On Literary-ness
Post-college I developed a healthy dislike for the sophisticate literature that had been so honored. I don't mean the classics, I don't even mean great poets like Derek Walcott or Les Murray, though both are clearly sophisticated and literary. Instead, I became suspicious of "Po-Biz", of intentionally obtuse literature that required at least a minimal college education to understand. It wasn't that I didn't want literature to soar, I just didn't want it to be quite so exclusive. If I read Les Murray to my mother, she liked it, if she wasn't always sure what it meant. When I read her Jorie Graham, she was fuming mad. I could understand: my mother's a literate, educated woman. She had a masters, albeit in Theater, and a high-profile career. Why was Jorie Graham trying to make her feel stupid?
That is what it feels like sometimes when a work becomes painfully literary, as though the author's whole game is to keep you locked out of the work of art. But of course, Jorie Graham isn't thinking of my mother at all. My mother, in her Southern California splendor and her faithful Japanese car and her faded oriental carpets and her talk of "energy" and penchant for red licorice, is the last thing on Jorie Graham's mind. Which is where, I decided, she had gone wrong.
Then came graduate school. If I had thought undergraduate was pretentious, I was in for a shock. In the world of the program, not only was Jorie Graham a genius, but other writers who were "popular", like Walter Mosely, Denis Lehane, even Haruki Murakami, were not even really writers. Much less Ann Rice or Stephen King. When they invited John Grisham to speak they gave us all a big lecture before we met him, warning us not to talk down to him and reassuring us that while Grisham was not an artist (artist!), he was a very skilled craftsman (craftsman!) and we should all be respectful. They thought they needed to tell us to behave respectfully toward a man who is more successful than any of us would ever be. That's how low their opinion was of "non-literary" writing. My fellow grad students and I couldn't help but giggle at how wrongly our instructors had read us. We were POOR. To us, the kind of success Grisham had was saliva-inducing.
One of my professors sat me down and began to inquire about the noticeably anti-intellectual streak in my work. "I simply don't understand," he said, with his large, theatrical voice, "you're the most educated one here." And that, as far as it went, was true. Not that I knew more than the other students, more that the things I knew were classically considered "an education". For example, I could translate Horace with facility. That kind of thing. I wanted to answer him, "Yes, but I am also the only one here who has fallen in love with a man who spent a great deal of time in prison. I am the only one who has had the police bust in on her in the shower, guns drawn. I am the only one who has fired a gun, gone to a strip club, done heroin, ridden a motorcycle, installed my own toilet or done something horribly, egregiously wrong." How could he ask me to begin to write something my lover would never understand? Or even my mother? Or my coworkers, the restaurant people? Wasn't art for them too?
Problem solved, right? Boo to Jorie Graham, Ra Ra to Denis Lehane. Sadly, it was not to be that easy.
My own duplicitous snobbery was everywhere. In all honesty, which had I enjoyed more, The Power of One or Hunger by Knut Hamson? I couldn't honestly answer: Knut Hamson. And yet, I knew I still considered Knut Hamson to be a "better" writer than Bryce Courtenay. Deep down, if I were stranded on a desert island I would choose to take with me The Waste Land over Anne Rice. I would. For that matter, however, I would choose The Waste Land over Hunger any day of the week. I had become, deep inside myself: an intellectual.
And so we come back to the ars poetica problem: what is art? What is it for? Is it for entertainment? Is it to communicate truth? Is it for anyone at all, or does it exist unto itself, in a perfect world of absolute truths?
I had read about a million different definitions and read a hundred debates on the subject. One way of looking at it, would be to say I needed to choose my audience: I could write for PhD's or I could write for ex-cons, purely a matter of choice. Another way of looking at it would insist that the "literary" is the work of art that gracefully makes use of its historical inheritance, and that to turn my back on it would mean giving up my place in the forward progression of art history, the ideas of man, the grand cultural evolution. Another way of looking at it, would consider art to be purely subjective, and tell me to write for myself and not worry about the entire problem but instead to "express" myself. There are myriad other schemas, but it would get boring to list them here.
Having gone through it all a thousand times, the only thing I can tell you for sure is this:
People make art. It is just something they do. They have done it forever, as long as they have been people, and they will continue to do so forever, until they die out. If we knew why we did it, we would probably stop doing it. We do it because we are compelled.
And so I have to assume that Bryce Courtenay was compelled, as was Knut Hamson, and TS Eliot and Anne Rice, dear God, perhaps Anne Rice most of all. No matter what we write, as long as you are compelled, it must be correct.
And then it struck me to thank my lucky stars that so many different kinds of artists had been created. That there were people who were compelled to write comic books and literary books and trashy books. It seemed to me that I had been asking, "Which is better, the daisy or the rose?" When the answer was: "Shut up, man, you've got both!" Not only did I have both, I had a variety of art as great as any botanical or entomological variety. The phenomena, the sheer, phenomena of it, was staggering. It was like looking out on a field in early summer at the fireflies, thousands of them, moving about like shaky planets. It was killer, man.
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