Hey everyone! I had
some thoughts about today’s discussion that I didn't really get the chance to
share in class, so I thought I’d post them here.
I had some issues with the way we were talking about Scott
Russell Sanders’s work – correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the
majority of us haven’t actually read more than the few pages of his journal
that we looked at for class today, so how can we be making
judgments about the literary value of his work?
It’s a bit unfair to say that his writing isn't sufficiently literary if
you haven’t even read the writing in question.
The judgment that Sanders’s work is ‘commercial’ rather than
‘literary’ also bothered me in general.
What’s wrong with that? What’s
wrong with wanting to reach a wider audience – not just English majors, but
people who read for leisure as well? And
really, there isn't anything wrong with wanting to make money off of your writing
either. I think someone made this
comment in class too, but just about everyone who has published a book was
hoping to make some money off of it, even authors from past eras that we tend to romanticize.
And personally, I don’t think that literature – and by
literature here I mean books in general, not just those written by long-dead
people with sufficiently tragic lives – is necessarily about being obscure and
complex. I tend to look at books as
vehicles to understand other people and other peoples’ experiences. Even if they are written in a simpler style
(and I don’t know if Sanders’s books actually are, because I haven’t read
them). I don’t think it’s really fair to condemn an author because the
impression you have of their books is that they are not literary enough.
Thank you, Elizabeth, for speaking up. The word "commercial" was in fact used misleadingly, and I didn't have a chance to correct this: if you look at his bibliography, you will see that he has in fact published mostly with non-profit presses. What he does want to do is reach readers--thoughtful ones, and these are not necessarily housed in English Departments. I wanted to post a passage from one of Scott's essays I like very much. It is the ending of his essay "Buckeye," in which he describes his return to the place in Ohio where he grew up, which is now completely under water. As he looks around, he recognizes some of the trees his father pointed out to him as a child. This is where the excerpt begins, which I will post separately. It engages precisely with some of the things we talked about today--complexity vs. simplicity, what our education tells us vs. what we feel. I realize that by confessing my fondness for this piece I render myself vulnerable, but this passage speaks to me as it has to many readers with similar experiences of loss.
ReplyDeleteI will post this in a minute. Elizabeth is absolutely right that most of you don't know enough Sanders to classify him. But Scott would welcome a discussion like ours today, because it does reveal something about our own desires as we read.
Yeah. It occurs to me now that I was probably blowing smoke today in class. It's hard though to not at least make a stab at discussing an issue given what we were given to look at today. I certainly haven't read anything beyond the material we were shown and by no means did I (or anyone else for that matter) mean to suggest Sanders as having insufficient literary talent. We're definitely not qualified to say that. Who is? (that can be an actual question)
ReplyDeleteI wonder what we're trying to talk about when we say 'commercial'. The word smacks of something gross to me but I know that it, technically speaking, isn't what I intuitively want to think it is. One may say, as Elizabeth suggests, that there is a connection between making a commercial literature and the desire to make money. Is making money off your art a bad thing? Depends. I think we'd agree that a literature that has this in mind may lack something, or at least I'd hope we could find that it does. Good or bad, it's safe to say that it does affect something. The stakes are raised.
By no means would I suggest that a writer who is looking to get paid lacks any kind of literary merit solely because he or she needs money. You've got to eat. Since Elizabeth gave us a presentation on Vonnegut, we may take him as an example of a paradox though between what we call 'commercial' and the creative process. There's this quote from A Man Without a Country (Vonnegut's last book). He says"the arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable." That's true (it feels true at least). But isn't it also true that Vonnegut got his start publishing short stories in popular magazines for money? He probably desperately needed that money (having a wife and three kids and then adopting his sister's three children after she died of cancer). He probably made a lot of money in his life through his writing, so when he says something that seems to be saying, "don't go into the arts for money" it feels intuitively true, but there's also this sense of, "hey but you did it!!" that I can't ignore.
Our issue of 'commercial' isn't really that...it's really something like why should he or she say that x writer isn't or is worth x amount of money and has x amount of literary merit. We all know it's a subjective thing and there's no clear cut answer and we could (maybe should) leave it at that. But I don't know. I think people are smarter than that. You don't have to be an English major or an intellectual to get the feeling like something is better or worse than something else, you simply have to care enough to consider the aspects of a creative process and be able to draw from those things what you know to be right.
I certainly hope literature isn't about being obscure and complex. When I graduate in a few weeks and my parents ask me what I learned (I *really* hope they don't do that), I don't want to have to tell them it's too obscure and complex to explain. I won't have to. Luckily, I think you're right. Literature is about understanding other people, being able to walk around in their shoes and consider things from their perspective. Authors can do this in simple ways or more complex ones and there will always be readers ready to receive it either way.
Whoa this is long. Sorry dudes. I'm stepping off the soapbox.
Christoph, I really appreciate that you bring up the discussion about "what our education tells us vs. what we feel" because I think that's an important component to our discussion here. Aaron, you said that a person doesn't necessarily have to be an English major or intellectual to be able to judge literature. In general, I agree with you. A reader has a sense of their own preferences, but I do believe that especially in a class like this, most or all of us being English majors and having extensive training in Western literature, we are taught to think of literature in hierarchies. Otherwise there would be no canon, Shakespeare would be regarded on the same playing field as say, Agatha Christie. But there does exist this thing as the English canon and while authors fall in and out of favor and new authors get added to the canon, I do think that we are trained to treat different types of literature with certain types of attitudes.
ReplyDeleteI guess my point in this post is that we should always be aware of our own prejudices. How and why we judge literature suggests a lot about us. I don't know, I'm guilty of being a literary snob, too. I'm not saying to never be judgmental about literature, I definitely think one should be, just don't presume that what we are taught to like is superior.
Thank you both for these excellent comments! I think the best someone like me can convey in literature classes is the need to realize that whatever assessments of literary value you will encounter--in the classroom, in the so-called secondary literature, etc.--are always historically contingent, the results of judgments made by people whon had the power to do so at the time--none which relieves us from the need to form our own opinions, as freely as we can.
ReplyDelete