critic does the same thing.
We assume that because the author has summoned the work into existence that he or she is God, but if we fool ourselves into believing this, then there is no further cause for investigation. But if we say that because an interpretation is valid and that interpretation evidences a message we disagree with, then the work must be condemned and extinguished, unworthy of appreciation or discussion.
But I think this too starts with the wrong supposition.
Art is an act of creation, not just on the behalf of the creator, but the individual viewer too. It is an act of two halves of the same soul coming together to create meaning, and that meaning exists uniquely between each reader and each author. If we impose our flawed and cherry-picked readings on all others–and the author–we do all art a disservice.
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I was so excited my junior year of college. I had known I wanted to be a writer from the moment I failed physics my freshman year, and I was finally getting a chance to take a class in creative writing.
My excitement quickly subsided as I realized that I was the only person who actually wanted a career as an author. Everyone else, it seemed, took the class as an easy elective. Nonetheless, I persisted regardless, scribbling voluminous notes on people’s manuscripts that they tossed in the trash after class.
We spent the first half of the semester writing poetry, and in that time, I wrote two bland poems. One was an image poem; the other was about consumerism–or something like that. They were not very good poems, but I had little interest in writing poetry. I wanted to be a novelist.
I read anything I could get my hands on. I explored the Canon, read as many books off as many great novels lists as I could find, burned through the recent National Book Award and Pulitzer winners (including Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I loved). I spent afternoons in the library, and in the evenings, after work, I paged through Wikipedia trying to pick up every bit of literary history there was. I also was particularly fond of Bret Easton Ellis.
One of our first fiction workshops showcased one of my peers and me. I couldn’t wait to learn what the weaknesses were in my writing, places where the pacing sagged, where characters motivations were unclear, where the style could be sharper. I longed to learn the craft, the necessary elements in telling a story. All I had to go on, at that point, was what I picked up from the great fiction I had read and a few articles I had read online. I couldn’t wait to have it all explained by an expert.
I should have known what I was in for after we discussed the first author’s work.
My professor, an academic and poet (I use that term loosely as she has fewer artistic publications than I do and is at least twice my age. One of her poems that I found online told the story of how Oprah was at the foot of her bed and told her to go for a run or something. It was not a worthwhile read.), didn’t focus on the writer’s craft. Instead, she handed out a photocopy of the definition of heterosexism. She said that the writer’s liberal use of the word “faggot” conveyed a heterosexist attitude.
I found myself as the only voice of descent as the rest of the class sat in silence.
It wasn’t long before we moved on to my story, a near twenty page ode to Ellis. There was sex, men who couldn’t orgasm and woman who could, murder for hire, a double-cross, and sex. I do not think the story was well-crafted now, but I was young and immature and still learning as an artist. I had some idea that I was showing how some men may feel in society and how they go to crazy means in order to reassert their masculinity. It was a model of bad behavior that spoke for itself. Instead, my story was accompanied with the definition of misogyny. My professor said my story was inappropriate for class and expressed a hatred for women.
Needless to say, I wasn’t all that happy about it. At first, all I could muster when she asked for my opinion was that I felt like a douche.
However, after I thought about it, I tried to say it was pretty clear that my character was a scumbag, that people shouldn’t be going to the lengths he did, that I didn’t need to spell out what a bad man he was. I even referenced a letter from Chekov, who wrote:
You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals and ideas, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse-stealers, say: “Stealing horses is an evil.” But that has been known for ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them, it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are.
But the conversation didn’t make any difference.
When I got my draft back, I learned that she had graded it as well. I “earned” a D-. (Who the fuck grades drafts, anyway?) That, I felt, was pretty unfair. I had written the longest story in the class, one that had a beginning, a middle, and end, one that had dialogue and description (a lot of description). And as far as I could tell, I was the only one who actually took the class seriously!
Her notes didn’t say anything about craft either. She didn’t tell me that acts needed to be shortened, that the plot was non-sensical, that the characters were unrealistic, that the symbolism didn’t work, or the theme wasn’t clear. She focused on the meaning, her meaning.
Of course, I’m not one to take defeat lightly. The first thing I did was appeal the grade to the dean, writing a two page letter on the multitudinous meanings of literature, citing everything I had learned from my theory classes. I gave a list of novels which, at some point in time, were deemed controversial and had graphic, shocking sexual and violent content.
My appeal was dismissed out of hand.
But again, I wasn’t going to roll over, and I did the one thing I could do: I wrote. I wrote a new story for my next workshop, one squarely aimed at my professor’s philosophy, one which would be so carefully written as to prevent any misinterpretation. I was going to be so damn clear and so damn moral that even Jeremy Collier would blush. I told the story of a writer who was attacked quite regularly for his perceived misogyny, who felt he was being misread because he thought of himself as a feminist. (I’ve always been known for my subtlety.) The story contained a plethora of footnotes that gave an overload of information. All profanity was excised, replaced with “[expletive deleted].” The protagonist is a bit of a jerk, but his favorite author is a female feminist poet (the poet part was an attempt to suck up to my professor so I wouldn’t fail), who he talks to early on about something unrelated to the plot. And the climax takes place at a reading, where a radical female feminist stands up to shoot him, but of course, even that violence I neutered. Her gun shot not bullets but a flag that read, “Bang!”
It was not a very good story, but I thought the message was clear: Feminism is good, but radicalism isn’t.
The day of the workshop came, and nobody seemed to have much to say, not even my professor. At the end of class, she handed me back my manuscript, and I searched through and read her notes. She highlighted the climax, where I had added a footnote explaining who my antagonist was and why she was a bad person and how she promoted the wrong brand of feminism, essentially that being a radical separatist was bad.
My professor asked, however, “Why do you want to depict feminists this way?”
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David Mura and Junot Diaz both teach at a writer’s conference exclusively for writers of color, called The Voices of Our Naton Association. Mura writes:
On a larger level, the student of color in a VONA class doesn’t have to spend time arguing with her classmates about whether racism exists or whether institutions and individuals in our society subscribe to and practice various forms of racial supremacy. Nor does the student have to spend time arguing about the validity of a connection between creative writing and social justice.
And there’s a part of me that agrees with that last bit about creative writing and social justice. I think that artists don’t write exclusively to tell a story: They have a message–and they should. But it doesn’t mean that it’s the only reason they write. It’s a pretty complicated affair, and fiction doesn’t serve just one person. Joyce didn’t like what he saw people doing in Ireland, but that’s not the only reason he wrote what he wrote. He wanted to convey, according to me, consciousness, the subjectivity of experience and perception, the cost of becoming an artist, the paralysis that infected Irish individuals, the beauty of sex, the Irish identity, his disgust with the Church. But he also wanted to write beautifully and tell a story and make people feel things. And he never does so didactically.
I don’t think we can have our cake here and eat it too though. There’s a difference between writing an essay and writing a story. An essay’s meaning is not up for debate, for the most part: It is a reasoned, logical argument. It’s meaning is fixed and can be defended or attacked. Frankly, it’s a better medium for making a point. A story, however, never once commits itself to one idea only. It is not a clear cut argument: It is a collection of evidence that can be interpreted and enjoyed or interpreted and hated.
And we are utterly helpless to control it. It’s that last part that really frustrates everyone else, but I’m OK with that.
I’m not in the business of pleasing others. I don’t write because I want to confirm your biases. I don’t write to make you feel better about yourself. I’m not trying to, as Vonnegut said, open my window and make love to the world because I know I’ll catch cold. Instead, I write to show you the reality I perceive, the world I inhabit.
We are the masters of our own little universes: Critics be damned.